Chapter 33
Steph
She kept her eyes on the trail ahead and her breathing as controlled as she could manage.
Steph didn’t know exactly where the snowmobiles were or where they might come out, but she knew they couldn’t stop moving. Not yet. She wanted to. More than anything, she wanted to stop running. Stop moving. Stop fighting.
But that wasn’t an option.
Those men wouldn’t give up, and neither would she. Her legs were burning, and her hips were screaming. She was deep in the pain cave. Deeper than she’d ever been in the past.
She understood the difference this time. Every other time, she was in it for the challenge. For the fun of doing something hard. A common comeback among endurance athletes, as they good-naturedly shared war stories of the event, was, “Yeah, but did you die?”
This was different. This could most certainly be life or death. In an ultramarathon or a brutal endurance event, she always had an out, an opportunity to quit if it became too tough. That opportunity didn’t exist this time.
The only choice was to keep moving.
Wind kept shaping snow as they hid, ran, then hid again, driving it into drifts along trees and rocks and stripping some stretches nearly clean. She found one of those sections and angled onto it, the hard-packed surface giving nothing away underfoot.
No tracks. That was a plus. If she could keep them on bare ground, they’d be harder to find. She picked the next patch and aimed for it.
Jack matched her line without being told. His footfalls had a quality she recognized, the sound of someone managing significant pain without acknowledging it. She could only imagine how he felt, yet he said nothing about the pain in his feet or how cold he must have been.
The rock outcropping appeared through the trees ahead, a mass of dark stone rising out of the snow, larger than the one they’d just left.
There was no obvious crevice they could squeeze into, but the formation had depth to it, a section where two faces of rock came together at an angle and left a recessed area backed on three sides.
A large boulder sat detached from the main formation, positioned in a way that gave a fourth layer of cover from the direction they’d come.
“This might work,” she said.
“Let’s try it.”
They moved into the recessed area, and Jack immediately positioned himself at the boulder’s edge with the rifle, his eyes on the approach through the trees. She settled into the rock behind him and let herself be still for a moment while she caught her breath.
Then she looked at his feet.
His socks were crusted with ice on the outside. That was expected. What was underneath the ice was the concern. The fabric showed dark patches. Maybe mud. Maybe blood.
She suspected blood. Most likely, he’d cut himself on something and hadn’t said a word about it.
He’d barely even slowed this entire time.
She scanned from his feet up to his wrists.
Blood showed from where the twine had dug in, and his hands were red and blotchy from the cold.
As she watched him, she noticed they were shaking.
His entire body moved as a shiver took him. Shivering was good.
“How many pairs of socks do you have on?” she asked as she removed her pack.
“Two. Toe socks for my first layer. Both pairs are wool.” He paused. “I’m fine.”
Steph snickered. “Oh, I’m sure.”
She took off her mittens and unzipped the main compartment of her backpack.
An extra neck gaiter was near the top, packed the way she packed everything—by access priority.
Her bandanna was in the side pocket. An extra base layer top was rolled tight at the bottom.
She had a pair of socks next to the top, but knew they would never fit Jack. His feet were much larger.
From her breast pocket, she pulled out the plastic baggies holding her food. She consolidated what was left of the snacks into one baggie and set the other two by her leg. Without asking, she moved to him and crouched at his feet.
He glanced down at her and then back at the tree line.
“Can you sit flat? On your bottom with your feet out?”
He shook his head. “I’m fine, really.”
She stared at him and waited. He glanced in her direction and rolled his eyes. “Seriously, Steph.”
“Humor me.”
With a sigh, he adjusted his position. She worked carefully, not removing the socks—that wasn’t an option out here, not with the temperature and the distance still between them and any kind of warmth.
She was tempted to rub his feet and work the circulation back into them, but the last thing she wanted was to thaw out frozen tissue. That could cause permanent damage.
He might already have permanent damage. She shook her head, as if that could silence the thought.
First, she put the baggie over his left foot. It covered his foot about halfway. Better than nothing. She wrapped the bandanna around the outside of the sock, securing the baggie and tucking everything tight but not too tight. She didn’t want to cut off circulation.
“Feel okay?”
“Honestly, I can’t feel much. That didn’t hurt, though.”
“Can’t feel much?” she repeated. “No tingling or burning?”
“Not anymore.” His tone suggested he knew what that meant as well as she did.
In the early stages of frostbite, commonly referred to as frostnip, the skin feels cold, tingly, and slightly painful. It’s a warning stage and is uncomfortable, but it doesn’t leave permanent damage.
Moderate frostbite might produce a pins-and-needles or burning sensation. The skin itself feels numb and waxy to the touch.
Total loss of sensation is common with deep frostbite.
No cold, pain, or discomfort. She was tempted to remove his socks and check the coloring of his skin.
Color changes could indicate deep tissue damage, the kind of damage that might be lasting and affect him for the rest of his life. It might even be deadly.
Steph took a deep breath. “Let me wrap the other one.”
