11. Hadley #2
The Sig is still in my hands. I'm still pointing it at the space where the mercenary was standing.
My arms are locked and my thumbs are stacked and my whole body is vibrating at a frequency that makes my vision swim.
I can't make my fingers open. Can't make the muscles release.
The trigger guard is slick with blood and spit and I don't know whose and it doesn't matter because I can't put the gun down.
Banks reads it in a glance. He doesn't reach for the weapon.
Doesn't try to pry it loose. He drops to his knees in front of me, right there on the frozen rock floor of the crevice, and his hands come up to my face.
Not grabbing. Hovering. A quarter inch from my skin.
The heat rolls off his palms and the fine tremor running through his fingers.
"Hadley."
My name. Just my name. Spoken low and rough and stripped of everything tactical. No command. No protocol. Just the sound of it in his throat, ground down to gravel.
My arms unlock. The Sig drops into my lap.
His hands land. One on each side of my jaw.
Warm. Enormous. The calluses on his palms catch against my frozen skin and he tilts my face up toward the gray light filtering into the crevice.
His eyes sweep across my features with the same clinical precision he used to check me for frostbite in the cave, but something behind the assessment is different now. Ragged. Uncontained.
He turns my head left. Right. Checks my pupils. Runs his thumb along my lower lip where I bit through my own skin when the mercenary grabbed me. The pad of his thumb comes away red and his jaw flexes so hard I hear his molars grind.
"Open your mouth."
I open my mouth. He looks at my teeth. At the blood on my gums. At the shredded skin on the inside of my cheek where my teeth caught when the man's palm slammed against my face.
"His blood or yours."
"Both."
Something moves behind his eyes. Something I don't have a name for.
He nods once, short and sharp, and his hands drop from my face to my shoulders.
He squeezes. Hard enough to check the bone beneath.
Then down my arms. Both of them. Wrists.
Hands. Fingers. He picks up each hand and turns it over, examining the skin, the nails, the joints.
His fingers dwarf mine. They're coated in the mercenary's blood and it transfers to my skin in dark smears but he doesn't notice or doesn't care.
"Can you feel this?"
He pinches the tip of my right index finger. The one that pulled the trigger.
"Yes."
"This."
Left hand. Same finger.
"Yes."
He moves to my torso. Pushes in. Checks for fractures. Moves to my sternum. My collarbones. Back to the ribs on the other side. His touch is clinical but his breathing isn't. It comes in short, controlled pulls through his nose and each exhale is slightly too fast.
"Your knee."
"It's bad. Worse than before. He landed on it when he grabbed me."
Banks shifts lower. His fingers wrap around my left knee and I hiss through my teeth. The joint is swollen tight inside my leggings, hot and thick and wrong. He probes the kneecap with his thumb and I grab his shoulder and squeeze until my nails dig crescents into his tactical jacket.
"Not dislocated. Sprained. Lateral ligament."
"Great. Perfect. Love that for me."
The ghost of something crosses his face. Not a smile. Banks doesn't smile. But the granite softens for half a second before it locks back down.
He sits back on his heels. Looks at me. Really looks at me.
The assessment is over and whatever he's doing now isn't medical.
His eyes track across my face like he's memorizing it.
Like he's committing the exact arrangement of blood and tears and fading pink hair dye to some permanent file in the back of his brain.
"You shot him."
"I missed the first time."
"You shot him."
"I screamed too. Like, a lot. Very loud. Very not tactical."
His hand comes up. Cups the back of my head. Pulls me forward until my forehead leans to his collarbone.
"Good girl."
Two words. Two stupid words that have no business doing what they do to my central nervous system. The shaking gets worse for three seconds and then, abruptly, stops. Like he flipped a switch. Like those two words rewired something fundamental in the panic in my brain and told it to stand down.
Then he releases me. Stands. Turns to the body on the gorge floor.
He crouches beside the mercenary. His hands move with that terrifying efficiency.
He strips the tactical vest open with two sharp tugs on the buckles.
Checks the magazine on the dropped pistol and tucks it into his own waistband.
Pulls a combat knife from the man's boot sheath and flips it once, testing the balance, before sliding it into his own belt.
Then he finds the radio.
It's clipped to the inner chest panel of the vest. Compact. Military-grade. Banks pulls it free and holds it up, examining the frequency display. His thumb finds the volume dial and turns it up from zero.
Static fills the gorge. White noise and interference from the mountains and the remnants of the storm still chewing at the peaks above us. Banks adjusts the frequency. One click. Two. Three.
The static resolves into voices.
Not mercenary chatter. Not encrypted tactical comms. Clear, unscrambled, public-band radio traffic. Local frequencies. The kind any scanner can pick up.
I know this because I spent six months dating a guy in Brooklyn who was obsessed with police scanners and made me listen to them during dinner.
The person coming through is calm. Professional. The flat, measured cadence of a dispatcher reading from a script.
"...all units, repeating, BOLO for Banks Tanner, age thirty-three, six-three, gray eyes.
Subject is a Search and Rescue operative believed to have gone rogue during a solo deployment in the Chugach Range.
Subject is armed and considered extremely dangerous.
Subject is wanted in connection with a triple homicide near Knik Glacier, including the execution-style killing of three unidentified males at a frozen waterfall... "
The gorge goes silent. Even the wind stops. Even the static seems to hold its breath.
Banks doesn't move. His hand is frozen on the radio. His knuckles are white.
"...subject is also believed to have forcibly abducted a civilian tourist, Hadley Fence, age twenty-five, reported missing from a guided hiking excursion.
Subject's SAR credentials have been revoked.
All units exercise extreme caution. Do not approach alone.
Subject has extensive tactical and survival training... "
"That's..." I start.
"A frame. They flipped the story."
"They're saying you killed those men. They're saying you took me."
Banks looks at me. The gray eyes are ice again. All the softness from thirty seconds ago, the raw heat, the trembling hands on my face, gone. Sealed behind something cold and operational and utterly still.
"Every SAR unit, every state trooper, every park ranger in a two-hundred-mile radius just got told I'm a murderer who kidnapped you." He turns the radio over in his hand. Studies it like it's a bomb. "We can't call for help. We can't flag a helicopter. We can't walk into a ranger station."
The dispatcher loops back to the beginning. Repeats the bulletin. My name. His name. Triple homicide. Execution-style. Armed and dangerous.
Banks clips the radio to his own vest and stands. His shadow falls across me and I have to crane my neck to see his face.
"We're on our own."