XIX
A hand sealed over my mouth.
Iron-tight.
The scream died against skin and bone as another arm caught me around the middle and hauled me sideways, out of the open and into the mouth of the mine.
My shoulder struck stone hard enough to scatter stars behind my eyes.
Before I could crumple, he turned me against the wall.
My cheek hit cold rock.
His chest locked against my back.
One hand stayed over my mouth. The other slid to the base of my skull, fingers threading into my hair to keep me still.
Pinned.
I bucked once.
Whoever held me didn’t move. One knee wedged between mine, trapping my boots before they could scrape against stone.
“Shh.”
The word brushed my ear, more vibration than sound.
I went still.
Not because I wanted to.
Because I knew that voice.
Cold rolled over my skin. Familiar and impossible.
The scent of him—glacial rain and wood smoke—flooded my senses.
Heaton.
Two flashlight beams sliced through the brush outside the mine.
“Where’d she go?” one man hissed. “She was just here.”
“Check the cliff’s edge,” the other snapped. “Julian said bring her back. He didn’t say in pieces!”
My lungs seized.
Heaton’s palm tightened over my mouth before the sound could escape.
My lips brushed the calloused center of his hand with every shallow breath, and some traitorous, terrified part of me noticed the shape of him anyway—the hard line of his chest at my back, the cold press of his body, the absolute command of his hand in my hair.
“Maybe she fell into a shaft,” one hunter muttered.
Panic tore through me.
I tried to twist toward the sound, but Heaton’s grip sharpened at the back of my skull, stopping me cold.
“Listen to me,” he breathed, voice low against my ear. “They’re just noise. Understand?”
I couldn’t answer.
My mind was a frantic, screaming mess.
His palm slid from my mouth to my jaw, but he didn’t let me go. His thumb braced beneath my chin, turning my face just enough for me to see him from the corner of my eye.
“October.”
His silver stare stayed fixed on the entrance, but as the hunters’ footsteps drew closer, his attention dropped back to me.
His thumb shifted, dragging once across my lower lip.
The touch should have steadied me. Instead, my pulse hammered against my throat, and my stupid, terrified body leaned a fraction closer into his chest before I could stop it.
“Check the shafts,” the second hunter called, much closer now. “She could be hiding in one.”
A silent scream built in my chest.
I was going to be sick.
Heaton’s hand slid from my jaw, fingers skimming the sensitive line of my throat before settling in the hollow at the base of my neck.
He didn’t just feel my pulse.
He caged it.
His thumb pressed against the flutter of my vein as if deciding whether to steady the rhythm or stop it entirely.
“Breathe,” he whispered, so low the word barely disturbed the dark. “Quietly.”
I hated him for saying it—hated myself more for obeying.
Footsteps crunched just outside the entrance.
Heaton went impossibly still against me, fingers tightening at my throat as if he held my pulse in one hand and the shadows in the other.
A flashlight beam sliced through the mine, skimming wet stone, my cheek, the edge of Heaton’s sleeve—then sliding away.
Blind.
Indifferent.
The air seemed to bend. A glitch in the dark, as if the mountain itself had blinked and missed us on purpose.
Outside, a stone skittered into the shaft, rattling down into the black.
“Nothing,” one of the men grumbled. “She must’ve doubled back. Come on.”
The footsteps retreated, the beams vanished, and absolute darkness swallowed the mine.
For several seconds, neither of us moved.
Then Heaton released me.
The cold rushed in where his body had been, punishing and immediate.
I turned slowly, still braced against the rock, my jaw aching where his hand had been.
My mouth could still feel the shape of his palm.
“You must have a death wish, October,” he hissed, eyes flashing like serrated steel. “I told you what would happen if you came here alone. I told you, and you did it anyway.”
He took a step back, raking a hand through his hair in disbelief.
“Next time you decide to be this stupid, I might just let the mountain have you.”
His expression hardened, all pretense of anger gone, replaced by a terrifying, possessive fire.
“Do you have any idea what you almost cost me?”
I leaned back against the wet rock.
“What it cost you?” I managed. “I was doing fine until you slammed me into a wall.”
“Doing fine?” He gave a short, humorless laugh. “You were breathing loud enough to wake the dead and running toward a two-hundred-foot drop. That wasn’t a tactical retreat. It was a suicide sprint.”
“I was being chased.”
“You were being hunted.”
Dust drifted between us, catching faint threads of light from the mine’s mouth.
