Chapter 17
Harper’s feet had gone numb two miles back.
Her limbs ached with a bone-deep weariness that went beyond tired and into something structural.
Her body had used up whatever reserves it had been running on and was now operating on fumes and stubbornness alone.
River grit had worked its way under everything, into the seams of her clothes, into the lining of his jacket, into places she didn’t want to think about—leaving a film on her skin that itched when she moved and stiffened when she didn’t.
But worse than any of that was the memory she couldn’t shake.
Pav shirtless by the fire.
The holster riding low on his hips when he’d stripped, casual lethality against bare skin.
His chest against her back beneath the survival blanket.
The shift of honed muscle when he adjusted around her.
His breath warm at her nape, stirring her hair in a rhythm more intimate than any touch she could remember.
The way her breathing had synced to his without permission and she hadn’t wanted it to stop.
She was not thinking about this.
She was absolutely thinking about this.
What the hell, Harper?
She focused on the pain in her feet instead.
Safer territory. The blisters forming on both heels, the raw skin between her toes where the wet boots had been grinding for hours.
Concrete, manageable problems that a medical degree could address.
Unlike the other thing, which no amount of training had prepared her for.
Pav walked ahead of her, same steady pace, same economy of movement, scanning the forest with that constant, unhurried vigilance that never switched off.
The bruised ribs didn’t show in his stride anymore—either they’d eased or he’d buried the pain so deep it no longer registered as information worth processing.
She suspected the latter. The man would set his own broken leg and call it not relevant.
The trees thinned, and a building appeared through the trees.
Her heart lifted for the first time in hours.
Shelter.
Food.
The mining station where he’d stored his cache.
She’d pictured something functional, not this low, squat structure of stained concrete and corrugated metal, half-consumed by the forest growing around it for decades. Rusted mining equipment hunched under shapeless mounds of snow.
One window, cracked and filthy. A door that looked like it had been kicked open and shut so many times the frame had given up.
But it had walls. And a roof. And somewhere inside, according to Pav, there was food and thermal gear and medical supplies and the possibility of feeling safe for five consecutive minutes.
That’s a win.
Pav slowed. His posture changed, his steady walking rhythm morphing into something coiled and watchful. He held up a hand.
She stopped, colliding with his back. The man was built like the mountains. “Wha—”
Two fingers pressed against her lips, cutting off the word before it fully formed.
His eyes never left the building, scanning the treeline, the clearing, the door. Then his hand dropped from her face. “Don’t move.”
“Pav,” she shout-whispered.
He pivoted, showed her the palm of his hand. Wait. He unslung his rifle, leading with the muzzle. His weight shifted to the balls of his feet. He went through the door fast and low, and then he was inside and she was alone in the clearing.
She rubbed her arms. Forest pressed in around her. Dense pine, the canopy filtering the pale daylight into a cold gray wash that flattened everything. Wind moved through the trees, and somewhere in the distance a branch snapped, the crack echoing off the frozen ground.
Shit.
She started, turning a slow circle, her breath sawing in and out.
The wilderness was impassive.
Nothing there.
Her breath fogged in the cold air like a signal flare, her heart rate ramping.
Okay. Enough of this. Get inside.
She ran. Her waterlogged boots broke through the crusted snow, and her lungs burned, the distance between the trees and the door shrinking in a blur of white and gray. She hit the threshold at speed and staggered through, catching herself on the doorframe.
The muzzle of Pav’s rifle cut past her cheek by inches.
Behind, his face was tight with adrenaline and something harder. He exhaled noisily through his nose and lowered the weapon. “What part of wait did you not understand?”
“I—”
Her gaze slid from his face to the room behind him. The place had been torn apart.
Shelving ripped from the walls, brackets still dangling from the concrete. A metal locker forced open, the door bent back on its hinges. Clothing scattered across the floor, thermal layers, socks discarded in heaps. Empty food wrappers and packaging.
“What happened?” she said, though the answer was already forming in her chest, cold and heavy.
Pav moved through the space with a methodical precision that was terrible to watch. Checking corners, running his hand along shelves that held nothing. His face was blank, everything inside locked down and running on protocol alone.
But his eyes were different. Cold and flat in a way she hadn’t seen. A fury so controlled it registered as absence.
The line of his jaw could have been carved from stone. “Food’s all gone.”
This was what lay underneath all that control. And the realization of how much he’d been holding back around her settled in her stomach and stayed.
He picked up a shredded wrapper, swore under his breath, the word low and vicious in Russian.
“How long ago?”
“Recent. A day.” He slung his weapon over his shoulder and moved toward the door.
“Where are you going?”
“Perimeter.”
She dug her nails into her palms so she wouldn’t scream in frustration. “Perimeter?”
“I need to check the perimeter. Make sure they’re gone.” He was already halfway through the door, his body angled toward the trees, his attention no longer on her.
“Pav—”
The wrecked door banged shut.
