Chapter Thirty-Four
Liam
We’re stopped in a small clearing, surrounded by trees, miles from anywhere. The adrenaline that got us out of that mine is
wearing off fast, leaving behind exhaustion and about six different flavors of guilt. I stand apart from Knox and Hailey because
that’s where I belong right now. On the outside. Watching them not look at me.
My ribs ache where one of Marlena’s guards got a lucky elbow in. There’s a graze along my left arm where a bullet caught the
sleeve and kept going—shallow, barely bleeding, but it stings like hell in the cold. My wrists are raw from the zip ties.
None of that hurts as much as the silence.
“I need to tell you both something,” I say.
Knox crosses his arms. Hailey doesn’t change, which is somehow worse.
Here goes nothing. Here goes everything.
“Marlena found me a few weeks ago. Not five years ago. Recently.” I force myself to keep eye contact even though every instinct
screams to look away. “She’d been hunting us since the theft, but it took her years to track me down. And when she finally
did, she didn’t just want the diamond. She wanted what she was owed.
“Marlena and Kedrov were married. Five years ago, when we pulled the job, they were already in the middle of a divorce. A vicious one. The Snowflake was listed as a joint asset—twenty million dollars that was supposed to be split between them in the settlement. But after we stole it, Kedrov reported it missing. On paper, the diamond ceased to exist. Which meant Marlena’s share of it ceased to exist too. ”
Hailey’s eyes narrow. I can see her running the math.
“It gets worse. Kedrov had already moved the diamond into her column during the asset division. He knew it was gone before
the lawyers finalized everything, but he let it stay on her side of the ledger. So when the settlement went through, Marlena
was credited with receiving a twenty-million-dollar diamond that no longer existed. She got less of everything else because
of it. Less real estate. Less liquid cash. Less of his tech portfolio.”
“He used our theft to cheat her in the divorce,” Hailey says.
“She lost tens of millions because of a diamond she never held in her hands. A diamond we stole.” I let that sit. “So when
she tracked me down, this wasn’t about collecting a pretty stone. This was five years of rage at her ex-husband, five years
of being humiliated by a man she already hated, and the two thieves who handed him the ammunition.”
The wind picks up, cutting through my jacket. Nobody speaks.
“I’m so fucking sorry.” The words feel inadequate. They are inadequate. “I can’t express it enough. To either of you.”
Knox goes still. Hailey wraps her arms around herself, and I can’t tell if it’s the cold or if she’s trying to hold herself
together.
“Everything in the cabin—that was real.” I need them to understand this part. “My feelings. The connection. All of it. I wasn’t
faking. I was trying to keep you alive while figuring out how to get us all out of this mess.” A pause. “I know that doesn’t
make it better.”
More silence. The trees creak around us. Somewhere in the distance, a bird calls out, oblivious to the disaster happening
in this clearing.
“You should have told us.” Hailey’s voice is quiet but steady. “In the cabin. When we were alone. You should have trusted
us.”
“I know.” I sit on the edge of my snowmobile because my legs don’t feel entirely trustworthy right now.
“I should have done a lot of things. I for sure should have done less. I fucked up. All of it.” My hands hang between my knees.
“But I’m here now. And we’re alive. And Marlena doesn’t have the diamond. ”
Knox exhales. For a long moment I think he’s going to tell me exactly where I can shove my apology, and honestly, I’d deserve
it.
“Well.” He uncrosses his arms. “We’re all guilty of fucking up. But right now we need to focus on survival.” His gaze sweeps
the clearing, the trees, the sky. “We’re in the middle of nowhere, freezing, with no real plan and a deranged woman who wants
her diamond back and us dead.”
“Not quite square one.” I pull out the items I grabbed from the emergency kit before we fled—maps, compass, emergency beacon.
“I know where we are. And I know how to get us somewhere safe.”
“Where?”
“There’s a ranger station about forty miles northwest. It’ll be manned, even in winter. We get there, we call for help, we
get extracted.”
Knox’s eyebrows rise. “Forty miles on snowmobiles. In this cold. With no survival gear.” He shakes his head. “That’s nearly
impossible.”
“Nearly isn’t never.” I unfold the map, trace the route with my finger. “And it’s our only shot.”
“What about the helicopter?” Hailey asks.
“Neither of us can fly one,” Knox says. “And even if we could, Marlena’s pilot isn’t going to hand over the keys.”
“So. Ranger station.”
