21
Layers of old snow lie thick and untouched around me. Elias’ bootprints are stark against the perfect surface. I follow them for a while.
His strides are long – my legs can’t match them, so I give up and settle into my own rhythm, stepping between his prints until I reach the forest edge.
It feels ancient. Massive pines and silver-skinned birch loom overhead. The snowfall is thinner in this area, the canopy catching most of it. That helps.
Still, I keep turning, trying to memorise my surroundings so I don’t circle back.
Every few paces, I score the bark of a tree with the hatchet – a small slash. Enough to mark my trail.
The first rush of breaking free has long since burned off, and the forest begins to thicken as I press deeper, following what remains of his bootprints.
I walk. And I walk and walk.
After what feels like hours of nothing but snow and tree trunks, my breaths count themselves.
I’m terribly out of shape. My thighs burn from effort.
Sweat crawls down my spine only to cool into clammy ice under my snowsuit.
The trees start to look the same, my hatchet marks the only proof I’m not moving in circles.
Every few minutes, I glance back, searching for any hint that I might be far enough, that the cabin is not near me any more.
The sky slowly lights up with that grudging, thin blue-orange seep rather than a normal sunrise. Just as I’m starting to wonder if I should stop or turn back, the forest grows sparser and something appears in the distance between the trunks.
My legs slow.
Squat and rectangular, it sits in a small clearing like a secret – barely bigger than a garden shed. Corrugated metal roof, cheap timber walls, half-buried in snow. No windows. One door, its edges packed with drift. The same snow-pressed silence as the cabin, only more purposeful.
I approach, pulse hammering.
The bootprints lead straight to it, then vanish under the overhang. Up close, the smell hits me first – petrol clings to the air, old oil and cold metal. And the snow is piled up on the sides as if it had been cleared recently.
There’s no lock.
Why would there be, Leandra?
No one is crazy enough to be out here in the first place.
I wedge the hatchet under the handle for leverage, grunt and force the door open. Snow clusters behind the creaky door in a soft hiss as I open it. Inside, pale light snakes through the gap over my shoulder, illuminating just enough.
Empty.
Or almost.
The space is just wide enough to fit a single small vehicle – my guess, because of the petrol stains.
Snow has been pressed flat into the floorboards in a neat rectangle, the kind that only something narrow and heavy would leave.
Hooks hang from the wall, holding a heavy canvas cover folded over itself.
A couple of tools and two white petrol canisters lie scattered on one side.
A snowmobile shed.
My fingers go numb on the handle.
He does have a snowmobile. Or he had one here recently.
Of course he does. Someone who lives in a place like this needs to be able to travel.
My stomach lurches. All those lectures about no roads, no one for miles… The way he’d made it sound like the mountains themselves closed their jaws around us.
Liar.
Or is he? He never actually said there was no machine. He only let me think the absence of roads meant the absence of escape.
I’m ridiculous.
He’s ridiculous.
No.
He let me make the assumption and never bothered correcting it.
Stepping inside properly, I stare at the emptiness. My throat works around a dry swallow. Hope and fury twist together until they gain a bitter taste beneath my tongue.
The jar knocks against my hip as I sit on the floor to rest. The thread around its neck bites into my gloves when I lift it up to my face.
The glass is fogged white on the outside, the feathery crystals starting to lace along the inner walls. I slosh it gently. The water moves, sluggish but still liquid, though a skin of ice is already beginning to form at the top, fracturing into shards as I tilt it.
The only reason it has not frozen solid is that the jar has been trapped against my hip on the outer fold of my snowsuit, stealing what little warmth my body can spare.
Another hour out here and it might be useless.
I go rigid.
Another hour and I might be, too.
Defeated, I unscrew the lid with stiff fingers, crack the thin ice with my forefinger that feels as if it might fall off from the cold, and force a sip down.
Clutching the jar for another moment or two, I accept the silence the shed offers. For a moment.
How’s he getting animals with a snowmobile?
I don’t care, I decide with a shake of my head. I’m out of here.
I glance at the tracks trailing away from the wooden structure. My gaze continues climbing the trees until it settles on the sky.
He might be back now or later. I don’t actually know because I have no idea when he’d left.
The thought snaps me into motion as I turn on my phone and check the compass app.
