Chapter 7
Chapter Seven
Gabe
Dawn came slow, gray, and grudging—light filtered through frost so thick it turned the windows into blurred shapes instead of glass.
I knew I’d been awake too long. My body kept reminding me.
The tremor in my hands. The heaviness behind my eyes.
The way the room blurred at the edges when I blinked too hard.
Didn’t matter. I wasn’t going to sleep while she lay there on the cot, wrapped in every blanket we had, breathing shallow but steady.
She’d lived. I kept replaying that fact like I didn’t trust it.
I’d treated hypothermia before—it was textbook.
Warm slowly, remove wet clothes, replace with dry layers, monitor vitals, watch for cardiac arrhythmia.
But none of that felt like procedure while I watched color crawl back into Mia’s face in uneven patches.
None of it felt clinical when her fingers started to move again or when her breathing lost that thin, fragile quality that meant the body was fighting and failing.
I’d done the same things for injured men in the middle of winter operations, men I couldn’t afford to lose because they were assets. Saving Mia hadn’t felt like that.
The ropes sat in a loose pile on the table—cut, useless, untouched since I’d thrown them there yesterday.
I should have secured her again. The logic was simple: she would run if given the chance.
She already had. I knew that and still didn’t move.
I couldn’t put my hands on those ropes without seeing her wrists again—bandages stained with dried blood, skin rubbed raw, bruises climbing toward her elbows.
Just thinking about tying her back down made something twist deep inside, something I didn’t want to name.
She shifted under the blankets and woke.
I watched the confusion hit first, then memory—and her whole body locked tight.
Her eyes snapped to me immediately. Reflex.
She needed to know where I was in the room to calculate threat, escape, options.
I stayed where I’d planted myself by the window—same vantage point on the door, the cot, and the whole cabin.
She pushed herself upright with slow caution, waiting for pain or dizziness or for me to stop her.
When I didn’t move, she swung her legs to the floor and stood.
Her legs held. Her eyes widened as if she couldn’t quite believe she was unrestrained.
I let her take a few steps. She used them to study the room—calculating distance, obstacles, objects that could become weapons, places she might run.
Recognition hit me hard: this was how I assessed a room. Thorough. Tactical. Focused. She wasn’t flailing. She was learning.
My stomach picked that moment to betray me with a growl loud enough to carry across the cabin. Her head snapped toward me, and for half a second—just half—I saw something close to amusement soften her stare. It vanished before I could track it, but I’d seen it.
I turned toward the supply corner, partly because we needed food and partly because she needed the reminder that she wasn’t the only one who could observe.
I pulled breakfast together—canned fruit, protein bars, instant coffee.
As I reached for the coffee tin, something nestled between the rations caught my hand.
A glass ornament. Small. Gold-painted angels whose edges had faded with time.
Christmas.
I put it back before I could think further.
I set her food on the table and kept standing as I drank my own coffee. The burn down my throat helped keep me grounded—pain was easier to control than whatever was happening in my head.
Mia took the chair slowly, like the wood legs might explode when she sat. She studied the protein bar like she was making sure it wasn’t laced with arsenic before she bit into it anyway. Hunger didn’t respect pride.
Silence held until she finally spoke.
“Five-star accommodations,” she rasped, gesturing around the cabin with the corner of the protein bar. “Truly premium kidnapping experience. I’ll be sure to leave a glowing Yelp review—assuming hostage reviews are encouraged.”
My face moved before I could stop it. Not a smile, not really. A ghost of one. A twitch in muscles I hadn’t used in a long time. She saw it. I knew she saw it. She looked startled, then tried to bury it behind indifference. Too late.
For the rest of the day she tested me, not with physical escape attempts—she wasn’t in any shape for that—but with words.
With sarcasm. With dry commentary delivered like she was poking a bruise repeatedly just to see when I’d react.
I didn’t answer, but every now and then I felt that twitch again. I didn’t stop it fast enough.
She was learning me while she learned the cabin. Watching my responses the same way I watched hers. Taking inventory. Filing information. Adapting.
