Caroline
Four miles, Afon said. Four miles north and a thousand feet up.
Finally, we reach what is surely one floor below heaven, and come to a stop. The engine dies.
"We're here," Afon says.
I lift my head from between his shoulder blades, where it has been wedged for most of the ride, and take a gander at what "here" looks like.
Aw, dammit.
The mining hut makes Afon's cabin look like the Aman.
It's a squat rectangle of gray, crumbling stone and weathered timber, maybe twelve feet by sixteen, shouldered up against a granite face like it's hiding from the wind.
Which, to be fair, is a good call, because the wind up here is absolutely miserable.
The roof is corrugated metal gone orange with rust. There's one window, small and deep-set, with glass so old it has actual ripples in it.
A stovepipe pokes up at a bizarre, Alice in the Wonderland kind of angle.
"It's charming," I say in a false cheery voice. "It's giving Yellowstone meets Soviet gulag."
Afon grunts and swings off the snowmobile.
Without his support, I slither off the seat like a Jell-O mold escaping its tin.
If it weren't for Wolf hopping down at a very opportune moment and throwing his weight into my hip, I would've probably kept on slithering down the mountain all the way back to Pine Hollow.
"I'm fine," I tell Afon when he looks around in amazement, only to realize that I'm no longer as vertical as I once was. "I'm thriving, truly. Just leave me down here."
He grunts again and hauls me up to my feet. Then, when he's certain I'm not about to take another tumble, he turns and stomps through the knee-high snow drifts to the door.
I follow, grateful that he's carving through the snow that might otherwise swallow me. It's like a little personal highway on the side of this wind-blasted cliff.
To nobody's surprise, the door isn't locked. Why would it be? The only people who could find this place are Afon and God, and I'm not even sure God has the GPS coordinates.
Afon signals for me to wait. He steps inside and sweeps around, then nods over his shoulder that it's safe to enter.
Thank God, because my nips are hard enough to carve C+A=4ever in the nearest tree bark. I duck through the doorway.
Inside, it's one room.
Although it's worth clarifying what "one room" means in this context, because I've toured studio apartments in Nolita that were technically "one room" and still managed to contain a Peloton and a breakfast nook.
This is not that. Not by a long shot.
This is "one room" the way a shoebox is "one room."
There's hardly enough room for the cast-iron stove in the corner, a rickety table that appears to have been assembled by someone who'd had a table described to him, once, over the phone, two slanted kitchen shelves, a kerosene lamp…
And a bed.
One bed.
Singular. A narrow iron frame pushed against the back wall, topped with a mattress that is old enough to have witnessed the rise and fall of the Roman Empire.
I stand in the doorway counting over and over. I'm no math genius, but even I know that two adults plus one massive dog does not jive with "one bed."
"There's only—" I start.
"I know," Afon interrupts.
Fine. Let's chalk that up as future Caroline's problem.
Present Caroline has more immediate concerns, such as the fact that she can see her own breath indoors and that her last twenty-four hours have included a kidnapping, an armed rescue, an emotional collapse on a stranger's floor, and two separate snowmobile journeys that would void any life insurance policy in the state of New York.
I am so deeply tired.
Afon hauls the duffel in and sets it on the table.
He moves around the hut, checking the stovepipe, testing the window latch, glancing at sight lines.
Wolf does his own circuit, nose to the floorboards, and then flops down by the door with a whump that shakes dust from the rafters, appointing himself head of security.
"Sit," Afon tells me, nodding at the bed. "Stay off the ankle."
"You know I'm not the dog, right?"
"I know," he agrees. "Wolf listens better."
I roll my eyes, but I sit, because (a) he's not wrong and (b) my ankle is currently impersonating a water balloon. The mattress crunches underneath me in a way I really don't like. I pull the wool blanket out of the duffel and wrap it around my shoulders and watch Afon kneel in front of the stove.
He builds the fire just as confidently as the one he did last night.
There is something hypnotic about watching this man do anything with his hands.
I'd watch him assemble IKEA furniture. I'd watch him do taxes.
