Chapter 12 Rocco #2
He doesn't move. The stubbornness is a mirror of my own. A man who would rather freeze to death than accept help from someone who scares him. I understand it. I respect it. And I’m not going to let him die from it.
I reach across the small space between us. I grab the front of the flannel shirt—my flannel, on his body—and I pull him toward me. He resists for a half-second. Then the cold wins. His body overrides his pride, and he lets himself be pulled.
I settle my back against the hard rock wall and draw him against my chest. He’s rigid at first—every muscle locked, his sharp shoulder blades pressed against my pectorals like plates of armor.
I wrap my right arm around his torso and hold him.
My left arm, the damaged one, I tuck between us, the bandaged hand resting on his hip.
He’s freezing. The cold radiates off his thin frame the way a fever radiates off mine.
It’s a thermal transfer, his body bleeding heat into the frigid air faster than it can produce it.
I pull him tighter against me. My chin rests on the crown of his head.
His unwashed hair is stiff, pressed against my jaw.
"Breathe," I say.
He breathes. A violent shudder runs through him—deep, structural. Then another. Slowly, the rigid lock of his muscles begins to release. His shoulders drop. His back settles against my chest. His head tips sideways, his temple resting in the hollow of my shoulder.
He weighs nothing. A hundred and seventy pounds that feels like a hundred. A body made of sharp angles and thin muscle and the relentless machinery of a mind that never stops calculating.
I could break him without trying. I could close my arm and crush the air out of his lungs. The knowledge sits in my body as pure physics, as raw capacity.
I don't want to break him.
The realization arrives without ceremony.
A simple fact settling into place like a bone resetting in its socket.
I don't want to break him. I want to hold him against the cold. I want to guard him the way I’ve guarded Alessandro—with the whole of myself, with every bruised and bleeding inch of what I am.
The thought is so foreign it doesn't have a shape. I let it sit there, heavy and unnamed, while the snow falls and his body warms against mine.
His shivering stops. His breathing deepens. The measured, counted rhythm gives way to something longer, slower. He has fallen asleep. His hand uncurls from his medical bag and comes to rest on my forearm. His long fingers are loose, his palm lying flat against the bandage covering my wound.
He’s holding my wounded arm in his sleep.
The overhang is dark. The heavy snow has muted the world outside into a featureless, silent white. Garrett is a still shadow at the entrance. Killian breathes steadily under the blanket. Adrian sleeps against my chest.
I am awake because someone has to be. And because my body is doing things I can't stop.
The arousal is a slow, insistent build. Not the sudden, feverish spike from the auto shop, but something heavier, deeper. It rises from the sustained, unconscious contact of his body against mine. His back against my chest. His hips settled between my thighs.
Every small shift he makes in his sleep presses some part of him against some part of me. The friction accumulates. The heat accumulates. I am hard against the small of his back and there is nothing I can do about it except sit here in the dark and burn.
I could move. I could shift my hips and create distance. I could wake him and make an excuse. But if I move, he wakes. If he wakes, he’s cold. If he’s cold, he shakes. And I can't watch him shake again.
So I stay.
My right hand moves. Slowly. I ease it from around his torso and slide it down between my hip and the cold rock wall.
The thin sweatpants have no resistance. The elastic gives easily.
My hand closes around myself and the relief is immediate—a bright, sharp pulse that radiates from my grip through my pelvis and into the base of my spine.
I don't think about women. I think about hands. Clean, steady, precise hands that held a needle in my torn palm and didn't shake. Hands that pressed a cold cloth against my burning chest and turned pink at the knuckles. Hands that touched me like I was something worth preserving.
I think about the way he looked at me in the motel. The sudden flush high on his cheekbones. The visible crack in his composure. The moment his clinical wall fractured and what was underneath was pure, undeniable want.
I think about what it would feel like to put those hands on me without the gauze, without the medical protocol. To have him touch me because he chose to. Because the thing between us finally stopped being a pathology and became a decision.
My hand moves. Slow. Controlled. The rhythm is deliberate. Adrian’s breathing is deep and steady against my chest. His fingers twitch on my forearm. I press my lips against the crown of his head. Not a kiss. A compression. The simple weight of my mouth against his hair.
The release comes quiet. A shudder. A deep clenching in my abdomen. A spill of heat across my knuckles that I catch in the hem of my shirt. My vision whites out for two seconds. I breathe through my nose. I hold completely still. Adrian doesn't stir.
The shame arrives immediately. A black tide that rolls in behind the pleasure. I used his body. Not his body—his proximity. His weight against me. The idea of him.
But the proximity was not offered for this. It was offered for warmth. For survival. I took something that was given as medicine and turned it into something else entirely.
I pull my hand free. I wipe it on my shirt. I adjust my waistband. The evidence disappears. The shame doesn't.
I tighten my arm around him. I hold him against the cold. And I don't sleep.
The sky lightens. The grey behind the snow goes from charcoal to ash to a pale, flat white. The snow has stopped. The accumulation is four inches—a clean, unbroken blanket of white.
Adrian stirs against me. His body tenses. The moment of waking. The rapid processing of data. He feels me. He feels my arms wrapped around him. He feels the configuration of his body against mine and the logical conclusion of what that means.
He goes very still.
"Morning," I say.
He sits up. The cold air hits the space where his body was. The absence is a physical thing—a hole in the heat map. He puts on his glasses. Adjusts them on his nose. His face is neutral. Composed. The wall has been rebuilt.
"Killian?"
"Breathing. Stable."
He nods. He reaches for his medical bag. The routine engages. Vitals. Dressing. Drain. The clinical machinery resumes its function. The man who slept against my chest retreats behind the surgeon. The surgeon doesn't look at me.
I stand up. My joints scream. My left hand is a fist of heat inside its bandage. I straighten to my full height and look out at the white world below.
The hillside is pristine. Four inches of fresh powder, completely unbroken. The trees are frosted. The silence is absolute.
Except.
Twenty yards down the slope, emerging from behind a stand of pine, a line of dark depressions breaks the perfect surface.
Boot prints. Deep, evenly spaced. The tread pattern is crisp in the fresh snow.
They come from the east, follow the contour of the hill, and pass within forty feet of our overhang before continuing north along the ridge.
They are fresh. Made during the night. Made while we slept.
Someone walked past us in the dark. Someone close enough to hear us breathing.
I count the prints. Two sets. Parallel. Moving with the disciplined spacing of men who have been trained to sweep terrain. They didn't find us—the overhang is obscured by rock and brush. But they were here.
The hunt has moved from vehicles to foot.
I step back under the overhang. Garrett is already awake, reading the expression on my face.
"Two sets of tracks," I say. "East to north. Military spacing. They passed us during the snow."
Adrian looks up from checking Killian’s vitals. His face is still composed, but his hands have stopped moving. He heard me. He understands.
I pick up the Makarov. I check the magazine. Four rounds. I took six from the hallway. I’ve fired none. But four is what I have, because the spare magazine was in the truck, and the truck is a dead machine at the bottom of this hill.
Four rounds. Two enemies confirmed. An unknown number of them somewhere behind us. A post-surgical patient who can't walk. A surgeon who can't fight. A medic with a shotgun and twelve remaining shells.
I look at Adrian. He looks at me. His hands resume their work on the blood pressure cuff. Steadier now. The mechanic, working.
"Pack up," I say. "We move."
The snow stretches below us. White and vast and no longer empty.