14. Nash
NASH
We go in at the vent, because it's the only one of the three points nobody's guarding.
Erin worked the tide of it for two days, air moving out means positive pressure means an active face somewhere below, and positive pressure means the pipe is exhaust, not intake, and exhaust means nobody stands in it.
She sold that argument to my father with a hand-drawn diagram and won.
The pipe runs through rock and drops us into a cross-cut nobody's used since the Kestrel worked. Old timber. Rail spikes in the floor. Erin goes ahead with the light because she can read the ground I can't, calling it out as she goes.
"Bootprints stop here. That's a survey nail, recent, galvanized. Look at the wall." She holds the light flat so it rakes. "That's a smooth-wall blast. That's modern. They came up into the old workings from below and stopped short of the connection."
"Why stop?"
"Because completing it makes a second entrance, and that is a second thing to guard." She's beaming, which is a strange face to see six hundred feet under a lake. "They left us a back door and they don't know they did."
We get further in, and we hear the machinery.
It isn't a pump, it's low and continuous with a beat under it, and the stone is warm to the touch.
There's that strong brine smell, and Erin gets thirty photographs, a temperature series, and a sample of the water weeping from the wall, and she does it all with her hands shaking and her voice perfectly level into the recorder.
Then a light comes down the drift behind us.
We get out through a stope that isn't on any map, up a raise with a rotten ladder, and into the alders on the wrong side of the ridge with two hours of dark left and men working the ground between us and the boat.
We hear voices in the distance, and I hold her wrist and shift into wolf form, throwing her on my back to head to the shack, my grandfather's, four miles up the Cutter drainage, and nobody's used it since the eighties.
She grips my fur tightly, as I race us away from being caught.
I get the stove going while Erin peels off soaked layers behind me. There's a wool blanket that smells like a hundred years, half a bottle of somebody's terrible whiskey, and a bunk built for a smaller generation.
"Caleb knows where we are?"
"He'll have the boat off the water by now. He'll come at first light." I feed the stove. "We're here till then."
She sits down on the floor beside it with the blanket around her shoulders and her hair loose and dripping. I hand her the whiskey, and she drinks some, coughs, and hands it back with the expression of somebody who's been personally insulted.
"That's paint stripper."
"It's my grandfather's."
"Then your grandfather was a hard man."
We sit there while the shack warms up. Outside the drainage is running loud with the last of the high-country melt.
"I keep doing the math," she says eventually. "If they'd come down that drift ten minutes earlier."
"I know."
"And I keep landing on a thing I don't like.
" She glances over the blanket. "There's a possibility over the next month where one of us doesn't come out, and I'm being extremely careful and reasonable, and taking my time, and building a proper plan.
I told you I wanted to decide slowly. I meant it.
I still do." Her voice goes rough. "But slow assumes there's a later, and I'm sitting in a shack with a bullet-scarred wolf listening to a creek and I'm not sure there is a later. "
"Erin…"
"Let me finish. I need you to hear the logic or I'll doubt myself.
It isn't the bond. That's the thing I had to work out.
If it were, I'd want the you that turns up ten seconds early and takes half my pack and fixes everything.
I don't. I want the one who stood in a doorway and let me teach kids about data sheets.
I want you handing me the keys to the truck when every instinct you had was screaming.
Fate would have picked the first man. I picked the second. "
I've been holding a piece of kindling. I put it down.
"Say what you want," I tell her.
"You are the most infuriating…"
"Erin."
"I want you." She says it steady, chin up, exactly like she read me a tibia. "Tonight. Because I choose to, not because either of us might die, though I'm aware I've made the argument badly."
I cross the floor and I take her face in my hands the same as I did on the ridge, and I kiss her, and everything I have been holding for four weeks lets go at once.
She gasps against my mouth. Her hands come up into my shirt and fist there, and the blanket falls off her shoulders, and she's cold everywhere. I get my hands in her hair. She bites my lower lip, entirely on purpose, and laughs when I swear.
"Slow," I manage.
"Absolutely not."
"Your ribs…"
"Are yellow and I am fine, and if you handle me like an injured deer I'll never forgive you."
So I don't, my mouth crashes back onto hers and I push her backward onto the rough floorboards, the blanket bunching under her spine.
She's already shoving my shirt up my chest; I yank it the rest of the way off and toss it somewhere.
Her skin is soft and reactive to my touch, under my hands she begins to warm up fast. I get the buttons of her shirt open one-handed while my other hand works the laces of her trousers.
She kicks them down her legs, boots and all, and then she's bare against the wood, pale and marked and breathing hard.
I get my own trousers open and shove them down just far enough.
