12. Banks #3
Her whole body tightens. Fingers digging into my shoulders hard enough to leave marks. Back bowing off the pad. A sound that starts as a gasp and ends as my name, half-swallowed, reverberating off the frozen chamber walls.
I hold still. Let her adjust. Her face cycles through shock and pressure and then something that softens her mouth and glazes her eyes and she nods, just barely, and I move.
Slow. Deep. The kind of deliberate that hurts worse than fast because I feel everything.
Every ridge and clench and the way her breath hitches on the upstroke and how her hips tilt to meet mine on the down.
The thermal pad crinkles beneath us. Chemical heat packs pools warmth against her shoulder blades.
My blood soaks through the bandage again and I don't register it.
Her nails drag down my back. Five lines of fire.
"More."
I give her more. Drive deeper and she arches into me and the cave catches every sound, amplifies it, throws it back at us. Her moan. My grunt. The wet slide of skin. The sleeping bag fabric tearing under my grip because I need something to hold that isn't her, something I can't break.
She cups my face. Both hands. Forces me to look at her while I move inside her and the intimacy of that is worse than the physical act.
Worse because I can't hide. Can't go behind the wall.
She's got her hands on my jaw and her eyes locked on mine and she sees everything I am, every broken ugly corner of the man they're calling a murderer, and she doesn't look away.
"I'm here," she whispers. "I'm right here."
The sound I make isn't human. Guttural, wrecked.
I drop my face into the curve of her neck and lose rhythm.
The discipline cracks. I drive into her hard enough to shift us both across the pad and she wraps around me tighter, legs locked at the small of my back, and matches every thrust with a rolling grind that strips me to wire and bone.
She comes first. Silent, which shocks me.
Her whole body locks rigid, every muscle seizing at once, her mouth open against my shoulder in a soundless cry that I feel more than hear.
The wave of it pulls me over with her. I bury myself to the hilt and let go and the release is savage, obliterating, a detonation that whites out my vision and leaves me shaking against her in a freezing cave while the wind howls outside and the world narrows to her heartbeat against me.
I don't pull out.
I can't.
I stay inside her, braced on my forearms, forehead leaned on hers, breathing her air. Her hands drift from my jaw to my shoulders to the bandage on my ribs, feathering over the tape with that impossible gentleness.
"You're bleeding again."
"I know."
"You need to let me rebandage it."
"In a minute."
"Banks."
"One more minute."
She relents. Threads her fingers into the short hair at my skull and holds me there, and the cave is quiet except for our breathing slowly coming back to normal and the ancient ice settling in its granite cradle.
I ease out of her eventually. Rebandage the graze with the last of the clean gauze while she looks from the sleeping bag, wrapped in every thermal layer we have between us.
Then I pull her to me, tuck the bag around us both, and hold her while the temperature outside the cave drops to something that would kill an exposed human in forty minutes.
Her breathing evens out. Deepens. Sleep pulls her under fast, the way it does when the body has burned through every reserve and has nothing left but the animal need to shut down and rebuild.
I don't sleep.
I peer at the entrance. Run the map in my head. Count rounds. Calculate distances. Factor in her knee, my blood loss, the twelve miles between us and the Glenn Highway.
The mercenaries' rally point northwest. Three red marks on a dead man's map.
They'll regroup there. Consolidate. Wait for daylight and better weather to push a coordinated sweep.
Unless someone hits them first.
Unless someone walks into their camp before dawn, while they think their quarry is hiding, running, freezing to death in the backcountry. While they feel safe.
I look down at Hadley sleeping against me. Pink hair fanned across my bare skin. Frostbitten fingers curled around my dog tags like a talisman.
The plan assembles itself with cold, mechanical clarity.
I ease out of the sleeping bag one inch at a time.
She murmurs. Shifts. Doesn't wake. I tuck the chemical heat packs against her body and seal the bag around her.
Pull on my layers, my tactical shell, my boots.
Strap the combat knife to my thigh. Check the SIG.
Chamber a round in the mercenary's rifle. Redistribute the ammo.
I leave the backup sidearm on the thermal pad next to her hand. Safety off. Same instructions as before.
I look at her one last time. Her face is slack with sleep, lips parted, the split in her bottom lip dark with dried blood. She looks young. She looks breakable.
She isn't.
I turn and slide sideways through the narrow entrance into the cold dark.