10. The Climb
TEN
The Climb
ADDY
The cold eats everything.
Fear, adrenaline, the sheer impossibility of surviving the last hour — the freezing rain washes it all away, leaving nothing but the brutal, mechanical process of putting one boot in front of the other.
The mud on the ridge is calf-deep and sliding out from under us with every step.
My thighs burn. My lungs ache from pulling in the icy air. The hardshell drive in my inside pocket is a heavy, sharp-edged weight against my ribs.
Wyatt moves ahead of me in the dark. A shadow among shadows.
He doesn't stumble.
He doesn't slip.
He picks a path through the shattered timber and exposed rock with the efficiency of a man who has spent half his life navigating hostile terrain.
Every hundred yards, he stops.
Waits for me to catch up.
Checks my face, his eyes sweeping my perimeter, and then turns and keeps climbing.
He doesn't offer his hand. He doesn't ask how I'm holding up. He just expects me to do the work.
That expectation keeps me moving long after my legs start shaking.
We crest a secondary ridge. The timber thickens here, ancient pines that somehow survived the storm.
Wyatt stops.
Not a pause to check my progress. A dead stop.
He drops into a crouch.
My pulse kicks. I freeze, mimicking his posture.
He holds up one hand. Two fingers extended. Hold.
The rain hisses through the pine needles. For three seconds, that's all there is. Then, fifty yards down the slope to our left, a pale green beam of light sweeps through the trees.
Night vision. Thermal imaging.
Ares.
Wyatt is beside me before I can draw a breath. He yanks me backward, off the game trail, plunging into a steep, narrow ravine choked with deadfall and freezing runoff.
The water hits my boots, shocking cold.
He shoves me down against the muddy bank of the ravine, under the thick, tangled overhang of a fallen cedar. The space is tight. Claustrophobic.
He drops over me.
His weight pins me to the mud. He wraps his heavy tactical jacket completely around me. His left hand clamps over my mouth. Not rough, but absolute.
The green light sweeps over the ravine.
Footsteps. Heavy boots crushing wet pine needles. Two of them. Moving parallel to the creek bed.
Wyatt's body is rigid against mine. The heat of him is the only thing keeping the freezing mud from shutting down my nervous system entirely. My mouth is pressed against his leather glove.
The footsteps stop. Directly above the fallen cedar.
They see us. They're going to fire down into the ravine and?—
"Nothing." A voice, muffled by the rain and the cedar trunk. "Thermal's clear. Keep moving up the ridge. They have to be in the rocks."
The boots move on, crunching away up the slope.
Wyatt doesn't move. He waits sixty seconds. Then another sixty.
He slowly lifts his hand from my mouth.
"Stay here." His voice is a ghost of a whisper against my ear. "Do not move. Do not make a sound."
I grab his wrist, panic flaring. "Wyatt?—"
"I have to take the tail. If they double back, they trap us against the high ground." He pulls his wrist free. "Stay down."
He slides out from under the cedar.
He doesn't draw his sidearm. He draws the combat knife from the sheath on his thigh. The dark, matte-black steel absorbs the faint ambient light.
Then he vanishes.
He doesn't step into the trees; he simply ceases to be in the ravine. No sound of boots on mud. No rustle of branches.
Nothing.
I press my back against the freezing mud and wait.
The rain is a steady, deafening hiss. I grip the handle of my Glock in its holster, my fingers stiff and clumsy from the cold.
A shadow detaches itself from the trunk of a pine thirty yards up the slope. The trailing Ares mercenary. He's moving slow, rifle up, the green night-vision goggles strapped over his helmet.
Wyatt materializes directly behind him.
There is no warning. No cinematic struggle. It is the most terrifying, efficient violence I have ever witnessed.
Wyatt clamps a hand over the man's mouth, jerking his head back, and drives the blade upward into the base of his skull. The mercenary's body arches, convulsing silently. Wyatt controls the fall, riding the heavy, armored body down into the wet ferns without making a single sound.
He wrenches the blade free. Pulls the man's sidearm, clears the chamber, drops the magazine into the mud.
He strips the night-vision goggles off the dead man's helmet and puts them on.
He turns and looks down the slope, straight at the cedar.
He knows exactly where I am.
He holds up a flat hand. Hold.
Fifty yards higher up the ridge, the second green beam cuts through the rain, sweeping back down toward us. The lead mercenary. Looking for his trailing partner.
Wyatt turns and melts into the dark, climbing the slope.