We check supplies. One snowmobile has a partial emergency kit—some flares, a basic first aid kit, a survival blanket that
looks like someone sat on it in 1987. Not enough, but something. The fuel gauges show half tanks, which should be enough for
forty miles if we’re careful and don’t hit any obstacles.
The maps show the ranger station clearly—remote but accessible if we follow the frozen river system northwest.
“We need to move,” Hailey says. Her jaw is set, her eyes clear. Whatever emotional reckoning is coming, she’s filed it away for later. “Before Marlena’s people regroup. Before this cold becomes a bigger problem.”
We mount up—Hailey and Knox on one machine, me on the other. No one talks about what comes after. If we survive this. If we
make it to safety. Then we’ll deal with the question of whether this fractured thing between us can ever be put back together.
First, we have to not die.
I take point, navigating by compass and the position of the sun through the trees. The terrain is brutal. Steep slopes that
make the snowmobiles whine in protest. Dense forest where we have to slow to a crawl to weave between trunks. Frozen lakes
we cross holding our breath, listening for any crack in the ice beneath us.
Every mile feels like ten. The cold seeps into everything—through my jacket, through my gloves, into my bones. My face goes
numb first, then my fingers. I flex them constantly on the handlebars just to confirm they still work.
Two hours in, and we’re close. According to my calculations, maybe five or six miles from the station. Close enough that I
can almost taste hot coffee and heated rooms and someone else being in charge of keeping us alive.
That’s when I notice the sky changing.
Not darkening from sunset. Wrong direction for that. These are clouds rolling in from the west, thick and heavy, the kind
that mean business.
Then the first flakes hit my visor.
Within minutes, it’s not flakes anymore. It’s a wall of white coming at us sideways.
“We need shelter!” I shout over the rising wind, but I’m not sure they can hear me. I signal frantically, pointing at the
sky, at the chaos surrounding us.
Knox pulls up alongside me. His face is grim. “How far?”
“Five miles. Maybe six.” The words taste like failure. “We can’t push through this. We’d get turned around, drive off a cliff,
freeze to death ten feet from safety without ever knowing it.”
He stares into the whiteout, and I can see him doing the math. Weighing the risk. We’re so goddamn close.
“We stop,” he says. “Find shelter. Wait it out.”
I scan the valley we’ve descended into, steep slopes on either side, forest dense enough to offer some protection but not
enough to survive a full blizzard.
Then I spot it. A shape through the trees that doesn’t belong to nature.
“There!” I point. “Old hunting cabin. This area used to have trappers, decades ago. Some of the cabins still stand.”
We push toward it, visibility dropping by the second. By the time we reach the structure, I can barely see ten feet ahead.
The cabin is small and half destroyed. The roof has partially collapsed on one side, and one wall is more gap than wall. But
three walls are intact, and through the doorway I can see a stone hearth.
It’ll have to do.
We pull the snowmobiles close to the door, cutting the engines. The sudden silence is almost disorienting—except it’s not
really silence. The wind screams past us, driving ice and debris into every exposed inch of skin.
“Move!” Knox grabs the supplies. Hailey’s already through the door. I follow, and the three of us crowd into the relatively
sheltered space just as the storm becomes something biblical.
Inside is barely warmer than outside. The wind finds every crack, every hole, every gap where the structure has surrendered
to time. The collapsed section of roof lets in a steady cascade of white that’s already forming a drift in the corner.
But the hearth is intact. And intact means potential.
Knox takes command immediately, which is fine by me. He needs to be doing something, and I need to not be in charge of anything
for a few minutes.
“Firewood. Anything burnable. Move.”
We scavenge. There’s old furniture in one corner—a broken chair, the remains of a table. Timbers from the collapsed section that are dry enough to catch. I start stacking it in the hearth while Hailey tears apart what’s left of a wooden crate.
My hands are shaking. From cold, from exhaustion, from the adrenaline crashing out of my system. But I get the fire laid out,
get the emergency matches from the kit, and on the third try, I get a flame to catch.
It grows. Slowly at first, then with more confidence. Heat. Finally, some goddamn heat.
We huddle around it, close enough that my cheeks sting from the temperature change. Knox goes through our supplies methodically.
No food. The survival items from the snowmobile kit. The emergency blanket, crinkly silver mylar barely big enough for one
person. The first aid kit. A handful of chemical heat packs that’ll last maybe four hours at best.