By late afternoon the fire needed more wood again. I stoked it methodically, fed it until the heat reached the corners of the room. She claimed the chair nearest the flames and pulled a blanket around herself like armor. I took my place by the window, the one that let me see everything.
She looked at me. I looked back. Something passed between us—nothing soft, nothing gentle. Just acknowledgment. Shared awareness that something was changing between us whether either of us wanted it to or not.
Four days in this cabin, buried under snow and choices neither of us wanted to make. She should have been bound to a chair. I should have been finishing the job Vincent gave me. Neither of those things was happening.
I didn’t understand where this was going. I didn’t know what happened when the storm ended. I only knew one thing with absolute clarity.
I didn’t regret keeping her alive. Not in the blizzard. Not when she woke. Not now.
And that truth sat heavy in my chest, dangerous and undeniable. Vincent would call it a weakness. A failure.
He wasn’t here.
Just me. Mia. The fire.And a storm we couldn’t escape—outside or inside.
I prepared the evening meal under lantern light.
The glow didn’t soften the room. It just made the hard edges more obvious—rough-cut wood, shadows that reached too far, corners that looked sharp enough to cut.
Canned stew warmed on the camping stove.
Preserved meat, preserved vegetables. Functional fuel. Nothing more.
I registered Mia’s movements without turning.
The soft shift of fabric against the chair when she leaned forward.
The small inhale she made when the smell reached her.
The fact that she tracked my position in the cabin the same way I tracked hers.
Neither of us relaxed. Not fully. Maybe not ever again.
When the stew was ready, I set the bowls on the table. Muscle memory guided the motion. But then I did something that wasn’t muscle memory—I sat across from her.
The tension changed immediately. Sitting meant conversation was possible.
Sitting meant we were on the same plane instead of opposite ends of the room.
Nothing about it made sense strategically.
But I was too tired to stand guard at the window another night.
Too tired to pretend I hadn’t burned through the last of my adrenaline in the storm.
She approached carefully, making sure I wasn’t using this to trap her somehow. When she sat, she didn’t touch the food right away. Just watched me with that sharp attention I’d come to expect.
We ate in silence. Spoons tapping ceramic.
Snow against the shutters. Fire settling on its logs.
I’d eaten with people knowing someone might pull a gun across the table.
I’d eaten in rooms where good posture meant survival.
I’d eaten alone enough times to lose count.
But nothing matched the way she watched me now—assessing, questioning, trying to understand a puzzle she didn’t want to solve.
Halfway through her bowl, she stopped. Set her spoon down with too much care. Looked at me like she was lining up a shot.
“Why was I spared?”
Her voice didn’t shake, but it had edges. She’d been carrying the question since the night I found her. I’d known it was coming eventually. Didn’t make answering it easier.
I set my spoon down so I didn’t snap it in my hand. Took a breath that didn’t help.
“You weren’t supposed to be there.”
She froze. The words didn’t land all at once—first confusion, then recognition, then impact. She stood so fast the chair legs scraped across the floor. She didn’t look at me, not directly. She paced instead, arms wrapped around herself like she needed something holding her together.
“So I lived by accident,” she said. “Because of timing. Because of coincidence. Because I was in the wrong place at the wrong time, just not wrong enough.”
There was nothing to add. Nothing to soften. She turned back to me and there were tears on her face now, though her voice stayed controlled.
“They died because someone paid you. And I lived because someone didn’t.”
“Yes.”
Her laugh didn’t belong to humor. It belonged to breaking.
“Who paid you?”
“I don’t get names. I don’t ask.”
Her expression twisted. “Of course you don’t. Pull the trigger, get your paycheck, don’t think too hard. Easier that way.”
She spoke like she wanted to hurt me. It worked. Not because the words were untrue, but because they were exactly true.
I stood slowly, kept distance, approached without threat. She didn’t back up. Didn’t look away.
“I know what I am,” I said. “Nothing I say changes what I did.”
She looked at me like she was trying to see the person beneath the damage and didn’t know if one existed.
“Then why am I alive?”
There were no tactical answers left. No training to fall back on. I had broken protocol the second she opened her eyes in that closet.
“I don’t know,” I said. The truth scraped its way out. “I should have killed you. I couldn’t.”
