Chapter 28
Jack
The twine was not going to cooperate.
Jack had been working at it since they tied his hands behind him, small, deliberate rotations of the wrist he hoped looked like nothing from the outside. The cord was thin but tight, the kind of tight that came from someone who’d done this before.
Every movement pressed it deeper into the skin above his wrists. Hot wetness told him the bite into his skin was drawing blood, and his fingers had gone beyond numb.
Todd stood twenty feet away, rifle slung, watching the tree line with the restlessness of a man who had been told to stand still and didn’t like it.
Rick and Graham had gone back toward the open area ten minutes ago.
Maybe fifteen. Without his watch, which they’d stripped him of when they captured him, along with his gloves, shoes, and heavy jacket, time was harder to track.
The cold was not harder to track.
The base layer was doing its job, but the frozen ground had worked through his insulated pants.
He was grateful they hadn’t taken his pants and his fleece vest, along with his stocking cap and neck gaiter, but it wasn’t enough to actually keep him warm, especially not with the way the wind was blowing. The wind made everything worse.
Jack shifted his weight often, trying to give his knees something other than frozen earth, and Todd told him to stop moving almost every time. Jack complied. Todd was the kind of man who looked for reasons, and Jack wasn’t in a position to give him one.
One thing he knew: Todd was not happy. He wanted to be out there searching and not here babysitting Jack. Todd didn’t think anyone should babysit Jack. More than once, he said they should put a bullet in him and be done.
Rick and Graham’s voices carried through the trees. Jack couldn’t make out the words, only the shape of the conversation. Graham’s tone held the quality of a man repeating an argument he’d already lost. Pack up and go. We’re wasting time.
Jack heard enough of Graham to understand how he thought. He wasn’t cruel. The poaching didn’t bother him. It was a way to make easy money. More money than someone his age was likely to earn legitimately. But he wasn’t made for what Rick and Todd had turned this into.
He wanted out.
Rick wouldn’t be moved by that. And Rick certainly didn’t buy Jack’s insistence he was out there alone.
He’d stood at the edge of the timber and looked at the tracks.
Jack had watched him do it. Rick crouched in the snow, glancing between the two sets of prints, and Jack had understood what he was reading.
Jack’s own stride was long, the shoe prints large. The second set was smaller by several sizes, shorter between each footfall. Rick hadn’t said anything. He’d simply straightened and told Graham to go with him.
A loose end was the word Todd had used. We can’t leave a loose end.
Rick had said nothing in response to that either, which was its own kind of answer.
Jack worked the twine. Todd paced left, stopped, and came back.
He was a man who needed movement, needed something happening, and standing guard over a man on his knees wasn’t providing it.
His attention kept pulling toward the tree line, toward whatever Rick and Graham were doing out there in the snow.
His face went hard as Rick and Graham walked farther away and out of sight. With narrowed eyes, Todd turned to Jack. “You’re more trouble than you’re worth.”
Jack stayed quiet and still, avoiding meeting Todd’s gaze for fear the man would take it as a challenge. Finally, Todd huffed and went back to his pacing.
The cold bit at Jack’s face. He tucked his chin and focused on his hands. He closed his eyes and thought back to the kiss in the crevice. He’d been holding it at a distance since they pulled him to his knees, not letting himself go there fully because going there made thinking harder.
It came back anyway. The way she’d turned her head in the dark. Her mitten against his jaw. Soft and careful and cold at first, and then not.
He could get used to that. He could get used to kissing Steph. To being with her. To more. He’d known it then, and he knew it now. The knowledge didn’t frighten him the way he might have expected.
That was the part he kept returning to. He’d been building defenses against exactly this kind of thing for years, for good reason, and the defenses had simply not shown up.
She’d told him things about the running club, and about her years of quiet work.
About the money she’d been saving and not spending, which she hadn’t fully explained but which he suspected had a harder deadline than she was letting on.
And about how his arrival in Basin County had looked from where she stood.
Jack didn’t blame her for any of it. He’d understood it before she finished saying it. The moment they got out of here, he was going to talk to Liam. Not about the Elkridge Endurance. About something different.
Something that had Steph’s name on the front of it and her hand on the decisions that mattered. Liam had money to put behind things, and what Steph had was everything else—the relationships, the history, the respect of people who’d watched her build something real over the years.
A race that combined both. A real race, with a real budget, the kind she’d been trying to put together on her own and couldn’t because the money never came together.
She might say no to anything connected to Liam. He understood that and had already accepted it as the likely outcome. But she might also look at the numbers and the possibilities and set aside the complications long enough to see what the thing actually was.
Jack was going to lay it out clearly and let her decide. She deserved to decide.
The thing he hadn’t been able to work out was the last chance.
It’s probably my last try. She’d said it, and then the hill had interrupted and he’d let her redirect and it hadn’t come back up.
Something in her tone, in the way she chose her words, tipped him off that this went beyond any adjustment to her racing schedule.
She’d started to explain and stopped, and the look on her face in the dark was the look of someone deciding how much to say to a person they weren’t yet sure of.
Was she sick? Something she hadn’t said out loud yet, something that was already changing every calculation she was making?
