Chapter 14
Grace
The questions stop, and somehow that’s worse. He’s back on his side of the cave, coiling the rope, and I’m still against the wall, going over what I gave him. The outline of it, nothing more. Not the one thing that matters.
I almost said her name.
When he crouched in front of me, it was right there in my mouth. He asked what the hold was, and for one second I wanted to hand it to him. Just give it to someone bigger than me and let him carry it.
Then he stood up and stepped back, and I still don’t understand why. He had me. He must have known he had me. Anyone else would have stayed right where he was and waited for me to break.
He didn’t. Now he’s winding rope like the whole thing is settled, and I can’t tell whether I won or lost.
I can’t sit here with it either way.
“I need to clean up.”
He looks over.
“I’ve been in these clothes since you took me. I can smell myself, and I can’t think.” All true. Also chosen, because it ends the silence and gets me moving through a cave I’ve only seen from one corner. “I can keep sitting in it if you’d rather. It’s your air too.”
“There’s no shower in a cave.”
“I noticed. But you drink, and you cook, so there’s water somewhere. I’d settle for cold.”
He weighs it. There’s nothing to watch while he does, no glance at the entrance, no furrowed brow. With him, the pause is the only sign he’s thinking at all. I’ve learned that much.
“There’s water in the cave,” he says. “A pool.”
He crosses to the lantern and turns it up, and what I’d taken for shadow on the far wall turns out to be a crack in the rock, wide enough for a man if he turns his shoulders. The cave runs back further than I guessed.
He goes through without telling me to follow.
I follow.
The passage is low and tight, with one turn where the rock pinches in. I keep my hand on the wall the whole way and fix that turn in my head, because if I ever have to come through here in the dark, this is where I’d get lost.
It opens into a second chamber, smaller and warmer. A pool sits at the back, fed by a thin sheet of water sliding down the far wall. Dark in the middle, clear where the lantern reaches, white gravel and fine sand under the shallows. The cold comes off the water before I’m anywhere near it.
He sets the lantern on a ledge, sits on a flat shelf of rock facing the way we came, and puts his back to the pool. His shoulders fill most of the opening. He doesn’t look at me, and he doesn’t say anything about not looking.
“You’re really going to sit there while I bathe?” I ask.
“Yes.”
“Why?” I look around. “It’s not like I can go anywhere.”
“I’m staying.”
“Fine,” I mutter. “Weirdo,” I add under my breath. There’s no point in pushing it, so I start on my boots.
The cold hits the second I’m in. I keep my underwear on and lower myself until the water reaches my ribs, and for a while there’s nothing but the cold and the washing—face, neck, arms, the grit and dried blood along my hairline.
“How far back does this go?” I ask.
“That’s the end of it.”
“Did you find it or make it?”
“Found it. Worked the groove for the boulder. The rest is how it was.”
“You bring people up here?”
“No.”
“Ever?”
“No reason to.”
I duck under and scrub my hair through. Come up, wipe my eyes. “Doesn’t it get to you? All this quiet? All this…nobody?”
“No.”
“Everyone says that. Then you leave them alone for a week, and they start talking to the furniture.”
“I don’t own furniture.”
I stop scrubbing and stare at the back of his head. Was that a joke? His voice didn’t change. Nothing changed. I honestly can’t tell.
“You have a cot,” I tell him.
“Everybody sleeps.”
Good to know. I was starting to wonder if he functioned like the rest of us.
“How long do you stay up here? When you’re not working.”
“Long as I want.”
“Weeks?”
“Sometimes.”
“Months?”
“Once or twice.”
“Alone the whole time?”
“Yes.”
I wait for more. It doesn’t come. He’s answered every question I’ve asked, and I know nothing I didn’t know before. It takes me until now—chest-deep in freezing water, watching the back of his head—to work out why.
He’s not hiding anything. There’s just no more.