Not great. But not nothing.
“We’re going to have to share body heat,” Knox says. His tone is matter-of-fact, clinical. None of us acknowledge what that
actually means—pressed together all night, intimate whether we want to be or not.
But it’s survival. And survival trumps awkward.
The storm rages. Hours blur together. We feed the hearth constantly, taking shifts to stay awake and maintain it. When the
easy fuel runs out—the furniture, the dry timbers—I look at the remains of what we have and then at the door.
“I’ll get more.”
“Don’t be stupid,” Knox says.
“It’s not stupid. The trees are right there. Dead branches. Won’t take long.”
Hailey grabs my arm. “You’ll get lost. You won’t be able to see anything.”
“I’ll tie myself to the doorframe. Old trick.” I’m already pulling off my outer layer—too bulky for moving through dense brush.
“I’ll be fine.”
I’m not fine.
The storm is worse than I expected. The wind nearly knocks me down the second I step outside, and visibility is measured in inches, not feet. But I tied a length of cord from the emergency kit to the doorframe, and I follow it out as far as it’ll reach.
The trees are closer than I remembered. Small mercy. I break branches by feel more than sight, snapping anything that’ll give,
stuffing them inside my jacket because my arms are already shaking too hard to carry them properly.
By the time I follow the cord back to the cabin, I can’t feel my hands at all. My face is a mask of ice. My legs move like
they belong to someone else, stiff and uncoordinated.
The door opens. Hands grab me. Pull me inside.
“Jesus Christ.” That’s Knox. He’s stripping my wet outer layer off before I can protest. Hailey wraps the emergency blanket
around my shoulders, but it’s not enough. Nothing feels like enough.
“You’re hypothermic.” Knox is checking my eyes, my reflexes. “Mild, but getting worse.”
“I’m f-fine.” My teeth are chattering so hard I can barely get the word out.
“You’re not.” He exchanges a look with Hailey over my head. Some silent communication passes between them. “We’re all getting
under that blanket. Right now.”
We arrange ourselves on the floor near the hearth. Me in the middle—I’m too cold to argue about it. Knox presses against my
left side, solid and warm. Hailey curves into my right, her body fitting against mine like we’ve done this a hundred times.
We have done this. Different circumstances. Different everything. But muscle memory doesn’t care about context.
The emergency blanket barely stretches around all three of us, but we make it work. My shivers are violent at first, whole-body
tremors that make my teeth clash together. Slowly, agonizingly slowly, the combined heat starts to seep in.
I feel Hailey’s breath against my neck. Knox’s arm is tight around both of us, anchoring us together. Neither of them speaks.
“This feels familiar,” Hailey murmurs eventually.
Despite everything—the cold, the guilt, the absolute clusterfuck that brought us here—I feel Knox’s body shift in what might
be a suppressed laugh.
“Minus the king-size bed and gourmet kitchen,” he says.
“And the psychotic billionaire watching our every move,” I add.
We’re quiet again. The storm screams outside. Our breaths sync up without anyone trying.
“I’m sorry. I know I keep saying it but . . .” The words come out before I can stop them. “I’ll say it every single day, hour,
minute, if it means you both will forgive me.”
Knox is silent for a long moment. I can feel the tension in him, the war between anger and something else. He’s been furious
with me since the truth came out, and he has every right to be.
But we’re pressed together in a collapsed cabin in the middle of a blizzard, and I nearly froze to death getting firewood
to keep us all alive, and I don’t know what any of that is worth except that it’s what I have.
“I know,” he says. “I’m still pissed. But I know.”
“Me too,” Hailey whispers. “And you don’t need to ask for forgiveness. We’ve all done things that need forgiveness, but we
also are who we are. I don’t want to change you. I don’t want to change Knox. And I sure as hell hope you both never want
to change me.”
Knox nods. “She’s right. Fuck forgiveness. Let’s just move on.”
We stay like that. Conserving heat. Taking turns sleeping while one stays awake to keep the hearth fed. The storm howls through
the gaps in the walls, relentless, like it’s trying to claw its way in. But the three of us are a closed system now, sharing
warmth, sharing breath, sharing this small pocket of survival we’ve carved out of the chaos.
My body slowly stops shaking. Knox’s grip loosens slightly as he relaxes into sleep. Hailey’s fingers find mine under the
blanket, squeeze once, let go.
We’re alive.
Together, for now.
And yeah . . . fuck forgiveness.