Chapter 16 - Harper
Snow piles against the windows of the abandoned dacha until the world outside looks erased.
Inside, the hearth spits out sparks like it’s arguing with the cold, flames flaring and collapsing in the same instant.
I sit close enough to feel heat seep into my knees but not close enough to thaw the ache living in my bones. The fire warms the room, but the silence between Damian and me is warmer.
We’ve been here long enough for days to lose their edges, bleeding into each other like watercolors someone left out in the snow. Morning and night exist only by the dimness of the light that manages to push through the glass. Time is a suggestion more than a certainty.
Damian is three feet away at the small wooden table, sleeves rolled up, forearms mapped in scars I never saw in the city’s low lighting.
He’s fiddling with some old transceiver like it’s a puzzle only he has patience for.
The glow from the lamp paints gold along his cheekbone, but exhaustion dulls the color.
Ever since we escaped the safe house, he carries weariness like a second spine.
I pretend to check the communications panel, an antique rig we resurrected on day two. In reality, I’m watching him in the reflection of a cracked copper pot hanging above the hearth. The distorted image softens him, makes him look younger, almost gentle.
The radio crackles.
He straightens as if someone snapped a thread tied to his ribs. The lines around his mouth deepen, tension carving familiar trenches.
“Kiro again,” he murmurs.
I adjust the dials.
“Same frequency?”
“Same. They must be close to a sweep.”
Static turns into Kiro’s clipped whisper.
“Blackbird to Gray Wolf. The Council bought the story. They think you’re dead. Anton and Inessa are driving the narrative hard. But they’re hunting everywhere.”
Snow taps against glass as Kiro pauses.
“They want proof your bodies burned in that van.”
Damian stiffens at the same time as me.
He answers, low and steady, “Then they won’t find what they want.”
The transmission cuts, swallowed by static. I reach for the switch with numb fingers and kill the line.
For a moment, all I hear is the fire and Damian’s heavy yet controlled breathing.
“They really believe it,” I echo. “That we’re dead.”
“They need to.” His tone doesn’t waver. “It buys us time. Not much.”
Time seems to be everywhere and nowhere inside this snow globe we’re trapped in.
Our routine is a strange one. We spend the daylight hours rebuilding connections one encrypted whisper at a time.
Damian maps out contact chains from memory, cross-referencing political grudges and family loyalties until the table is littered with notes written in three languages and two alphabets. He writes fast, like the ink is burning through paper.
Meanwhile, I keep the equipment alive. The generator has the temperament of a retired warhorse. I coax it, clean it, bribe it with hope and profanity. Some days, it behaves. Others, it seems to wait for my fingers to go numb before sputtering out.
Between these tasks, Damian and I have begun doing something I never thought we would do.
Talking. Not strategy, not danger. The isolation has stripped us of our armor, it seems. Here, we use different words.
Sometimes he asks me about what I wanted to be before all this. As if “before” is a place I can still remember without wincing. Sometimes I ask him if he ever sleeps—not the kind where your body collapses, but the kind where the world stops pressing its thumbs into your windpipe.
He never lies, but he rarely answers directly. His honesty is diagonal, like sunlight through old curtains.
At night, when exhaustion has rubbed our edges raw, our conversations take on a tone that feels… dangerous.
Danger has always been part of Damian, stitched into the fabric of him—but this emotional kind, the version that threatens the walls we spent months building is very new.
It starts small: a shared laugh over our matching dark circles, a moment of accidental eye contact that lasts one heartbeat too long, a brush of fingers when passing tools.
Each one is tiny, insignificant, a chisel blow at something I pretended was impenetrable.
It’s on the fifth night—at least, I think it’s the fifth—that something shifts.
The fire is low, casting the room in a warm, flickering half dark. Damian is sitting on the floor across from me, backs both against the hearth, our legs stretched toward the rug that still smells faintly of cedar.
He rubs his thumb against the edge of a compass, one of the old ones, brass and worn smooth. His eyes are unfocused.
“You’re not sleeping,” I say quietly.
He huffs a sound that isn’t quite a laugh. “Can’t.”
“Why?”
He hesitates. That in itself is new. Damian rarely hesitates; he calculates. But now, he struggles with the weight of something unsaid.
“Because every time I close my eyes,” he admits, “I see the faces of people who trusted me to keep them alive.”
The fire crackles.
I swallow. “Damian…”
He shakes his head once, cutting me off gently, like he’s too tired to let me comfort him properly.