The fire cracked. The wind hit the wall hard enough to make the shutters rattle. She sat again, not because she trusted me, but because her legs were done. I returned to my seat too, not because I knew what to do, but because there was nothing left to say.
She didn’t look at me. I didn’t look away from her.
Some truths don’t change anything, and still change everything.
She now knew the answer she’d needed. I now knew she would carry it for the rest of her life. We sat with that reality in the dim light—two people bound together by an act I’d carried out and a mistake I couldn’t undo.
Outside, the storm kept trying to bury the cabin.
Inside, silence did the same.
Night pressed hard against the windows, turning the frost into a second layer of ice. The storm had gotten worse, the wind hammering the cabin like it wanted the walls to fail. I added wood to the fire because if the heat dropped even a little, Mia wouldn’t stand a chance. Neither would I.
The flames were low, coals glowing under ash. I stirred them until they caught breath again, fed them with kindling, then larger logs. Heat rolled out in sharp waves, bright enough to paint the room in amber and chase back some of the shadows.
The work helped. It demanded just enough focus to keep my mind from circling everything said at the table. Why she had lived. Why her family had died. The answers neither of us could change.
I knew she was behind me before I heard her. A shift in the air. A subtle change in proximity. She’d moved to the chair nearest the hearth again, drawn toward the growing heat. I didn’t look at her, but my senses tracked her anyway.
I stayed kneeling, letting the warmth hit my face. For one moment, I let myself breathe without scanning the room for threats.
She touched me.
Her fingers brushed my jaw—light, hesitant, warm enough to shock me still. I turned and she was right there, her face close, her expression unreadable and startled in equal measure.
“You had soot,” she said. Barely more than a breath.
Her hand trembled. Mine didn’t move. I didn’t think I could have pulled away even if I tried.
For a moment, neither of us did anything. Just silence, heat, breath. Her eyes fixed on mine, green and wide and full of things I didn’t know how to navigate. Her lips parted slightly, not an invitation exactly, but something vulnerable. Something human.
We leaned in. One of us. Both of us. It didn’t matter.
Our mouths met.
The kiss wasn’t cautious, but it wasn’t wild either.
It landed somewhere in the middle—driven but controlled, hungry but restrained, careful because anything else risked breaking us both.
Her fingers curled against the back of my neck.
My hand found her waist, pulling her closer, eliminating space I hadn’t realized mattered.
Every rule I’d lived by dissolved in seconds.
Then reality shoved itself back into the room. Every detail hit at once—who I was, what I’d done, what I had taken from her, what power imbalance existed in every inch of this place.
I tore myself away. Too fast. Too hard. Her breath hitched when I did.
I stood because staying near her was impossible. My hands curled into fists on instinct—not to strike, only to keep them from reaching for her again.
“You don’t kiss men like me.” My voice sounded scraped raw. “You shouldn’t. You can’t.”
I didn’t wait for her response. I crossed to the window and pressed my palms to the cold glass until the burn helped clear my head. Outside, snow erased the world. Inside, the fire didn’t care about the damage happening in its glow.
She stayed behind me, still near the hearth. I could hear her breathing—quicker than normal, matching my own. The silence between us wasn’t the tense stalemate of earlier days. It was worse. Close. Charged. Wrong.
She said my name once, soft.
“Don’t.” I didn’t turn around.
The storm rattled the shutters. The fire snapped. I kept my eyes on the white blur outside until she finally moved away from the hearth. The quiet sound of her settling onto the cot hit harder than raised voices ever could.
I stayed at the window. She stayed under the blankets.
Two people sharing a single room but separated by everything that mattered.
I could still feel her mouth on mine, still hear the sound she made when the kiss deepened, still feel the way she’d held on to me like she didn’t hate me for a fraction of a second.
It didn’t matter.
I had killed her family. I had taken her choices. Nothing about this could be clean or right. There was no version of this where I got to want things from her.
The storm kept swallowing the cabin. The fire kept burning. And we stayed on opposite sides of the room trying to carry something neither of us should have to carry.
Eventually, dawn would come. And when it did, nothing that happened here tonight would make tomorrow easier.