Dr. Levinson would have a field day with this, probably something about how competence reads as safety to my anxious attachment system, which then eroticizes it, but Dr. Levinson is two hundred miles away and her co-pay is forty dollars, so she can wait.
The match flares. The flame catches and spreads.
And that's when I see it.
When Afon leans forward to feed another stick of kindling into the stove, his jacket gapes open and rides up, and the hem of his sweater pulls away from his waistband, and there—just above his left hip—the gray wool is soaked through with a dark, rust-brown stain the size of my hand.
It's not mud. Mud doesn't bloom from the inside out. Mud doesn't have a darker center where it's still wet.
"Afon."
"Hm?"
"You're bleeding."
"No, I'm not."
"I'm sorry, are we challenging object permanence now? I can see it. Your shirt is soaked."
"It's old."
"Old as in—what, since when? We've been together for the past eighteen hours, except—" My stomach drops through the floorboards and into the abandoned mine below us. "The shots. This morning. When we left the cabin. One of them hit you."
"It grazed me," he corrects. "And it's shallow. I'm fine."
"You drove a snowmobile up a mountain for hours with a bullet wound and didn't say anything?"
"There was nothing to say."
I'm off the bed before my ankle can file an objection. The blanket falls as I cross the hut in a fast-paced limp and plant myself between him and the stove.
"Sit down," I command.
"Caroline—"
"Sit. Down." I point at the bed. "I have been professionally trained in how to make hostile witnesses comply, and I swear to God, Afon, I will deploy every single tool in that arsenal. I will subpoena you until you cry."
He looks down at me. I look up at him. A chill rips through as the wind drags its talons across the roof. Wolf lifts his head, glances between us, and lays it back down with the weary patience of a dog who has already pegged how this ends.
"It's a graze," Afon says again.
"Wonderful. Then this'll be quick."
A muscle works in his jaw. He's clearly still in Defy Her At All Costs Mode.
And then, to my astonishment, he exhales through his nose, moves to the bed, and sits.
I retrieve the first-aid kit from the duffel. It's a serious one, a soft-sided military-looking thing, not the Duane Reade special with two Band-Aids and an expired Neosporin that lives under my bathroom sink at home. I kneel in front of him, open it on the floor, and look up.
"Shirt off."
He raises one eyebrow a quarter inch. By Afon Satyrin standards, that's basically an emotionally eloquent Broadway production.
"For medical purposes," I clarify, and I'm horrified to hear that my voice has gone up half an octave. "I need access to the wound. This is a clinical environment now. I'm basically a field medic."
"You're a contracts lawyer."
"Litigation, actually, and the wound doesn't know the difference."
He reaches back, fists the sweater between his shoulder blades, and pulls it over his head along with the thermal underneath, the way men do, in one motion, like they're just completely unaware that it's the sexiest thing of all time.
Okay.
So.
Here's the thing.
I saw him shirtless once before, through the window, the day I face-planted into his life. But that was at twenty yards, through glass, with a concussion incoming.
This is different.
This time around, I'm two feet away in firelight, and I have a job to do, and the job involves touching him, and my brain has chosen this moment to crash like a MacBook with a bajillion tabs open.
He's built. But not built built. He may be the size of The Rock, but he's rough and imperfect like an actual rock.
Not gym-sculpted, nothing decorative about it, just dense functional mass laid down by decades of actual work.
The scars I glimpsed through the window are all here at close range: the long one down his sternum, pale and ancient; the puckered one across his ribs; a constellation of smaller marks I didn't see before.
Topping it all off like his body is a Christmas tree is the eight-pointed star on his throat.
There's silver in the hair on his chest, like tinsel, glittering in the firelight.
Oh, God. I didn't know I had an older man fetish until right this second. I have feelings about topic, none of them fit for polite society, and I am going to need every single one of them to get back in their assigned seats immediately.
"The shirt is off," Afon says dryly.
"I'm painfully aware."
"Would you like my pants off, too?"
