12. Banks #2
Then I rebandage my side. The graze looks worse than it is. Shallow channel through the oblique muscle, clotted with dried blood and dirt. I clean it with an alcohol wipe and pack it with fresh gauze. Tape it down. My hands are steady.
Hadley opens her eyes.
"They said you killed those men."
"Yeah."
"The men at the falls."
"Yeah."
"That's insane."
"You don't know me."
The words come out harsher than I intend. Defensive. Stupid.
"I know you carried me half a mile on a bleeding side without stopping.
" She shifts on the thermal pad, pulling her injured knee close.
"I know you gave me your last heat pack and you're sitting there on bare rock in a frozen cave rewrapping your own wound like it's an inconvenience.
I know you killed a man who had his hand over my mouth, and the first thing you did after was check my teeth for damage. "
I did check her teeth. Force of habit. Blunt trauma to the jaw can crack molars. It's basic field medicine.
"That's not evidence."
"Banks."
She says my name and something in my ribcage locks up. Just seizes, like a cramp in a muscle I forgot I had.
"I watched those men execute someone. I saw their faces.
I know what happened on that ridge and I know what didn't happen.
You weren't there." She pushes herself upright, ignoring her knee, ignoring the cold, ignoring everything except pinning me with those wide brown eyes that have no business being that steady after running for her life since yesterday.
"When we get out of here, I'm going to tell every cop, every fed, every reporter who will listen exactly what I saw.
Every detail. The angle of the gun, the sound it made, the way the snow turned red.
The bag they threw into the crevasse. Their faces. "
She pauses.
"And I'm going to tell them that Banks Tanner found me dying in a cave, carried me through a blizzard, took a bullet keeping me alive, and never once stopped fighting for me. That's not a murderer. That's the man who saved my life."
The cave is silent. Chemical heat packs ticking faintly as they warm. Wind screaming outside the entrance, muffled by rock to a low moan.
I should tell her testimony from a traumatized witness won't hold up against a well-funded legal team.
I should tell her that whoever orchestrated this frame has resources that make her conviction irrelevant.
I should tell her the truth, which is that clearing my name is secondary to keeping her breathing.
Instead I look at her. This woman with pink hair and a busted knee and frostbitten toes and more fight in her than half the soldiers I've served with.
"Okay."
One word. It comes out rough. Scraped raw.
She nods. Like that settles it. Like "okay" from a wanted man in an ice cave twelve miles from the nearest road is some kind of binding contract.
Maybe it is.
I lean back against the rock wall across from her. Three feet of space between us. Might as well be three inches. I can feel her presence like a heat source, independent of the chemical packs, independent of anything rational.
We are alone. Completely, absolutely alone.
No radio, no backup, no extraction timeline.
The entire law enforcement apparatus of the state of Alaska thinks I'm a murderer and she's my hostage.
The mercenaries want us both dead. The weather is a coin flip between survivable and lethal.
And the only two people on earth who know the truth are sitting on a thermal pad in an ice cave that doesn't exist on any map.
Her hand reaches across the gap. Finds mine in the dim blue light. Her fingers are cold and small and they thread through mine like they belong there.
I let them.
Her fingers tighten around mine. Small pulse of pressure. Deliberate.
I should let go. Should put three feet of cold air back between us and run the numbers on our water supply, our calorie deficit, the likely search grid the mercenaries will deploy at first light. Should be the professional. The operator. The machine.
Her thumb traces across my knuckle. One slow stroke.
The machine breaks.
I pull her across the gap. Not gentle. Her injured knee bumps the thermal pad and she gasps, but then she's in my lap, straddling me, her cold hands fisting the collar of my base layer and her mouth finding mine in the blue dark.
She tastes like the protein bar and like blood where her cracked lips split against mine.
I don't care. I grip the back of her neck and take her mouth deeper, harder, swallowing the small sound she makes when my tongue slides against hers.
Her hips roll forward and the friction sends a jolt straight through my core that has nothing to do with the bullet graze screaming along my ribs.
"Knee," I grunt against her mouth.
"Don't care."
"Hadley."
She pulls back far enough to strip her base layer over her head.
The air in the cave is twenty-eight degrees and her skin pebbles instantly, goosebumps racing across her collarbone, her stomach, the pale inner curves of her breasts.
She should be shivering. She is shivering.
But her eyes are on fire, steady and fierce and completely unafraid, and when she reaches for the hem of my shirt I lift my arms and let her take it.
Her hands touch my bare skin. I hiss. Her fingers are ice.
"God, you're warm." She spreads her hands wider, pushing into the dense muscle along my torso, tracing the bandage wrapped around my ribs without touching it. Careful even now. Even with her pupils blown wide and her breathing ragged. Careful with me.
Something in my throat closes up.
I flip her. Put her on the thermal pad with the sleeping bag bunched underneath and my body blocking the entrance and every frozen thing in the world that wants to hurt her.
She arcs up when her bare back hits the pad, a sharp inhale, and I catch her mouth again before she can exhale.
My hand spans her ribcage. I can feel every bone.
She's lost weight in two days here and the rage that triggers is irrational and consuming and I channel every volt of it into the way I kiss her jaw, her throat, the hollow below her ear where her pulse hammers so hard I can count the beats with my lips.
"Banks." My name cracks in her mouth. Breaks into two syllables on a shudder.
I work her leggings down over the swollen knee, easing the fabric past the compression wrap with a precision I reserve for field surgery.
She lifts her hips to help and the movement shoves her bare stomach against mine and the contact is volcanic.
Skin on skin in a frozen cave at altitude in the Chugach Range and we are generating enough heat to fog the ice on the walls.
I strip the rest of my gear. Drop it within arm's reach because the pistol stays close, always, even now.
Her legs wrap around my waist and the size difference hits me again the way it does every time.
My shoulders span wider than her entire torso.
My hands could circle both her wrists with room to spare.
She is small and battered and half-frozen and she is pulling me down against her with a strength that defies every physical metric I know.
I lean my forehead to hers. Breathe her in.
"Look at me."
Her eyes open. Brown and bright and burning in the faint blue light that bleeds off the ice walls, turning her skin luminous, turning her into something carved from this mountain.
I push into her.