13. Hadley
HADLEY
Cold wakes me. Not the gradual seeping kind I've gotten used to over the past two days, but sudden, vicious cold that punches through the sleeping bag like a fist.
I reach for him.
My hand finds empty thermal pad.
My fingers close around metal. The backup pistol, still warm from the heat pack beside it. Safety off. Just like he left it the last time he tucked me behind a rock and vanished.
"Banks?"
I sit up. The sleeping bag pools at my waist and the cave air hits my bare shoulders and I gasp, grabbing for the fleece he stripped off me hours ago.
The cave is small enough that I can see every corner from where I sit.
His pack is here. The medkit is here. The water bottles, the fire steel, the emergency rations.
His rifle is gone. His combat knife. His chest rig with the spare magazines.
Everything designed to keep him alive in a fight, gone.
Everything designed to keep me alive without him, left behind.
"No. No, no, no."
I scramble out of the bag. My knee screams the second I put weight on it, the swollen joint grinding hot and wrong beneath the skin.
I ignore it. Yank on my thermals, his spare base layer that hangs past my thighs, my ruined boots.
Every movement is clumsy, fingers numb and shaking, and the whole time my brain is running a ticker tape of every terrible thing.
He went after them.
He went after them alone.
He went after three or four professional killers with a graze in his side that won't stop bleeding and a single rifle and whatever rounds he pulled off a dead man's vest.
I shove the pistol into my waistband the way he showed me. Barrel pointed down, grip accessible. My hands won't stop trembling.
The cave doorway is a crooked slit in the rock, barely wide enough for his shoulders. I turn sideways and push through, and the world outside is blue. Pre-dawn blue. The kind of light that isn't really light at all but the mountain deciding whether or not to let the sun in today.
His tracks lead downslope. Boot prints in the crusted snow, precise and evenly spaced, the stride of a man who knows exactly where he's going and what he'll do when he gets there. I follow them with my eyes until they disappear into the black tree line two hundred yards below.
Wind cuts across the exposed face of the slope. It finds every gap in my layering, every seam, every zipper that doesn't quite close because the jacket was designed to look good in photos, not survive the Alaskan backcountry at negative thirty.
I take a step. My knee buckles. I catch myself on the rock face, fingernails scraping granite, and force the joint straight again.
Another step.
Another.
The snow comes up past my calves and each stride is a controlled fall forward. I'm not fast. I'm not quiet. If someone is observing the ridge with optics they'll see me in seconds, a stumbling, bright-haired target against endless white.
He doesn't get to do this. He doesn't get to make love to me like that, like I'm the only warm thing left on the planet, and then walk into a gunfight without saying goodbye. Without saying anything. Without giving me the chance to grab his face and tell him to come back.
Fifty yards from the forest. My lungs burn. My knee has graduated from screaming to a white-hot silence that scares me more than the pain did.
Forty yards.
A branch snaps somewhere in the dense spruce.
I stop. Yank the pistol free. Hold it the way he showed me, both hands, arms extended, front sight centered. My hands shake so badly the barrel traces small circles in the air.
Another snap. Closer. Heavy footfalls, the crunch of packed snow under significant weight.
A shape materializes between the trees.
Massive. Dark tactical shell plastered white with snow.
Rifle slung across his back. Something clutched in his left hand that I can't identify.
He moves through the deep powder with that terrifying economy of motion, each step deliberate, controlled, and when he clears the last line of spruce his eyes find me immediately.
He stops.
Looks at me standing in the open, fifty yards from the cave, in my fashion boots and his oversized base layer, holding his backup pistol in shaking hands.
His jaw works. A muscle ticks beneath his left eye.
I lower the gun. My face crumples.
"You absolute bastard."
He closes the distance in a dozen strides. His free hand catches the back of my head and pulls me to him and I punch him. Hard, right in the sternum, and he doesn't even flinch. Just holds me tighter. His jacket smells like cordite and pine resin and cold sweat.
"Done," he says against the top of my head. The word vibrates through his ribs into mine.
"Done?"
His left hand opens. A sat phone, caked in frozen blood, clatters onto the snow at our feet.
"Their comms. Their rally point. Done."
I pull back far enough to look at his face. Really look.
A fresh cut runs along his left cheekbone, shallow but ugly, the blood already frozen into a dark crust. His lips are cracked. The bandage around his ribs has bled through, a rust-colored bloom visible where his jacket hangs open. His eyes are flat and hard and completely, terrifyingly calm.
