13. Nora
Nora
I wake up to light streaming brighter through the small window than it has in three days, no gray filtering through storm clouds this time, just clean pale morning sun on fresh unbroken snow.
The wind has gone completely quiet for the first time since the crash, and the silence should feel like relief.
Instead my stomach twists into something tight and cold the second I register what the quiet actually means.
The storm is over. The world outside this cabin, the world with the Armenian mob and Levon Pertrosyan and my own uncertain future rewritten by strangers with clipboards, has just gotten its door back open.
I sit up slow, ribs protesting less than they did yesterday, and look over at Colt. He is already awake, propped on one elbow, watching me with those eyes that always seem to see straight past whatever face I am trying to put on for the day.
“Everything will be okay,” he says, voice still rough with sleep. He reaches over and tucks a strand of hair behind my ear, his rough fingers gentle in a way that still catches me off guard every time. “We will face it together. You are not alone in this, whatever comes.”
The words help. Not completely, not enough to untangle the knot sitting under my ribs, but enough that I can breathe around it instead of choking on it.
That might be the whole trick to surviving something like this, I am starting to think.
Not getting rid of the fear. Just finding somebody willing to help you carry it instead of pretending you can carry it alone.
We get up and start the day slower than usual, him checking me over with the same careful thoroughness he has used every morning since the wreck.
The wrap comes off my ribs easier today, the bruising gone from angry purple to a fading yellow green that looks worse than it feels.
I stretch my arms overhead, twist slow at the waist, and manage the whole thing without the sharp catch of pain that used to stop me halfway through.
“You are worse than a mother hen,” I tell him, laughing as he makes me sit back down for a second check anyway. “I am fine. Genuinely, actually fine. You can stop interrogating my ribcage now.”
He grunts, hands warm and careful against my side, testing gently along the last tender spot. “Better safe than sorry. You hit that tree hard enough to total a car. I want you strong before I trust any of this healing to just take care of itself.”
“Is that a professional marshal opinion or a personal one?”
“Both.” He does not even try to pretend otherwise, which I appreciate more than I probably should.
Once he is satisfied, he suggests something that makes my whole chest lift for the first time in days.
“Storm is over. Fresh air will do you good, and I want to check the property properly now that I can actually see more than ten feet in front of me. Take the snowmobile out. See how the mountain looks under all that new snow.”
I say yes before he even finishes the sentence, giddy at the idea of being outside, actually outside, for the first time since I ran through these same woods with men shouting behind me.
We bundle up in his spare layers, the fabric heavy and warm and smelling like cedar from wherever he stores it, and he helps me onto the snowmobile behind him, his hands steady on my waist as I find my balance.
The engine turns over with a rumble that travels up through my legs and settles somewhere in my chest, and then we are moving, gliding out into a morning so bright and clean it feels like a different planet from the one that nearly killed me.
The sun catches the snow and throws it back at us in a million small sparks, the whole mountain glittering like something out of one of my own cartoons if my cartoons ever bothered with this much genuine beauty.
I wrap my arms around Colt's waist and hold on, my cheek pressed against the solid warmth of his back, and for a little while, gliding over drifts with the cold biting pleasant against my face and his heartbeat steady under my palm, I let myself forget every single thing waiting for us back at that cabin.
He points out landmarks as we go, shouting a little over the engine noise.
That ridge where he shot his first buck at fourteen, badly, more luck than skill, according to him, though I suspect he is being modest. The bend in the frozen creek where his father taught him to read ice thickness by the sound it made underfoot.
A lightning scarred pine he has watched survive four decades of winters that should have taken it down twice over.
Every story he tells peels back one more layer of the quiet, careful man I have been slowly falling for since he pulled me out of a wrecked car, and I find myself wanting more of them, greedy for every small piece of his life he is willing to hand me.
We hit a bump and I laugh out loud, surprised, squeezing him tighter out of instinct, and he glances back at me with something warm and unguarded in his face that has nothing to do with watchfulness or protection or any of the heavier things sitting between us right now.
Just a man enjoying a morning with a woman he likes.
It is such a small, ordinary thing to feel, and I want to hold onto it as long as the ride lasts.
The good feeling holds right up until we get close to where my car is buried.
Colt slows the snowmobile as we approach the drift, and something in the set of his shoulders changes before I even see what he has already spotted.
The car is still mostly hidden under the snow he packed around it days ago, but as we get closer I see it.
The driver side window, shattered, glass scattered bright and sharp across the fresh snow in a pattern that has nothing gentle or accidental about it.
My heart drops straight through the floor of my stomach.
Colt cuts the engine and helps me off, his hand firm on my arm, but I notice he does not let go right away, and I notice his eyes are already moving across the whole clearing in slow, careful sweeps, the same way they move when he thinks I am asleep and does not know I am watching him do it.
“Could have been an animal,” he says, low and careful, and something about the exact careful way he says it tells me he does not believe that even a little.
I crouch near the wreck before he can stop me, some instinct I did not know I had pulling me toward the evidence instead of away from it, the way I used to lean into a good panel instead of a safe one.
There, half buried at the base of the drift where the snow has started to melt and refreeze in a thin crust, is a boot print.
Deep. Deliberate. Aimed straight at the car like whoever made it walked right up and looked inside before doing whatever they did to that window.
“Colt.” My voice comes out steadier than I expect. “This was not an animal.”
He crouches beside me, and I watch his jaw go tight as he studies the print, and something shifts in his face, some decision getting made behind his eyes. “No,” he says finally. “It was not. And I think it is time I told you something I have been keeping to myself since two nights ago.”
My stomach drops again, colder this time. “What.”
“A light, on the logging road, the first night you were here. A print near this same spot a few days back that I did not tell you about because I did not want you carrying more fear than you already were. An engine yesterday morning that I could not place.” He says it plain, no hedging, watching my face the whole time like he is bracing for me to be angry at him for the silence.
“I should have told you sooner. I am telling you now.”
I should probably be furious. Some part of me is, distantly, the part that does not like discovering she has been kept in the dark even gently, even out of care.
But mostly what I feel, crouched in the snow next to the wreck of my old life with this careful, watchful man finally laying it all out plain, is something closer to relief.
He was protecting me the only way he knew how. Now he is trusting me enough to stop.
“Thank you for telling me,” I say. “Even if it is terrifying. I would rather know.”
“I am starting to understand that about you.” He helps me up, his hand lingering in mine a beat longer than strictly necessary. “We should get back.”
The ride back is quieter, both of us scanning the treeline now instead of pointing out landmarks, and when we reach the cabin he makes me wait outside while he checks every room with that sharp marshal focus I have come to recognize, some part of him always ready for the worst even when the rest of him is gentle enough to tuck my hair behind my ear first thing every morning.
Only when he is satisfied does he wave me in.
I sit by the fire, warmth working slow into bones that went cold somewhere back at that broken window, and he settles in beside me.
“Do you think someone broke it on purpose?” I ask, my voice smaller than I want it to be.
He pulls me into his lap instead of answering right away, arms wrapping around me solid and sure.
“Could be the Armenians. Could be somebody else entirely, a scavenger who saw a wrecked car and got curious about what was worth taking. I do not know for certain yet, and I am done pretending to certainties I do not actually have.” He presses his lips to my temple.
“What I do know is I have got you, and I am not planning on that changing, no matter what that print in the snow turns out to mean.”
I let myself believe him, mostly because the alternative, sitting here doubting the one solid thing in my life right now, is not a version of today I have any interest in living through.
Outside, the sun keeps shining on snow that is hiding more than it is showing, and somewhere out there, close enough to leave a boot print by my car, somebody is still looking for me.