Keeping northwards might mean something.
It has to. Last time I looked at a map, a stretch of blue separated Norway from the next piece of land.
So… north means sea. Sea means water, and water means towns, roads, people – or maybe my brain just needs a direction badly enough to invent reasons for one.
Are there fjords nearby? He’d mentioned locally grown apples, so a village should be close. A fishing road? A fucking leprechaun bush—
No, wait, that’s Ireland.
I have no idea where the bloody hell I am!
Fuck, I should have paid more attention during geography.
For the third time, I check the notification bar – still no signal. Nothing but my own reflection on the screen – pale and stupid and breathing too fast.
The compass works, at least. North is the only certainty at this point.
The snowmobile tracks lead ninety degrees to the right from the storage shed. Evidence that something has gone that way and might return from it.
I should follow them, if only as proof that civilisation breathes at the end of that.
But that’s the way he had taken. He will take the same route back and then I’ve done fuck all.
I choose the unknown because it feels less like walking directly into his hands.
As the tracks fork away from me and north beckons me closer, my lungs start contracting with each step.
Though I can taste freedom, however far it is, there is only one thought that keeps cleaving through the panic: I’m leaving him.
Not the captor. Not the madman.
Elias.
Someone who had been abandoned so many times by so many people – everyone, in fact.
My heart aches. It may be that saviour complex I’m unable to rid myself of, but the truth is far harsher.
Elias was never just a prisoner to me. He was never just a project, never just a distraction.
Even if there is a strong possibility that I might have imagined everything, there is still a small, tender place in my chest reserved for a particular pair of blue eyes.
My phone shows it’s past ten by the time I stop again. Still nothing. Just woods. Just nothing!
Christ, I may have made a mistake.
And just as I pivot to find the tree I last marked, I hear something—
It’s faint at first. Like the rasp of air through bare trees.
But then it starts getting gradually louder.
An engine.
Meaning crawls very slowly into my half-frozen brain. It might be a saving grace. But then I realise it might also be the sound of punishment barrelling my way.
A sickening lurch rolls through my gut.
I break into a run. The trees are scarcer here, leaving the snow thicker on the ground. I flounder through it, trying to push ahead. My jar of frozen water drops away halfway, but I don’t stop. The sound of the vehicle is already sharper.
In a single moment of panic, I glance behind me, and I see him—
White snowsuit, hood over his head, goggles, a white balaclava framing his face. I don’t need to see it to know what kind of expression has calcified there.
Tears start spilling from my eyes, freezing against my lashes before they can even fall.
‘No!’ I cry to no one.
The engine cuts out.
I risk a glance back and see him running on foot. Faster than is natural in the snow that reaches up to the ankles. Faster than the panic ripping through me.
One look at the tightening gaps between the trunks and I realise the machine can’t follow him through here.
A ridiculous spark of hope catches. If the trees stopped the machine, maybe the snow can slow him too.
My boots sink, drag, sink again. Each step is a small theft of time, and I don’t have air to spare.
Behind me, only the crush of his boots through the drift follows, closing the distance one stride at a time.
Branches whip my face as I cut through a line of birches, keeping to the trees where the snow is shallower. And for three delicious seconds, I think I might have a chance.
Suddenly, the faint rasp of breath through fabric resounds behind me.
My throat burns as I give the last of my strength to my thighs. My vision pulses at the edges; the winter chews at my chest every time I inhale, slicing down my ribs.
I veer left, aiming for thicker trees. If I can force him to slow – if I can make him choose a harsher path—
I’m yanked by my hood so hard my spine jolts. An ugly cry tears out of me. My legs scissor for purchase, my boots skid, and I twist on instinct, swinging the hatchet up without thinking – as if that would even scare him.
The blade whistles through the space and bites into nothing.
He’s already moved. His arm locks around my waist from behind and he lifts me off the snow.
For half a second, I’m suspended, weightless, stolen from the world.
My back slams into his chest. The impact knocks the breath out of me. My gloves scrabble at his forearm, trying to pry it away, but winter gear and muscle make his arm feel carved from the same wood as the forest around us.
I buck. I twist. Slam my elbow back, aiming for where his ribs should be.
He takes it like it’s nothing.
‘Enough!’ The growl slams into the back of my skull.