"You went after the helicopter."
Not a question. He confirms it anyway with a single nod.
I wipe my nose with the back of my sleeve and peer at the sat phone lying in the trampled snow between us. Military grade, heavy black casing, the kind of thing that costs more than my entire apartment's monthly rent. A smear of someone else's blood arcs across the antenna.
"The pilot," Banks says. He bends down, picks up the sat phone, checks something on the screen. "Refueling at a cache two klicks east. Ridge saddle where the drainage meets the old mining road."
"You killed the pilot."
His eyes come up. Hold mine. No apology in them.
"He was armed. Had a sidearm and a manifest with your physical description on it. Hair color. Height. Clothing. They printed a photo off your social media."
My stomach drops. That particular brand of nausea that has nothing to do with altitude or hunger or cold.
They printed a photo. Some guy in a helicopter cockpit had a printout of one of my Instagram posts, probably the one from the trailhead where I'm grinning and holding up a peace sign in my pink boots, and he was using it to hunt me.
"Which photo?"
Banks frowns.
"Does it matter?"
"No." I swallow. "Yes. I don't know. It matters to me because three days ago I posted that photo for likes and now someone laminated it and stuck it in a helicopter so they could find me and put a bullet in my head."
I process this. He doesn't rush me. Doesn't touch me. Just stands there, this enormous, bleeding, impossibly steady wall between me and everything that wants me dead.
"The chopper's grounded," he says after a moment. "Fuel line severed. Avionics pulled. He won't fly again."
"And the pilot won't either."
A grunt. That's all I get.
I pick up the sat phone from where he set it on a flat rock. It's heavier than my regular phone. The screen glows a dull green, some kind of encrypted messaging interface I don't recognize. GPS coordinates scroll across the bottom in a constant feed.
"Their network?"
"Part of it. Pilot was the logistics link. Fuel, extraction coordinates, check-in schedule." He takes the phone from my hands, turns it, shows me a string of text messages. They're in shorthand, abbreviations and grid references, but a few jump out in plain English.
TARGET CONFIRMED ALIVE. GROUND TEAM ALPHA REPOSITIONING. EXTRACT WINDOW 0900.
"Nine a.m.," I say. "That's their extraction."
"Was their extraction. Pilot missed his oh-six-hundred check-in twenty minutes ago. They know something's wrong."
"So they'll send someone else."
"Takes time. Nearest staging area is Valdez. Two hours minimum by air. More if the weather holds bad."
I look at the sky. Heavy clouds sit on the peaks, fat and gray and threatening. The wind has a bite that promises more snow.
"Weather's holding bad."
The corner of his mouth twitches. Not a smile. Banks doesn't smile. But something close. Something that lives in the neighborhood of approval.
"That phone is our lifeline," he says. "Encrypted channel, but I can strip it back to a standard sat frequency. Reach my handler at Anchorage SAR dispatch. Someone I trust."
"I thought they framed you. I thought the police think you killed those men."
"My handler knows me."
"Banks, they told the cops you kidnapped me. They told them you went rogue. What if your handler believes it?"
His jaw tightens. That muscle under his left eye again, the one I'm learning to read like a mood ring for a man who refuses to have moods.
"Dawes has known me eleven years. Pulled me out of a crevasse in Denali when I was twenty-two. He doesn't believe anything until he verifies it personally."
I want to argue. I want to tell him that trust is a luxury and that people believe what they're told, because I spent five years building a career on that exact principle. Curate the story, control the narrative, and people will swallow whatever you feed them.
But he's already stripping the phone's back panel off with his knife, exposing a circuit board and a nest of colored wires. His fingers, cracked and bloody and thick as dowels, move with surgical precision. He splices something, reroutes something else, and the screen flickers from green to white.
Standard satellite interface. Open frequency.
"Won't the mercenaries intercept the signal?"
"Not on this band. Military spec, frequency-hopping. They'd need a dedicated SIGINT rig to even detect the transmission."
He holds the phone out to me.
"You call. You identify yourself. Tell Dawes everything you saw at the waterfall. Every detail."
"Why me?"
His gray eyes lock onto mine. Steady as bedrock.
"Because you're the witness. You're the victim. And right now, the whole state of Alaska thinks I'm the monster." He pushes the phone closer. "Your voice clears my name, Hadley. Not mine."
My fingers close around the sat phone. The casing is still warm from his hand.