“Responsibility doesn’t stop when you leave a room, or a city, or a life. It stays. It remembers.”
I’ve seen him furious. I’ve seen him cruel. I’ve seen him patient in ways that terrify me.
But this quiet, brittle guilt is something else entirely.
“You think it’s all your fault,” I say, softer.
He doesn’t deny it.
I pull my knees up to my chest, absorbing the cold that seeps through the floorboards. “You carry too much.”
“And you carry enough for ten people,” he counters, looking at me with an intensity that feels like a hand closing lightly around my throat, not to choke but to hold.
I look away.
“I keep moving. That’s not the same as coping.”
“No,” he agrees. “But it keeps you alive.” A breath. “It keeps me alive.”
The admission is quiet, dropping between us like a stone into deep water. I breathe slowly, steadying the tremor I feel in my hands.
“Do you regret anything?” The question escapes before I can stop it, fragile and reckless.
Damian’s head lifts. His eyes find mine, open and unguarded.
“Only what I never said,” he answers, “when I had the chance.”
My pulse stutters at his words, as if the air in the room thins all at once. Something inside me gives way so quietly I barely register the sound of my own defenses falling.
Damian must sense it because he tracks every shift in me like he tracks danger. Still, he doesn’t move toward me. He holds still, waiting, as if any sudden motion might turn the moment into smoke.
The silence feels full, like snow-heavy branches bending under their own weight. Every glance feels like a touch, every exhale like an invitation neither of us says aloud.
He moves closer, but not enough to close the space. Just enough to acknowledge it exists. My hand rests on the rug and his ends up near mine. The space between our fingers feels electric, like the room has shifted its axis.
After hours or seconds, our shoulders brush slightly.
Except it’s not accidental. The moment his forehead rests lightly against mine, I breathe out in a shudder I didn’t know I was holding.
Sleep takes me before I even know it.
The next morning, my eyes open to a faint glow. My cheek rests against Damian’s shoulder, the exact way I fell asleep. His hand is not holding mine, but it’s close enough to touch. The space between us is marked with a new kind of quiet.
Something that tastes like trust. Deep inside me, a shift has taken place. I don’t wonder whether he’ll disappear the moment danger calls his name. The thought doesn’t even occur to me.
Instead, I wonder what we will do when danger finds us.
Damian’s breath becomes shallower against the crown of my skull, and I know he’s waking up. A strange kind of desperation forces me to brush my pinky against his as he’s coming to, before this moment is taken from me forever.
Damian’s finger curls around mine, brazen and confident.
I move my head from his shoulder, looking up at him. In the faint light, I can see the freckles on the bridge of his nose. There’s the tiniest scar right above his brow, his black hair mussed and sexy.
Sleep laces his thick eyelashes, but those deep green eyes are as awake as ever. I can see my reflection in them. His other hand lifts slowly, coming to cup my face as he brushes the fattest part of my cheek.
“Harper,” he rasps throatily. It sounds like a confession, a prayer, a call for war at the same time.
“Harper,” he breathes, as if my name is what brought him out of his sleep and what lets him close his eyes at night peacefully.
I feel possessed, a deeper emotion coming alive deep in my chest. I move to his lap, and his other hand wraps around my waist, scooching me closer to him.
“Damian…” I croak, tracing his plush lips with my finger. He kisses the tip of my finger, and tilts his chin up. I press my lips to his, soft and passionate. His tongue seeks entrance and I allow it.
We kiss and kiss and kiss, everything forgotten, lost in our own world. I don’t know when our clothes disappear, when he lays me back on our makeshift, dingy bed; when his mouth kisses his way down my thighs and licks up my wetness like it’s an elixir.
In this hazy and warm state, I feel like I finally see him. When he raises my leg, slowly sliding inside me as he massages my thigh, kissing the arch of my foot, I throw back my head.
The stretch is as delicious as always, his member throbbing inside me. The pace is slow but deep, each thrust knocking a moan out of me. He links his fingers with mine, his abs contracting as he moves inside me.
His eyes are stuck on me, drinking me in like a thirsty man would a mirage of water. Beads of sweat drift down his chest, disappearing past his Adonis belt.
A man as sexy as him, and he’s all mine.
The thought is enough to rip my climax out of me. I moan out his name as he speeds up, chasing his pleasure.
“You’re mine,” he says deliriously, bending over me to press his lips to mine. “Mine.”
“Yours.”