My cock springs free, already thick and aching, and she reaches for it without hesitation.
Her fingers close around me and she strokes me, slow, thumb sweeping over the head.
I groan into her mouth and push two fingers between her thighs.
She's wet, open, and her pussy is soft and hot.
I slide one finger in, then two, curling them while my thumb finds her clit and circles.
She arches, ribs be damned, and rocks onto my hand.
“Ah yes, yes.” She mewls, her words spurring me on.
I kiss down her throat, bite the hinge of her jaw, then lower, taking one nipple into my mouth and sucking hard while my fingers keep working her.
She's wet enough that it coats my palm. I add a third finger and she makes a broken sound, hips lifting.
I keep the pressure steady on her clit, rubbing in tight little circles until her thighs start to shake.
“Nash, I’m.. I’m…”
She comes with a silent gasp, a long, shuddering exhale and her pussy clamping hard around my fingers. I work her through it, slower now, until she pulls at my wrist.
I shift over her, knees between her spread thighs, and drag the head of my cock over her, wetting myself.
She's still pulsing, and I notch against her entrance and push in with one long, controlled thrust. The heat of her pussy swallows me, tight and slick, and I pull far out with a low sound that feels dragged up from somewhere deep.
She hooks her heels behind my thighs and pulls me deeper.
I start to move, slow at first, long strokes that let me feel every inch of her gripping me, then harder when she digs her nails into my back.
"Faster," she asks.
I increase my pace, and the floorboards creak under us. I brace one forearm beside her head and use the other hand to keep her hips tilted so every thrust drags across the place that makes her gasp. Her pussy flutters around my cock; I can feel how close she already is again.
Her eyes roll, and her lips part, moans leaving as I hit deep.
She grips me tightly, and opens her eyes staring into me, and comes.
I lean down and kiss her, fucking her thorugh her orgasm.
The vibration of her moans against my lips.
She brings her mouth to my shoulder and bites it, her body clenches and a raw sound leaves me.
I get harder and she screams, my hips rolling and grinding against her clit on every downstroke, and the wet sound of skin on skin fills the shack. I hitch her thigh higher over my hip and drive deeper, my cock hitting that spot inside her that makes her voice break.
"Nash," she says my name, soft and wrecked.
I can feel the pressure building at the base of my spine, the way her pussy keeps tightening in little rhythmic pulses.
I reach between us and rub her clit with two fingers, matching the pace of my thrusts.
She shatters again, harder this time, and the rhythmic squeeze of her body around my cock is too much.
I bury myself and come with a low, punched-out groan.
I drop my head and hold her cheek, still thrusting slower now as my cock expands and her pussy clenches.
I stay there for a long moment, forehead pressed to hers, both of us breathing hard.
My cock is still half-hard inside her, twitching with aftershocks.
Eventually I ease out; the wet slide makes us both shiver.
I drop onto my side and pull her against me, careful of the bruises I know are under the yellowing skin of her ribs.
She tucks her face into my throat. Outside, the wind moves through the trees.
Inside, the only sound is our breathing evening out.
I drag the blanket over both of us and keep one hand splayed low on her back, feeling the steady rise and fall of her.
There's nothing left that needs saying right now.
I lift her off the floor and she wraps her legs around me as I carry us to the bunk, and she falls asleep almost instantly.
Morning comes gray through the one window, and she's on my chest with her hand curled under her chin.
She wakes when the stove ticks. I watch her surface, work out where she is, and decide about it, I can see the whole process cross her face.
"Well," she says.
"Well."
"I'd like it on the record that I've been awake seconds and I haven't panicked."
"Noted."
She props up on an elbow. The blanket goes with her, mostly. "Here's what I want to say before we're out that door. Whatever this is now, you didn't get it for free and neither did I. We're past fate, Nash. Fate got us in the same room in April. Everything since has been ours."
My hand is flat on her back and I hold her there.
"I've waited years to hear somebody say that."
"You waited four weeks. Don't be dramatic."
"I was dramatic long before you got here."
She laughs into my collarbone, and for about four minutes the world is a shack and a stove and nothing else.
Then Caleb's voice comes up the drainage, calling my name from a hundred yards out, which is a courtesy and also a warning, and by his tone I know before he reaches the door.
He's been running all night. His hands are cut. He stands on the step and doesn't come in.
"Bracken's gone," he says. "Nash, burned out, three in the morning. Loon River hit at the same hour, and somebody put a cordon on the Marrow Creek road and started taking vehicles apart. Same clock, three sites, ninety miles between them."
Erin's already pulling her boots on. I feel the floor of my life shift and settle into new ground.
"That's not security anymore," I say. "That's a campaign."