The possibility sat heavy in his chest, and he pushed it aside because he didn’t have enough information, and building on guesswork wasn’t going to help either of them right now.
She didn’t seem sick, not with the way she climbed those hills, pulling the sled and barely increasing her breath.
Moving? A new position somewhere, a different life she’d decided to start where the running club and the races and the careful years she’d built weren’t part of the picture?
He didn’t know. He needed to find out.
But he needed to get off his knees first. The twine shifted. Not much. A fraction of give, barely there, but present. He went back to work, slower this time, more deliberate. Not chasing the progress. Building on it.
Todd had stopped pacing. He stood with his back mostly to Jack, his weight shifted forward, his head tilted to the right.
Jack kept his wrists moving. Todd took two steps toward the tree line and stopped.
Something caught his attention and was holding it.
Jack tracked him without moving his head, reading the angle of Todd’s body, the way his hand moved toward the rifle and then didn’t quite close on it.
Todd moved again, walking toward the trees. Jack worked the twine harder.
The sound reached him before he could make sense of it. A sharp hiss, immediate and unmistakable, followed by Todd’s voice breaking apart into something raw and involuntary.
Not words. Just sound.
Todd lurched into view, hands clawing at his face. Steph came into view. She had a branch the length of her arm in both hands, and she swung it across Todd’s back before he could find his feet.
He stumbled forward. She hit him again, lower, and Todd went down hard into the snow. He made one attempt to get up. She hit him a third time, a fourth and a fifth. The branch cracked loudly against his body. The rage she was unleashing on him was impressive and scary.
Todd stopped moving. Jack was on his feet. Steph gave another solid hit with the branch, muttering, “And stay down.”
She rushed toward Jack, taking something from her pocket as she moved. She slid open a pocketknife and got behind him. Within a second, he was free, the blood suddenly rushing to his hands and sending painful pinpricks through them.
“We need to go,” she whispered.
“We need the rifle.” He moved to Todd. Up close, it was easy to see the damage done by Steph and her limb. One leg sat at an odd angle, as did his left wrist, and he was bleeding from his head. He was out cold . . . or worse.
Jack’s hands were almost useless, and getting the rifle loose from the sling was not easy.
“Let me,” Steph said, sawing at the nylon sling with the knife. When it came free, they moved.
With the sling still half attached, Jack cradled the rifle under his arm, noting the filled elastic ammo sleeve on the stock.
Jack’s feet registered every step on the frozen ground. Cold and uneven and sharp through his socks, patches of ice and debris between the trees. He moved through it and kept up with Steph.
She angled through the timber, moving fast and low, staying inside the tree line. He matched her pace and kept the rifle at the ready, hoping his fingers would cooperate if he had to squeeze the trigger.
He’d been cold before, during biathlons, and knew the cold could affect his shooting. He’d never been tied up and had his hands feeling like lumps and his fingers like useless meat attached to the lumps.
They put the length of a football field between themselves and the injured Todd before they slowed. They hid in a clump of trees, both breathing hard as Steph scanned the area and he checked the rifle, his fingers fumbling with the task. Jack clamped his jaw and forced himself to do the job.
The magazine held five, and a round was chambered. The ammo sleeve held nine. Not bad.
“They don’t seem to be following us.” She turned to look at him.
The relief that hit him was physical. The full-body kind that came up from somewhere deep and moved through him all at once and left him unsteady for a moment.
Steph was standing in front of him with pink cheeks and snow on her jacket.
She was completely fine.
And she had no right to be. She had no right to be standing there, fine and steady-eyed, because he had told her to stay hidden.
He had told her clearly and specifically, and she had heard him say it and gone and done the opposite because she’d decided her judgment was better than his.
The last time someone he loved made that decision, it cost everything.
Celeste.
He loved her, wanted to marry her, had even picked out a ring and started saving for it. Everything fell apart the moment she decided she couldn’t wait, that she knew better than he did, that the risk was hers to take.
Now Steph did the same thing, taking a risk she had no right to take—one that might kill her. Just like it had Celeste.
Steph was putting herself in danger for him, just like Celeste did.
The rage came up before he could stop it. “What were you thinking?” The words came out low and hard. “I told you to stay hidden. I told you exactly what to do, and you waltzed in there anyway.”
She blinked.
“He had a rifle.” He kept his voice down. He could hear himself, and he couldn’t stop. “You came in there with bear spray and a branch.”
“Jack— ”
“I had it handled.” He knew how that sounded. “I was working the ropes. I had time. You didn’t need to do that, Steph. That was reckless. That was—you could’ve been killed. You understand that? You could’ve been shot before you got close enough to use the bear spray.”
She looked at him.
“I told you to stay put.” His voice was still too low, still too tight, still coming from the wrong place, and he couldn’t pull it back. “That was careless. What you did was careless and reckless and— ”
“You had it handled.” Her voice was flat and even. “On your knees. In your socks. In the snow. Tied up.”
He stopped.
She held his gaze and didn’t look away and didn’t add anything to it. She just stood there and looked at him with those steady eyes and waited, and the silence stretched between them and held all the things he hadn’t said and all the things he had. His hands were shaking.
He told himself it was the cold.