I wiped the lingering taste of woodsmoke from my lips.
His eyes dropped to my hand, then returned to my face. For a split second, he looked less like a predator and more like a man who had been struck.
Offended.
“If my methods are too much for you,” he said, voice laced with a new, dangerous edge, “feel free to walk back out there and apologize. See if they’re as gentle with your throat as I was.”
I swallowed hard.
The phantom pressure of his palm ghosted over my lips.
My jaw.
My windpipe.
He had been rough.
He had also been careful.
Somehow, that made it worse.
“Julian,” I said, my voice echoing against the stone. “Why did he send those men after me? How could he have known I’d be here?”
Heaton went still.
“You really don’t know?” The question was flat, devoid of sympathy.
“He said something about my dad. About the Lanterns.” I took a tentative step toward him. “He was waiting. Like he knew exactly where I’d be.”
“He did know.”
I blinked. “What?”
He stepped closer, the faint light catching the grim set of his mouth.
“Winter Quarters,” he said, the name sounding like a curse. “I told you to forget this place existed. I told you to keep this town out of your mouth.”
He shifted nearer, not touching me this time, but cutting off the narrow path to the entrance.
“And what did you do in second period?”
My stomach dropped.
“You pinned it to the board,” he said. “In front of the entire class. Julian included.”
“I didn’t—”
“You put a target on this mountain,” he cut in, leaning down until his eyes silvered in the dark, “and invited everyone with teeth to take a bite.”
“I didn’t think—”
“That’s the problem.” His voice sharpened. “You don’t think. You chase. You dig. You bleed all over the floor and act shocked when something follows your scent home.”
He stepped closer, close enough for the cold of him to crawl over my skin.
“Julian didn’t need to track you.”
His gaze dropped over my shaking body.
Then lifted.
“He only needed to know you’d be reckless enough to come.”
“Then why are you still here?” I stepped into the cold pulsing off him, because apparently almost dying had done nothing to improve my survival instincts. “If I’m such a disaster, why didn’t you just let them take me?”
He gave a quiet, humorless laugh.
But his eyes lowered.
“You think I haven’t asked myself that every day since you showed up?”
He moved before I could answer.
This time, I was facing him when the rock stopped me.
Heaton filled the space in front of me, all cold shadow and silver eyes.
“I could have let them take you,” he whispered. “It would’ve been easier. Cleaner.”
My breath caught.
“Then why didn’t you?”
“Because Julian wouldn’t know what to do with you if you came with an instruction manual. He’d break you in a week.”
He trailed his knuckles down the side of my face, silver eyes tracking the way my blood rushed to meet his touch.
“And I’ve waited decades for someone like you to stumble into my dark. I have no intention of letting him touch something he’s too stupid to understand.”
I couldn’t breathe.
My eyes darted toward the tunnel’s mouth, the world outside feeling a million miles away.
“They were right there,” I whispered. “They should’ve seen us.”
He didn’t pull back.
If anything, he loomed closer; the chill radiating from him beginning to numb the cheek he had just touched.
“They nearly did.”
“Then how—”
“Sometimes,” he cut in softly, “if the light hits just right, the eye only sees what it wants to.”
I shook my head, mind racing to make sense of the glitch I had seen in the air.
“That’s not an answer.”
“It’s enough for a skeptic.”
He gave a slight, dismissive shrug.
“Although skeptics don’t tend to last long out here.”
A cold current hummed between us—no longer fear, but a sudden, dangerous voltage.
My breath plumed white in the dark.
His did not.
I glanced toward the narrow opening where daylight trembled beyond the trees.
“I should go. They’ll be gone by now—”
“No.”
His hand shot out, fingers wrapping around my forearm.
“They’ll be watching the trail,” he said. “Waiting for you to think it’s safe.”
“Then what?” I looked past him into the black throat of the mine. “I can’t just stay here.”
He studied me, something dark and volatile shifting behind his eyes.
Then he released my arm and turned, his shape already being swallowed by the dark.
“There’s another way out,” he said, voice echoing softly from the damp. “But it runs through the heart of the mountain.”
Every instinct in me recoiled.
“That’s deeper.”
“You can stay here and freeze.”
He looked back over his shoulder, only half his face left to the light.
One silver eye caught and held.
“Or you can trust me.”
The words landed like a dare.
Like a trap. Like the worst decision I could ever have wanted to make.
I drew in one cold, shaking breath—and followed him into the dark.