"No!" I blurt. My cheeks are red hot. Who needs a fire? We have an endless fuel source for warmth: my constant state of embarrassment around this man. "No lower half nudity, for God's sake."
"Is something wrong?" he prods. "You look flustered."
I cast my eyes downward so I don't have to see the tiny smirk growing in the corner of his mouth. "I'm about to conduct a serious medical operation. You'll have to forgive me if I'm a little bit nervous."
"Something tells me that's not what's making you nervous."
"Shut up," I mumble, still looking down. "And lean back. The operation is beginning."
He leans back on his hands. The wound is exactly what he said it was, which annoys me—a graze, a raw red channel maybe four inches long, carved across the flesh above his hip bone.
It's stopped actively bleeding. but the whole area is crusted and angry, and it has clearly spent the morning being ground against the waistband of his jeans.
It amazes me that he showed no sign of it.
I would've been wailing like The Boy Who Cried Wolf.
"This is going to sting," I warn, tearing open an antiseptic wipe.
"I don't think I'll be bothered."
"Like, a lot," I insist. "I'm not going to count to three or anything, I'm just gonna—"
"Caroline. Do it."
Well, if he's gonna be rude…
I do it.
He doesn't flinch. That's, like, the least surprising thing ever. I'm pretty sure that if I performed an appendectomy on this man with a grapefruit spoon, he'd ask me to keep it down.
But under my left hand, which is braced flat against his side for stability—which is a legitimate field-medic technique and not an excuse for physical contact—I feel the muscle tighten, a deep involuntary clench, and something about that reassures me that I'm not the only one feeling a little hot and bothered.
He's also literally hot, albeit not bothered. He's furnace warm, warm like the fire behind me, and as long as I'm touching him, the savage winter storm that's found its second wind outside doesn't seem so fierce or worrisome anymore.
"You're quiet," Afon observes.
"I'm concentrating."
"You've never been quiet while concentrating. You talked through breakfast. You talked through the kidnapping, probably."
"I'll have you know I was extremely composed during the kidnapping." I reach for the butterfly closures. "I only bit one person."
A strange vibration in my palm alarms me, but only because I don't recognize it at first for what it is: a laugh.
He's actually, audibly laughing.
Did I do that?!
I keep my eyes on the wound. If I look up at his face right now, I will do something catastrophic, like blush, or say a true thing.
I place the closures one at a time, pinching the edges of the graze together, my fingertips against his skin.
Then the gauze pad. Then I'm tearing strips of medical tape with my teeth.
To anchor the dressing properly, I have to follow the line of his ribs around toward his back, and that's when my fingers wander across something and stop.
A tattoo.
It's small—smaller than the star on his throat, tucked low on his left side where the ribs end, half-hidden in the shadow of his arm. Old ink, blurred soft and blue-black at the edges. I tilt my head, and when it swims into focus, the whole world goes very still and very far away.
The tattoo is of a bird. A swallow, mid-dive, wings swept back against its body.
And clutched in its beak: a skeleton key.
I know this image. Because my father drew it—this exact bird, this exact key, the wings at this exact angle—in blue ballpoint at the bottom of the letter that came to me through Matvei Satyrin at Dani's wedding in Red Hook. Beneath the last line—Forgive me—was the drawing.
I spent four months staring at that little bird. I googled it until my search history looked like a conspiracy theorist's. Reverse image search. Ornithological databases. A very strange forum about Eastern European prison tattoos.
I found nothing. I'd half-convinced myself my father invented it, some private doodle, a dying man's hand wandering.
Until now, when it appears on Afon's ribs.
It has been there, by the look of it, for fifteen or twenty years.
My fingertip is resting on the swallow's wing.
I can't seem to move it. The hut has gone so quiet I can hear the wood settling in the stove.
I think, wildly, He's had the answer inked on his body this whole time and I've been carrying the question in a fireproof box in my closet on East Seventy-Eighth Street.
"Caroline," Afon hums. "What is it?"
I press the last strip of tape down over the gauze and smooth it flat. "Nothing," I say brightly. "You're all patched up."