Chapter 17 #2
He spun her to face him. The snow was so thick, his face was a mask of frost and fear. “We can’t. Not in this. We have to dig in. Now.”
She blinked once, twice, then let the survival training click into place.
“Leeward side,” she managed, pulling his hand and dragging him toward a drift that would offer the tiniest bit of shelter from the wind.
They crashed behind it, carving out a pit with gloved hands, burrowing down until they were below the surface.
Their bodies pressed together, face-to-face, heat pooling in the microclimate between them.
Elliot cradled her head, his lips at her ear. “They’re trained. They’ll find shelter. Right now, you’re all I care about.”
She wanted to bite back, to tell him the whole point was not dying, but instead she just said, “Same,” and let her body shake with the adrenaline and cold.
They hunkered there, breath mingling, the snow closing over the pit until the world narrowed to the tiny space between their chests.
Elliot cupped her jaw, careful and firm, and forced her to look at him. “Talk to me, Rue. Stay with me.”
After a minute, the terror bled away, leaving only the awareness of him—his arms, his chest, his leg slotted to hers. If the universe was going to erase them, she thought, this was as good a way as any.
She let her forehead rest against his and closed her eyes. “If we die here, I want you to know?—”
“Don’t,” he said. “We’re not dying here. And whatever you were going to say, I already know.”
“Showoff,” she muttered, but her voice broke, just a little.
He pressed his lips to her brow, then her nose, then—careful not to fog her goggles—her mouth, warm and desperate even through the layers.
Rue clung to him, the fear inside her finally giving way. Antarctica could keep her ghosts, her buried nightmares, her thousand miles of lethal ice. All Rue needed right now was the man who wouldn’t let go, not even at the end of the world.
Above them, the storm howled, relentless, erasing everything.
But in the pit, there was warmth. Breath. A single, stubborn heartbeat, pulsing with life and refusing to be frozen out.
The storm pressed harder, each gust packing more snow into the narrow pit until Rue felt the walls closing in. She tried to shift her weight, but the drift above them cracked with a hollow groan.
Elliot stiffened. “Rue…”
The snow under them buckled.
There was no time to grab for an anchor, no chance to brace. The world simply gave way. The drift collapsed, and suddenly they were sliding, tumbling, falling through the ice itself?—
Right into the abyss.
The world blurred—ice, darkness, the ragged sound of her own breath. Rue’s scream ripped away into the storm, cut short when the rope snapped taut across her harness. Her body jerked, whiplashed against the wall of the crevasse.
Above, someone shouted her name.
Elliot.
She looked up. He’d caught himself on the edge of the hole overhead, arms braced as he took her swinging weight on his harness.
“Can you get any purchase down there?”
Her answer tore out in a string of curses her dad would’ve been proud of—creative, graphic, and anatomically improbable.
“I’m working on it!” she shouted up, breath fogging inside her mask. “The walls are slick as hell!”
Her boot finally found a nub of ice, then slid uselessly off again. Every attempt jolted the rope, making Elliot grunt above her. She could feel the strain in the line, the way his strength alone kept gravity from winning.
“Keep trying!” he bellowed. “Find anything—a ledge, an outcropping, anything!”
She tried. God, she tried. But the walls were polished smooth, the snow driving sideways so thick she could barely see her own hands.
Then she heard it—the shift in his tone. Panic edged his voice. “Rue! I’m going to try to pull you up. When I say so, you climb. Whatever happens, don’t stop climbing.”
Her gut clenched. “Whatever happens?” she shot back. “Elliot, what aren’t you telling me?”
“Just trust me.”
That never boded well.
The rope twitched. “One… two…”
The ground above her cracked like a gunshot.
“Three!”
She hauled herself upward with everything she had. Her boots scraped the wall, caught for half a heartbeat, slipped again. The rope lurched, lighter—then heavier, as if the glacier itself had grabbed hold of Elliot.
Her stomach dropped. The ledge had given way.
“Elliot!” she screamed, and suddenly his weight yanked her down another brutal inch. Instinct took over—she reached, grabbed, caught him .
They slammed together chest to chest, their harnesses tangling, the rope the only thing tethering them to the world. For a breathless second, they dangled nose-to-nose in the white void. His face was raw with frost, his eyes wide with terror and something else—something that steadied her.
Rue forced a smile, voice pitched low and calm, even though her pulse hammered like a war drum. “When I said I’d keep you warm in Antarctica, this isn’t what I had in mind.”
An exasperated laugh escaped him. Typical Elliot.
Then the rope above them shrieked. Fibers popped, snapping one by one like gunfire.
Rue tipped her head back just in time to see the last threads fray.
Shit.