7. Hadley
HADLEY
His hands are iron around my wrists. Not painful. Not gentle. Something between the two that makes my blood sing in a register I've never heard before.
The cabin is pitch black except for the single tactical flashlight propped on the table, throwing its beam sideways across the floor, catching the underside of his jaw in harsh white light.
Every angle of his face is blade-sharp. The cut of his cheekbones.
The hard line of his brow. Those gray eyes burning down into mine like the last two embers of a fire that should have gone out hours ago.
I'm pinned against a log wall in an abandoned cabin in the Alaskan wilderness by a man who just killed someone with his bare hands, and my stupid, traitorous heart isn't beating fast because I'm scared.
I'm not scared.
That's the thing. That's the whole enormous, terrifying, ridiculous thing.This man ambushed a mercenary in the dark.
He shattered an ice bridge with a climbing axe while bullets shredded the air around his head.
I just packed gauze into a hole in his body while he gripped a chair hard enough to splinter the wood.
He is the most dangerous human being I have ever been in the same room with.
His blood is on my fingers. I can feel it.
Tacky and cooling between my skin and his palms. His blood, which he spilled getting me across that ravine.
His blood, which he bled while he stayed upright long enough to tell me where the cabin was.
His blood, which is now the only warm thing between us because the fire hasn't caught yet and the cabin is freezing and he's standing here with half his shirt cut away and a bandage soaking red around his ribs and he's looking at me like I'm the dangerous one.
Like I'm the thing in this room that could kill him.
My chin tips up. Not defiance. Something deeper. Something I don't have a word for yet. I hold his gaze and I don't drop it and I don't flinch.
The moment stretches. Thin as the bridge we just crossed.
Something breaks in his face.
Not softens. Breaks. Like a fracture line running through granite. His jaw works. His nostrils flare on a ragged inhale. He looks down at his own hands wrapped around my wrists and something dark and ugly moves behind his eyes. Recognition. Horror.
He releases me.
Both wrists at once, fingers springing open like he touched a hot stove. He steps back. One step. Two. His boots drag across the rough plank floor. His right hand goes to his wounded side and his left hand curls into a fist so tight his knuckles go white in the flashlight.
"I'm sorry."
The words come out ground to dust. I barely hear them over the wind screaming against the shutters. He won't look at me. His head is turned, jaw clenched so hard I can see the muscle jumping beneath his ear. He's staring at the far wall like it personally wronged him.
"Banks."
He shakes his head once. A short, vicious jerk.
"That doesn't happen again."
"Banks, you didn't hurt me."
"I put my hands on you." The words sound like they're being pulled out of him with pliers. Each one separate. Deliberate. Disgusted. "You're a civilian in my care and I put my hands on you."
I push off the wall. My wrists are tingling where he held them. Not from pain. From absence. From the sudden cold where his grip used to be.
"Look at me."
He doesn't.
"Look at me, please."
His chin drops. He still won't turn his head. I can see him swallowing, his throat working above the dark collar of his base layer, and in the dim sideways light he looks less like a man and more like something carved from the mountain itself. Rigid. Unyielding. Cracking from the inside out.
I step closer. Close enough to see the bandage darkening at his hip, fresh blood wicking through the compression wrap. He's bleeding again. Of course he's bleeding again. He just threw himself out of a chair and slammed a woman against a wall with a wound packed full of gauze.
"You're bleeding."
"I'm fine."
"You're not fine. You're bleeding through the bandage I just spent ten minutes packing while you grunted like you were trying to bench-press this whole cabin."
Something twitches at the corner of his mouth. Not a smile. A crack in the wall. He turns his head a fraction and those gray eyes find mine. Still furious. Still burning. But underneath, something raw and exposed that he doesn't want me to see.
"I will get you out of this alive."
It's not a promise. It's not a reassurance. It's a vow. An oath sworn to the dark cabin and the howling storm and the blood on both our hands. He says it like he's carving the words into his own bones.
"I know you will."
His eyes search my face. Looking for doubt. Looking for fear. Looking for any crack in my certainty he can use to justify the distance he's rebuilding between us, brick by furious brick.
He doesn't find one.