She stood in the ransacked station as the tramp of his footsteps faded. Then there was nothing but the wind moaning through the cracked window and the creak of the building around her.
One minute passed. Then two. Silence thickened, pressing against her eardrums, filling the space where his presence had been.
He’d left.
What if he didn’t come back?
What if this was where the math finally failed?
One man with busted ribs and her in borrowed clothes with blistered feet and no useful skills beyond keeping people alive.
And Sasha was still dead.
Maybe he’d looked at the wrecked cache, done the calculation, and she’d come up expendable.
She shut it down. She was Harper Fox. She sure as hell didn’t sit in the dark and wait for someone to save her.
She searched the station, taking her time, fighting to be thorough, her brain shifting into triage mode.
Assess, prioritize, and work the problem.
The thieves had taken the food and the primary supplies, but they’d been sloppy.
She found what they’d missed or hadn’t wanted.
A half-empty box of waterproof matches in a corner, a dented tin mug.
A tarp, wadded into a ball and kicked behind a pile of debris.
A handful of thermal layers scattered across the floor—too big, men’s sizes, but dry and intact and warmer than anything she was wearing.
And finally, the pièce de résistance. A tin of sweetened condensed milk.
She built a fire in the old stove in the corner, remembering how Pav had worked so efficiently. Dry pine needles first. Thin twigs. Then thicker branches. Her hands were stiff and clumsy, and the first match guttered and died before the kindling caught. The second did the same.
She sat back on her heels and wiped her nose with her sleeve. Pav had crouched by the river, arranging pine needles with patience that seemed impossible given the cold.
Patience. Breath.
The third match held. The flame caught the pine needles and climbed to the twigs, and she fed it carefully, nursing the heat the way she’d coax a weak pulse—willing it to strengthen.
The flames took hold. Warmth bloomed through the small space, pushing back the damp and the cold, turning the concrete walls from hostile to merely grim.
She dragged the tarp near the stove and pulled on the thermal layers she’d found.
The sleeves hung past her fingertips, but the fabric was soft and warm against her grimy skin.
Her feet throbbed as sensation returned, each blister waking one by one.
Finally she settled close to the flames with the tin mug full of snow melting slowly in her hands.
She placed the tin of condensed milk close to the fire. She’d keep that for when he returned.
Because he would return. Right?
An hour passed.
The fire needed constant feeding. She rationed the wood, adding one twig at a time, refusing to let it burn too fast.
She melted snow. Drank. Melted more. The routine gave her something to hold onto.
The silence changed. Every groan of the building, every shift of wind through the broken window sounded like movement.
She checked the door more times than she cared to count. If he didn’t come back, she would die here. She hated that every calculation led back to him. And that the thought of him not coming back made her grip tighten on the tin mug until the cheap metal buckled under her fingers.
Another thirty minutes crawled past.
A sound outside. Boots on snow.
Her heart slammed against her ribs.
Could be Pav. Or the people who’d ransacked the cache coming back for what they’d missed. Could be the traffickers hunting her. Could be anyone.
She boosted to aching legs and grabbed the biggest of the logs she’d collected. She weighed the damp wood in her hand.
Heavy enough to do damage.
She positioned herself behind the door, her back flat against the wall. Whoever came through that door was going to regret it. The footsteps stopped outside. A pause that lasted a century. The handle moved—slowly, carefully, the mechanism grinding against rust and cold.
The door opened.
She swung.
The log jarred to such an abrupt stop her teeth clacked together.
His hand was around it, his face inches from hers. Snow dusted his hair and the faint cloud of his breath rose between them.
For a full second, neither of them moved. Her arms locked in the swing position, his hand on the log, her lungs seizing and his barely changed, as if the effort of catching a full-strength swing one-handed hadn’t even registered.
“You were going to hit me with a log.”
A gasp escaped her. “I didn’t know it was you.”
“Who else would it be?” His eyebrows knitted. Those impossible winter eyes should not belong to someone so infuriating.
“Anyone. Literally anyone.” Her voice cracked on the second word, and she hated it.
He swept the room in one glance—fire, tarp, water, her precious tin of condensed milk—cataloguing everything she’d done.
He released the log, and she lowered her arms burning from the aborted swing.
“What?” she snapped, because he was looking at her with an expression she couldn’t read.
He brought his other hand from behind his back.
An arctic hare. White-furred, limp. The pristine fur bright against his dark glove, one ear folded back.
She stared at it. Relief hit first—sharp and humiliating. “You went hunting.”
“We need to eat.”
“You were gone for over an hour.”
“I checked the perimeter, cut false sign toward the ridge.” He lifted the hare. “Then I hunted.”
“For over an hour?”
“They’re fast.” The corner of his mouth moved. Just barely.
The ghost of that almost-smile she’d caught by the fire, the one that transformed the stony geography of his face into something that made her forget, catastrophically, how to breathe.
He tossed it over his shoulder as he moved past her into the warmth, already pulling a knife from somewhere to deal with the hare. “Nice fire. You figured it out.”