CHAPTER 40
Brynn
Vercors Region, France
Day Twenty-Five Off Grid
I woke in a bed I didn’t recognize.
For one blank second, there was nothing before it.
No road. No explosion. No Jameson. Only an unfamiliar ceiling and the dry scrape of my own breath catching somewhere too high in my chest.
I came upright.
Pain tore through my ankle. The mattress shifted beneath me, thin and uneven, and the blankets tangled around my legs as I scrambled backward until my spine struck a wooden wall.
The room was wrong.
Everything about it was wrong.
Cold dust. Old timber. Smoke buried so deeply in the walls it had become part of them.
A weak orange glow moved through the open doorway, stretching shadows across warped floorboards. Wind dragged against the shutters with a low, uneven scrape.
Then something shifted in the next room.
A floorboard.
My hand searched the mattress beside me.
Nothing. No gun. No bag. No camera.
My pulse slammed hard enough to hurt.
Where the fuck was I?
Another creak came from the other room.
Closer.
I shoved the blankets away and swung my feet toward the floor.
The room tilted.
My injured ankle folded the second it touched the boards. Pain shot through my leg, sharp enough to pull a broken sound from my throat. I caught myself against the bedframe before I hit the floor.
The movement outside the room stopped.
Then came fast.
A shadow crossed the doorway.
I grabbed the closest thing within reach, an old metal lamp with no shade, and raised it with both hands.
Jameson stopped at the threshold.
He held an armful of split wood against his chest. Frost clung to the shoulders of his coat. His glasses had fogged from the change in temperature, hiding his eyes behind a pale blur.
For half a second, neither of us moved.
Then he dropped the wood.
The pieces struck the floor in a hard, uneven clatter that made me flinch and lift the lamp higher.
He raised both hands where I could see them. “It’s only me.”
I knew his face.
I knew his voice.
My body didn’t seem convinced.
I kept the lamp raised. “Where are we?”
He stayed at the threshold, hands still raised. “France.”
“That is not enough information.”
His gaze stayed on me. “We’re in the Vercors. An old chalet.”
I looked around again.
The weak firelight. The unfamiliar bed. The crooked shutters. Nothing connected to anything I remembered.
I looked back at him. “How did we get here?”
His expression tightened behind the fogged lenses. “You don’t remember?”
“No.”
The word came out too fast.
I tried to reach backward and found nothing solid.
The explosion. Heat. Jameson climbing into the SUV.
Then pieces with darkness between them.
A road. Cold glass against my temple. His hand around my arm.
After that, nothing.
“Why can’t I remember?”
He lowered his hands slowly. “You were in shock.”
The lamp began to lower without me deciding to lower it.
“How long?”
His mouth tightened. “Since yesterday.”
My fingers closed harder around the metal base. “Yesterday?”
He watched the lamp dip another inch. “You slept most of the day.”
I stared at him. “I lost an entire day.”
“Not entirely.” He took one careful step into the room. “You woke up a few times.”
“I don’t remember that either.”
He nodded.
The lamp lowered another inch.
“What’s wrong with me?”
“Nothing.” His answer came immediately. “Your nervous system kept you moving until it couldn’t anymore. Coming down from that can be rough. Disorienting. Sometimes jarring.”
My arms had started to ache from holding the lamp.
I barely felt it.
I tightened my grip on the base. “I don’t know how I got here.”
His gaze stayed on mine. “You don’t need to remember all of it right now.”
The lamp finally settled against my lap.
“I’m cold.”
The admission came out smaller than I intended.
His attention moved over me again. Bare feet. Shaking hands. The blanket twisted around my legs instead of covering them.
He took another step. “Can I touch you?”
I nodded.
He crossed the remaining distance slowly, as though any sudden movement might send the lamp back above my head.
His coat carried the cold in with him. Frost melted along the shoulders, darkening the wool. He reached for the blanket trapped beneath my legs and eased it free without touching my skin.
The metal lamp rolled away from my lap and landed against the mattress.
He lifted the blanket around my shoulders.
Warmth didn’t come with it.
The fabric was cold too. Everything in the room was cold. The bed, the walls, even the air caught inside my lungs.
His hands closed over the blanket at my upper arms, pulling it tighter around me.
“There,” he said quietly.
My body tipped toward him.
There was no decision between upright and falling. One second I was sitting in front of him, and the next my forehead struck his chest and my fingers locked into the front of his coat.
He caught me immediately.
One arm closed around my back. The other came up behind my head, holding me against him before I could slide from the edge of the mattress.
The cold fabric scratched my cheek.
Underneath it, he was warm.
The first tear slipped out without warning.
Then another followed, silent and hot against my frozen skin.
His hand spread across the back of my skull. “Brynn.”
That did it.
Something tore loose in my chest.
The sound that came out of me was ugly and broken. It hurt my throat. Another followed before I could swallow it, then another, until my entire body folded around the force of them.
He lowered us onto the bed.
I barely felt the mattress beneath me. Only his arms, the hard line of his body, and the steady pressure of his hand moving over my back.
I cried into his coat until the wool went damp beneath my face.
I didn’t know exactly what I was crying for.
The safe house. The explosion. The hours I had lost.
The fact that someone had stood outside our door while we were inside believing we still had time.
Maybe all of it.
Maybe my body knew even if I didn’t.
I clutched his coat. “I can’t stop.”
His arm tightened around me. “You don’t have to.”
My fingers clenched harder in his coat.
My crying softened eventually, not because I felt better, but because my body ran out of force. The sobs broke into uneven breaths that stretched farther apart.
His coat warmed beneath my cheek.
The hand at my back never stopped moving, following the same path up and down.
Again.
Again.
My eyelids grew heavy.
I tried to lift my head, but it felt too far away from the rest of me.
“Jameson.”
His hand paused between my shoulder blades. “I’m here.”
I believed him.
That was the last thing I knew before sleep took me again.
***
I woke warm.
Not room warm.
Jameson warm.
He lay beside me on top of the narrow mattress, one arm curved beneath my head and the other resting heavily across my waist. At some point, he had taken off his coat and boots. His shirt was wrinkled beneath my cheek, the top button open, his skin warm where the fabric had shifted.
The room had gone dark.
Firelight pulsed through the open doorway, painting the wall in slow orange movement. Wind pressed against the shutters, but it sounded farther away now.
His breathing moved beneath me, slow and even.
Asleep.
I stayed still.
I had never seen him sleeping before. Not really. He was always awake first, already watching, already calculating whatever might happen next.
Without his glasses, the hard precision of his face looked less protected. Exhaustion sat openly beneath his eyes. A faint cut marked the skin near his jaw.
I lifted my hand.
My fingertips brushed the stubble along his cheek.
Memory surfaced.
Zovirax.
Not Zovia.
The wrong medication.
Weeks of pills doing absolutely nothing I had thought they were doing.
My fingers paused against his face.
Well, that’s badly timed.
I looked at him sleeping beside me, his arm still locked around my waist as though even unconscious he had refused to let me drift too far.
His brow tightened beneath my fingers.
I pulled my hand away before I woke him.
There was nothing I could do about it now.
No answer waiting for me if I panicked hard enough.
Only possibility.
I let my eyes close again and listened to his breathing until mine matched it.