I press my back into the mud and watch the green beam slice through the pines. It sweeps left, then right, moving steadily closer to where the first body lies in the ferns.
Then the beam jerks wildly toward the canopy.
It stutters, flashing across the timber in a frantic, broken arc, and abruptly goes dark.
No gunshot. No shout. Just the heavy, wet thud of armored deadweight hitting the ground.
Sixty seconds later, Wyatt materializes at the edge of the ravine.
He motions with two fingers. Move.
I scramble out of the freezing water.
Flint's words echo in my head. Wyatt spent years making money killing people. At some point you run out of ways to call it righteous.
I watch him wipe the blade clean on the first dead man's tactical vest and slide it back into the sheath. I don't feel horror. I feel a dark, twisting knot of awe and absolute, terrifying safety.
We double-time it higher into the mountains. The slope turns to sheer rock. My breathing is a ragged scrape in the back of my throat. I can't feel my toes anymore. My fingers are locked into tight, aching hooks.
"Here."
Wyatt stops at the base of a massive limestone cliff. The rock face is fractured, split by a narrow, jagged fissure.
He slides into the dark opening, sidearm drawn.
I lean against the cold wet stone outside and wait. The shivering starts deep in my core—violent, uncontrollable tremors that rattle my teeth. The adrenaline has burned off, leaving nothing but the brutal reality of the temperature drop.
Wyatt emerges from the fissure.
"It's clear. Goes back twenty feet. Dry."
I push off the rock wall and stumble toward the opening. My right knee gives out.
Wyatt catches me before I hit the ground. His arm hooks around my waist, hauling me up.
"I've got you." He guides me into the fissure.
The air inside is dead and still, blocking out the punishing wind. The floor is covered in generations of dry pine needles blown in by past storms. The ceiling angles upward, forming a natural chimney near the back of the small cave.
Wyatt deposits me against the driest section of the wall.
"Don't sit. Keep your blood moving."
He turns back toward the entrance, gathering deadwood and dry brush from the deep overhangs just outside the cave.
He works fast. Within three minutes, he has a small, smokeless fire burning near the natural chimney at the back of the cave.
The heat is immediate and agonizing against my frozen skin.
"Take the jacket off."
He's already stripping off his own soaked tactical jacket and heavy outer shirt. The firelight flickers over the hard, scarred lines of his chest and shoulders.
I fumble with the zipper of my jacket. My fingers won't cooperate. The shivering is so violent I can barely stand.
Wyatt crosses the small space. He brushes my useless hands aside.
His knuckles graze my throat as he pulls the zipper down. The contact is electric.
He strips the heavy, soaked jacket off my shoulders and tosses it aside. Then he reaches for the hem of my freezing thermal henley.
I catch his wrists.
My hands are ice against his skin.
"It's soaked through." His voice is low. Gravel. "Your core temp is crashing. If you don't get the wet layers off, the fire won't save you."
I look up into his face. The dark eyes. The hard set of his jaw. The man who just executed a mercenary in the mud without a second thought, now standing in the firelight with his hands on my waist.
I let go of his wrists.
He pulls the henley over my head.
The cold air hits my skin, but it's immediately eclipsed by the heat radiating off his body.
I'm standing in a sports bra and wet denim, shivering uncontrollably. The air in the small cave is thick with the smell of woodsmoke, rain, and the raw, heavy tension that has been building between us for seventy-two hours.
"Come here."
He doesn't wait for an answer. He pulls me against his bare chest and wraps his arms around me.
The shock of his body heat is overwhelming. It sinks into my freezing skin, overriding the cold, overriding the exhaustion. I press my face into the curve of his neck, wrapping my arms around his waist. He feels like iron and fire.
The shivering begins to subside, replaced by a different kind of trembling.
He slides his hands down my bare back, pulling me flush against him. The physical contact is absolute. There is no space left between us. No safe house. No tactical briefing. No Frost standing on the other side of a door.
Just the cave, the fire, and the man who took apart my entire world.
"You're shaking." His voice is a rough scrape against my ear.
"Not from the cold."
His hands tighten on my back. He pulls back just enough to look at me. The firelight catches the raw, unguarded hunger in his eyes.
"Addy." It's a warning.
I reach up and trace the line of his jaw. "You said you take care of me."
A muscle feathers in his cheek. The last thread of his control snaps.
He backs me into the stone wall of the cave, his mouth coming down on mine with punishing, desperate heat.