I’ve spent so long around people who talk to cover something. Everyone who came out of places like I did carries things they can’t say, so they say everything else. I thought his quiet was the same thing. It isn’t. Ask him a question, he answers it, and then he stops, because he’s finished.
So what do you do with a man like that?
I climb out and pull my shirt on over wet skin. The cold has gone all the way into my bones, and it should be the only thing I focus on.
It isn’t.
There’s a warmth low in my chest, and it connects to him. The water should have killed it. If anything, the cold made it sharper. He’s the most dangerous thing on this mountain, and my body wants to cross the chamber and get closer to him anyway.
It’s just because you’re cold, idiot.
He didn’t look when I stripped, and he isn’t looking now. It isn’t manners, either. He just doesn’t care. Probably because whatever this pull is, it’s mine alone. I’m carrying it by myself, and that’s the part I hate most.
I do up my jeans and wring my hair out over the gravel.
“You don’t fill silences,” I say.
He picks up the lantern. “No.”
“Most people can’t stand them.”
“I know.”
“It’s not a trick, is it? You’re not waiting me out.”
“No.”
He stands. As far as he’s concerned, that’s the whole conversation. I take one last look around the chamber—the pool, the water sliding down the back wall, solid rock everywhere else—and follow him out.
Back in the main cave, the hours crawl, and I can’t afford a single one of them.
The men in that road failed. By now someone’s reported it—that I’m alive and loose, that something big and angry carried me off before they could finish the job.
I keep turning over what that means for Serenity, and I can’t make it come out safe.
I’m a loose thread. Maybe it makes her a loose end too.
I can’t think that and stay standing.
So I do the only thing I can do from inside a mountain. I work on him.
“You’re not here with Viktor’s blessing, are you?” I chew on the thought. “You brought me here, when you should have taken me back there.”
Nothing. But I’m sure that it’s true.
“He’s going to send someone. You know him better than I do. Does he seem like a man who lets one of his people just vanish?”
“No.”
“So he’s already looking.”
“Yes.”
“And the Syndicate’s looking for me. Two sets of people, both patient, and you sitting in the middle with a woman you took off the books.” I tip my head back against the rock. “I’d be worried, in your place.”
“You’re not in my place.”
“What happens when they find you?”
“Depends who finds me first.”
“That’s not a plan. That’s a coin toss with my life on one side.”
He doesn’t argue it.
“What if I told you there’s somewhere I need to be? That there’s more at stake?”
“Then tell me.”
I open my mouth.
And what if this is all just a ploy? Aurora’s way of extracting information from me. It would get back to the Syndicate. They’d take it out on my sister.
“Forget it,” I say.
“All right.”
That’s all I get. He doesn’t even circle back to it, and somehow that stings worse than pushing would have.
He’d have listened. If I’d said it, he’d have listened.
And taken it back to Viktor. I can’t risk it.
I put the thought away.
“Does anything get to you?” I ask. “Anything at all? I’ve been at you since the truck, and you haven’t raised your voice once.”
“Wastes energy.”
“Being a person wastes energy?”
“Raising my voice does.”
“You’re either very patient, or you can’t be irritated. I honestly can’t tell which.”
“Both.”
“That’s not a comfort.”
“Wasn’t meant to be.”
A laugh gets out of me before I can stop it. The first one since I last saw Kaylin, and it surprises me. Nothing surprises him.
Going at him like this is the first thing in this cave that’s felt alive. It’s also gotten me exactly nothing.
My stomach growls, loud in the quiet. His head turns.
“I’m hungry,” I say. “It’s not a trick. The shelf’s empty. I finished the crackers this morning, and the jerky’s been gone since yesterday.”
He looks at the shelf. He can see I’m right.
“Then I’ll go down for more,” he says. He doesn’t get up to do it.
“So go.”
He stays where he is, and I watch him not want to. His eyes move from me to the entrance and back, and I understand the problem: going means leaving me, and leaving me means the boulder is the only thing standing between me and the slope.