I don't let him stand there bleeding in the dark like some martyr carved from mountain rock. I grab the flashlight off the table and sweep it across the cabin, assessing what we have to work with.
Not much. A single room, maybe twelve by fourteen.
Log walls chinked with something that's crumbled to dust in the gaps, letting thin ribbons of wind whistle through.
One window shuttered with heavy boards Banks nailed closed when we first stumbled in.
A rough-hewn table. Two chairs, one missing a leg.
A narrow bed frame against the far wall piled with what looks like animal hides under a thick layer of dust and mouse droppings.
And in the corner, squat and black and beautiful, a cast-iron woodstove with a crooked pipe running up through the ceiling.
"Stove."
Banks is moving. He crosses the cabin in three strides, favoring his right side in a way he'd deny if I pointed it out, and drops to one knee in front of the iron door. Wrenches it open. Shines his own smaller penlight up the pipe.
"Flue's clear."
He pulls a fire kit from somewhere inside his vest. Waterproof matches, a compressed fuel tab, a small bundle of tinder wrapped in waxed cloth.
His fingers work with brutal efficiency, building a tiny nest of tinder inside the stove's belly.
He strikes the match on the first try and cups it with hands that don't shake despite the blood loss, despite the cold radiating through the gaps in these walls.
The tinder catches. He feeds it carefully, adding splinters he breaks from the ruined chair leg, then larger pieces from a stack of ancient split wood piled beside the stove that some long-dead trapper left behind.
The fire builds. Orange light crawls across the floor and up the walls, pushing the shadows back, and for the first time since the ice cave I can see the full extent of what we look like.
It's not good.
Banks is soaked. Snow melt and blood have turned his dark tactical pants into a frozen second skin. His base layer is cut open from where I hacked it apart to get at his wound, and the exposed skin underneath is the wrong color. Not the ruddy pink of cold. The waxy gray-white of something worse.
I look down at myself and it's the same story in a different font.
My four-hundred-dollar puffer jacket that the brand rep swore was "expedition rated" is a waterlogged sponge hanging off my shoulders.
My leggings are frozen stiff from the thigh down.
I can't feel my toes. I stopped being able to feel my toes somewhere between the bridge and the ravine.
I thought it was adrenaline. Now I think it might be something I should worry about.
Banks stands up from the stove and turns. His eyes do that thing again where they inventory me like I'm a supply manifest. Head to toe. Clinical. Thorough. His jaw tightens.
"Strip."
The word lands like a gunshot in the small cabin.
"I need you to take off everything wet. Everything. Right now."
"I know what hypothermia protocol is. I took a wilderness safety course before the trip. It was online. There were quizzes."
He's not listening. He's already moving to the bed, ripping the furs off the frame one at a time, shaking years of dust and debris free with sharp, violent snaps of his wrists.
Underneath the top layer of grime, the pelts are thick.
Bear, maybe. Something heavy and dense that holds its loft despite the years.
He drapes them over the bed frame, fur side up, and turns back to me.
"Everything wet. Now."
Then he turns his back.
He strips with the same efficiency he does everything else.
Vest first, laid flat on the table with his gear accessible.
Base layer peeled up over his head, and I observe the muscles of his back flex in the firelight and the white of the bandage pull against his ribs.
His shoulders are enormous. Not gym-built.
Functional. Dense and corded and scarred in places the light picks out like a topographical map of every violent thing he's ever survived.
A puckered circle on his left shoulder blade.
A long, thin line across his lower back.
Stories written in scar tissue that he will probably never tell me.
He unbuckles his pants and pushes them down and I realize I'm staring and he's not looking and I need to move.
My fingers are clumsy. Numb. I fumble with the zipper on my jacket for ten agonizing seconds before I get it down and peel the wet shell off my shoulders.
It hits the floor with a heavy, sodden slap.
My thermal underneath is damp and cold against my skin and I drag it over my head, shivering so hard my teeth click together.
Sports bra. Leggings. Socks that peel off with a sticky, frozen sound that turns my stomach.
Everything wet. He said everything.
I unhook my bra. Push my underwear down. Stand naked in a trapper's cabin in the Alaskan wilderness while a blizzard tries to tear the roof off.