She repeated the process with the second baggie and used the fleece neck gaiter to fashion a cover, securing it against itself. Neither the bandanna nor the gaiter was elegant, but they were functional. She’d take functional.
“Thank you.” Jack’s words were genuine, but the tone underneath them had something in it she recognized. The quality of a man accepting help he wasn’t sure he deserved.
She looked up at him.
He was watching the trees, avoiding her gaze.
“We need to take care of your hands.”
Jack handed her his right hand. “I need to be able to shoot.”
She nodded as she took in his fingers. There were spots of white on the pinky and index finger, and his coloring was terrible. She had an extra pair of gloves, but like her socks, they’d be too small. Maybe she could make them work.
She pulled out the gloves. They were a thin material, perfect to wear when running, yet still warm. Steph opened her pocketknife and sliced off the fingers of the right glove.
Next, she pulled the extra base layer from her pack and used the knife to slice it into strips. Jack glanced at her and shook his head. Steph ignored him and continued her work.
When she was finished, she had the fingers of the gloves over each of Jack’s fingers and used the strips to hold everything together. “It’s not pretty, but it seems tight. Can you work the gun?”
He showed her how he could easily slide his fingers into the trigger guard. “It’s perfect. Almost as good as the custom gloves I used for competition.”
“Oh, I’m sure.” She smiled. “Let’s do the other hand.”
The coloring on his left hand was marginally better.
She assumed it was because he’d been carrying the rifle in his right and was trying to keep his left hand covered whenever he could.
That would be a natural instinct in the cold.
When she had the left hand done in the same manner, she said, “How about adding my mitten over the top?”
“I’d rather not. I might need to shoot left-handed.”
“You can shoot with both hands?”
He shrugged. “I needed to know how to do both in case I fell and hurt my right hand or wrist.”
She supposed that made sense, but she’d never considered it before. Never really considered how he was a professional through and through and completely dedicated to his sport.
Of course he was. Someone didn’t almost make the Olympics without that dedication. In her mind, Jack had been little more than an irritant, not an actual person with actual dreams and goals before he swooped into Basin County and tried to destroy her dreams.
That’s not fair. My dreams changed long before Jack came on the scene.
Steph stayed crouched beside him as the realization of everything settled over her. They’d been running and hiding and running again, and there hadn’t been space for the thing that needed to be said. And now there was a moment, and she was going to use it.
“Why did you react that way?”
He didn’t answer.
“Jack.”
“I heard you.”
“Then answer me.”
His jaw tightened. She could see it from where she crouched, the muscle working along the side of his face. He kept his eyes on the trees and his hands on the rifle as the silence stretched out.
She scooted away from him and sat in a more comfortable position. “I deserve an explanation.” She kept her voice even. “You called me careless, and I want to understand why. That’s not an unreasonable thing to ask.”
He looked at her then. Something moved in his face, the same thing she’d seen at the tree line before the culvert, the look of a man standing at the edge of something and calculating the crossing.
For a moment, she thought he was going to do it, step off the edge and say whatever it was that had been sitting behind everything since he’d stood in the snow and said all those things.
He looked back at the trees.
The moment closed.
Steph breathed out through her nose and let it go.
She couldn’t force it. She understood that much about him already.
Whatever he was carrying, it wasn’t going to come out because she pushed at it.
It was going to come out when he was ready, or it wasn’t going to come out at all, and she was going to have to decide what she did with that.
Jack was a strange one. He could talk endlessly about nothing, tipping into chaotic drivel when he was nervous or excited, but the moment things turned serious, he shut down.
Maybe that was normal. Steph understood how people filled silence when they were uncomfortable, words spilling out faster than sense as a way to outrun what they didn’t want to say.
As near as she could tell, it was not quite like that for Jack. It seemed more like he got excited and simply started talking, a spark in his eye when something caught his interest.
He had been like that earlier when they talked about movies.
And according to Jocelyn, he had rambled on after the car nearly hit Steph.
Steph hadn’t noticed at the time, too busy feeling grateful she hadn’t been run over.
That probably made sense too. Nerves mixed with a near-death experience could cause him to ramble.
But now his jaw was held so tight she thought he might break a tooth. He was keeping his words to himself for now.
She pulled the beacon from her pocket and checked the screen.
The last message sat unchanged. No update had followed, even after she’d sent her message saying they were being shot at.
She checked the time stamp. The team should’ve been there already.
What’s taking them so long? And why hasn’t there been a response to my last message?
She looked at the signal indicator and then at the sky above the rock formation, dark and flat and giving nothing away. They had the coordinates. They knew the situation, knew there were armed men intent on killing them.
Steph looked at the screen again as if looking harder would produce a different result.
It didn’t.
Something had gone wrong. Maybe the messages weren’t getting through, or the team had run into a problem and didn’t want to tell Steph. Maybe something bad had happened at Silver Mane’s Lodge that was holding them up.
Maybe they’d be forced to be on their own for even longer. Forced to find their own way back to the lodge and their vehicles. Even with the added layer, Steph wasn’t sure Jack’s feet could take the walk and exposure much longer.