Chapter 15
The cold struck Harper’s shins, and the world contracted into a single, screaming point of sensation. The water was so cold it didn’t feel like water at all—it felt like pressure, like the river crushing her bones through her skin.
Her doctor brain fired automatically.
Near-freezing water. Cold shock in under a minute. Motor control failing soon after. Hypothermia not far behind. The knowledge made it worse.
She placed her feet where Pav’s had been, the rocks treacherous beneath her boots.
His hand was steady around hers, grip firm, an anchor while the current shoved at her calves.
Water battered over rocks with a hollow, relentless crash, loud enough to swallow the forest. It climbed past her knees, numbness spreading upward through her thighs.
The water hit her waist, and her body betrayed her. The gasp was involuntary—a violent inhale that ripped through her chest before she could stop it. Every muscle from the waist down seized as the current surged against her hips, dragging her sideways.
She couldn’t breathe or think. The cold pulverized everything until nothing existed but panic.
“Breathe.” His mouth close to her ear. His breath the only warm thing in the world.
She gasped again.
One word. Low and steady. His hand tight around hers. The same word he’d said when he buckled her seatbelt in the helicopter. Her body took comfort from his voice before her pride could object.
She sucked in a ragged breath as air finally broke loose in her chest. The pain ebbed as her body surrendered to the numbness, the cold sinking into her bones instead of attacking them.
She tightened her grip on his hand. They were past the middle now. The current eased slightly, the rocks larger beneath her feet. But her legs had stopped communicating properly—signals from her brain arriving late, her feet clumsy and imprecise.
Her boot slipped. One second she was upright. The next the river had her. Filthy water surged up to her chest in a freezing wall that emptied her lungs in a wrenching wheeze.
Pav’s arm clamped around her ribs before the water could keep her. He hauled her upright, braced against the current, his body a wall between her and the rushing water. “Harper?”
“I’m—” Her teeth clacked violently. “M’okay.”
“Almost there.” His arm stayed locked around her.
Tears burned her eyes. One foot, then the other. Each step was an act of will, because the alternative was to surrender and the river would kill her.
The bank materialized through a cold blur closing in at the edges of her vision. Frozen mud. Dead grass. Her hands clawed into the earth, fingers hooking into the frozen clods.
Behind her, the river clamored as if nothing had happened. As if it hadn’t nearly taken her.
Pav hauled her up from behind—hands around her waist, lifting, dragging—until the river released its grip and she collapsed on her hands and knees in the mud.
The air hit her soaked clothes, and the freezing chill doubled, the breeze turning the wet fabric into ice against her skin. Violent tremors overtook her body. She tried to stand, but her legs buckled and she dropped to one knee with a sound that was half gasp, half sob.
Strong arms closed around her shoulders and under her legs. Then she was lifted. Her body sank into the solidity of his chest as he carried her up the bank into the shelter of the trees.
She should have protested. Would have, if her mouth had remembered how to form words. Instead, she let the world narrow to his heartbeat, his wet jacket, the iron grip of his arms holding her.
For a moment, they were simply there. Soaked, shaking, and breathing the same freezing air. His chest rose against her cheek. The arm around her tightened as another shiver coursed through her.
“I’m going to put you down now.”
“Mm-hmm.” She nodded, the movement stiff.
He set her carefully back on her feet and stepped away.
Those unreadable taiga eyes held hers. “You did good.”
A tiny bloom of warmth spread behind her sternum, stubborn and entirely unrelated to temperature. She opened her mouth. Nothing came out but chattering teeth and a shaky breath.
Two hours to the cache. They wouldn’t make it like this.
Sodden fabric was stealing heat from her body faster than she could generate it. Her thoughts were already slowing at the edges, the world going soft around her. Hypothermia was gentle, and the cold was getting quieter inside her body.
“Need a fire,” she forced out. “Two hours in wet clothes at this temperature and altitude—we…we won’t make the cache.”
He gave a clipped nod. “We need a fire. Smoke’s a risk. But wet clothes will kill us faster than anything else.” He pointed through the trees. “There.”
A rocky overhang backed by dense pine, sheltered from the wind and screened enough to break the smoke.
He moved immediately, dropping to a crouch beneath the overhang and shrugging off his pack. From it he pulled a survival blanket—a square of thin silver foil that looked like nothing and meant everything.
One blanket.
He shook it out, wrapped it around her shoulders, and pressed gently until she sat. She sank gratefully on legs that had gone loose and unreliable beneath her.
Goosebumps pebbled his exposed forearms and throat, but he moved as if unaffected. “Wait here.”
He headed into the trees, snapping dead limbs from the underside of conifers where the needles were dry. When he returned, he built the fire quickly—pine needles first, then thin twigs, then thicker branches. One spark from the flint around his neck and the flame caught.
Small at first, then growing. Resin snapped in the flames, sweet enough to cut through the cold metal taste in her mouth. The warmth touched her face, and her body leaned toward it with desperate instinct. Her skin burned as sensation returned—a thousand needles stabbing through deadened flesh.
Pav shifted closer to the fire, putting himself between Harper and the wind sliding down the river valley.
“We need to get out of these wet clothes. Wet fabric against skin speeds up heat loss.”
His expression remained neutral. “So.”
He met her eyes.
“Clothes off.”