“You’re working out whether you can leave me here,” I say. “You can. There’s a rock the size of a truck across the only way out. I watched you roll it. I couldn’t move it an inch with both hands.”
“You’ll try anyway.”
“Probably.”
“Don’t.” Flat, like he’s doing me a favor.
“The boulder’s seated. Even if you got past it, you don’t know this country.
It’s two hours of dangerous terrain to anything in any direction.
You’d go over an edge in the first hundred yards, and then you’d be lying out there with a broken leg, easier to find than you are right now. Sit tight. Save yourself the skin.”
“Noted,” I say, and mean none of it.
He hears that I mean none of it. Something tired crosses his face, the closest thing to a reaction I’ve gotten out of him all day.
He crosses to the entrance and runs his hand down the line where the boulder meets the rock, slow, checking the fit. He doesn’t look at me while he does it.
He just told me not to try, and he’s checking the seal anyway.
He doesn’t believe his own warning will hold me.
Smart man.
“I won’t be long,” he says.
He sets his hand to the boulder and rolls it back. Cold air pours through the gap—fir and ice. He’s out in the few seconds it takes the gap to open. Then the boulder rolls home and takes the daylight with it.
I count to one hundred. Then I move.
The boulder first. I dig my fingers into the seam on both sides and push until my legs shake. It doesn’t give. I knew it wouldn’t. I had to be sure.
I take the lantern back through the passage to the pool and go over the chamber properly this time, every foot of wall, the rock face behind the falling water, my boot pressing along the bottom for anything that shifts. Solid stone everywhere I put my hands. A dead end with a pretty floor.
Back at the mouth. When he rolled the boulder home, I caught something: a thread of gray light, high on the left, gone almost before I knew I’d seen it. I hold the lantern up and look for it now.
The groove the boulder sits in is worked smooth, but the rock face above the groove on the left side is unlevel. It’s raw and knobbed, and the boulder’s curve doesn’t sit flush against it. There’s a gap. Two inches at its widest. Less than that most of the way.
Too small. Almost certainly too small.
I stand there with my fingers in the cold air coming through it, and I think about my sister.
I have to get out of here.
I go to the pegs where I saw the gear hanging.
There’s a small, flat spade among it. Heavy metal.
Sturdy. I take it. I climb the rough face beside the boulder—it gives me handholds the smooth rock never would—and wedge the head of the spade into the gap.
It doesn’t move. I put my back into it. Still nothing.
Finally, I set my feet against the wall, grip the handle as hard as I can, and put my whole body weight into it.
For a second, there’s nothing. And then a tiny scraping sound.
It’s moving!
I push some more, gritting my teeth and straining until sweat is dripping down between my shoulder blades. Fraction by fraction, the gap opens wider, until I’m pretty sure I can get my head through if I turn it the right angle.
I straighten, toss the spade away, and dust my hands on my jeans.
If you can fit your head through, you can get your body through.
I don’t know where I read that, but it’s all I’ve got right now.
I squeeze up against the gap, feed my right arm through first, then my shoulder. The stone bites into my armpit, and I push past it. My ribs come next. Halfway through, a ridge of rock catches my left side and tears the skin.
“Shit.” I breathe everything out of my chest, flatten myself past what should be possible, and keep pushing.
My hips are the worst of it. I turn sideways, work one through, and drag the other after. I tumble out the other side in an ungainly heap. Then there’s cold air on my face and pine needles under my hands, and the whole mountain drops away below me in fir and loose stone.
I scramble to my feet and take off running.
The shift takes me faster than I can ever remember. Clothes rip away, and I’m on four legs before I’ve finished deciding to be, and the world goes sharp and close. For a fraction of a second, the wolf wants to look over her shoulder.
Serenity. She needs us.
I don’t look back. I keep moving.
I don’t know this country. I don’t know what’s loose in it. I know one direction—the one that puts him at my back—and I take it at a dead run, fast and reckless, nothing left in my head but away.