Chapter 23
Pav’s hand was in her hair. Her fingers were against his jaw. As if neither of them were ready to stop.
The northern lights faded above them in a slow, silent collapse.
His system fought to come back online. Assessment. Protocol. Next steps. The operational framework that had kept him alive for years reached for an anchor, but there was nothing there.
She’d broken something.
The compartments. Distance. Control.
Gone.
He could still taste her.
Fuck.
That was a problem.
He dropped his hand from her hair and stepped back, allowing the cold air to rush into the space between them. The sensation was familiar and reliable. Cold had protocols. He could work with cold.
“We should get inside.” His voice sounded almost normal. But Harper missed nothing and that was becoming dangerous.
Her face crumpled. A small, private collapse she tried to hide by dropping her gaze, followed by a sharp intake of breath pulled through her teeth. With a tiny nod, she turned toward the door.
His good hand curled into a fist at his side. He was a bastard, and he knew exactly why. He gritted his teeth and followed her in.
The fire was low in the stove, the embers pulsing a deep orange through the grate.
He crossed to it and fed in two lengths of broken shelving with a precision the task didn’t require.
He needed occupation, something, anything that wasn’t crossing the room and pulling her back against him and finishing what the northern lights had started.
The weight of her attention pressed between his shoulder blades. But he didn’t look at her. Looking at her was how this had started. One look and years of discipline had gone with it.
He cleared his throat, his voice coming from the other side of the wall he was rebuilding as fast as he could lay the bricks. “You should sleep. We leave at first light.”
She huffed a slow breath, choosing. The push or the retreat. She chose silence.
He was relieved, but also disappointed.
She lay down on the tarp near the warmth and pulled the survival blanket over herself. “Pav.”
He adjusted the stove's airflow as the intensity of her gaze burned his back. “Yeah?”
“Thank you. For the lights.”
He stared at the blackened metal of the stove. “Get some sleep.”
Quiet. The rustle of the blanket as she settled. The fire ticking in the grate. Then her breathing, slowing by degrees, the rhythm lengthening and deepening as exhaustion dragged her under.
Now he moved and sat with his back against the wall, rifle across his knees. Eyes on the door.
The package. That’s what she was.
He let the thought sit as he stared at the lick of the flames.
It didn’t hold.
A package didn’t kiss you under northern lights. Or throw your own words back at you with a sharpness that made you want to smile for the first time in years.
He pressed the heel of his good hand against his eyes until he saw static. His head wound throbbed, deep and persistent, keeping time with the thoughts he was trying to outrun.
Focus. The border was almost sixty miles southwest—he pulled the terrain from memory, the contours and elevations and choke points mapping themselves behind his closed eyelids.
Two hard days on foot if the weather held and his body cooperated.
And that was if the men hunting them had been sufficiently discouraged by the wolf pack’s territorial dispute with their tracking dogs.
Fox and Zak would be at the rendezvous. Handoff. Extraction complete. Mission done. And then what?
Nothing was waiting for him.
Nothing he hadn’t chosen.
The thought surfaced and refused to drown.
He could still feel her mouth on his. The softness, tentative at first, giving him room to retreat, and then the moment the gentleness had burned away, replaced by something he hadn’t felt in so long that he’d forgotten the shape of it.
The sound she’d made against his lips—soft, involuntary.
It had reached past every wall he’d built and found the man behind them.
And when he closed his eyes, the future wasn’t the border and the next job. It was something else.
Waking with her beside him.
Soft with sleep. Her hand on his wrist for no reason at all.
He opened his eyes and glared at the door.
He couldn’t do this. Not here. Not with miles of hostile terrain between them and safety and armed men behind hunting them.
Even if some part of him had already started.
He checked the rifle across his knees. Magazine. Chamber. Safety. The ritual steadied him.
She was the mission and the mission was all that mattered. Keep her alive. Get her to the border. Don’t let whatever happened under the northern lights compromise the objective.
He watched the door, not Harper.
Twenty minutes passed. She hadn’t moved, her breathing steady and slow. Deep sleep. The kind that wouldn’t break easily.
He stood, checked his weapon one last time, and slipped outside.
The cold hit him like absolution. Clean, sharp, stripping away the warmth of the station and the smell of her hair and the memory of her mouth.
His lungs filled with air that tasted of resin and ice and nothing human, and for a moment the familiar machinery clicked back into place, and he was just a man doing a perimeter check in hostile territory and everything else was noise.
He moved through the assessment on autopilot. Entry points—one door, one window, both covered. Sightlines—clear to the treeline on three sides, the fourth blocked by a snow-covered equipment shed. Approach routes—south through the forest, east along the ridge, both visible from the door.
Snow had continued to fall, a persistent accumulation filling their tracks with white silence. No sounds of pursuit. No movement in the trees. The sky was vast and black overhead, scattered with stars so dense they looked like frost on dark glass.
The northern lights had faded to a faint green shimmer. The ghost of what they’d been. The ghost of what he’d allowed.
The wound on his chest prickled under the dressing. He scratched it through his shirt without breaking stride. Irritation, sweat. Perfectly normal.
He filed it and de-prioritized it.
He completed the perimeter. Everything was secure and quiet. He should go back inside. He stood in the snow instead, head tilted up to the sky. The last traces of the aurora thinning to nothing, green bleeding into dark, the stars reclaiming the night one degree at a time.
Three seconds.
He let it in.
All of it.
The kiss. The taste of her. The sound she made against his mouth.
His walls coming down, not brick by brick but all at once, the way a structure fails when the load exceeds the design—total, catastrophic, irreversible.
The feeling of standing in open ground with no cover and nothing between him and the thing he’d avoided since his brother died.
The possibility of caring about someone enough to lose them.
Three seconds. It moved through him—hot, enormous, ungovernable.
Something that lived beneath the training and the discipline and everything he’d built on top of the man he’d been before.
Before the SEALs. Before he’d learned that the safest way to survive was to never let anything matter enough to hurt.
A shape moved between the trees, detaching itself from the deeper darkness of the forest. The wolf stood at the edge of the clearing.
Alone—not the alpha from the pack earlier, but smaller, leaner, its winter coat thick and silver-tipped in the starlight. Yellow eyes caught the faint glow of the dying aurora, fixed on him with an attention that carried no aggression.
It studied him but didn’t approach. Two creatures built for the cold and the dark, standing at the edge of something neither of them trusted.
The wolf turned, disappeared into the trees without a sound, gone between one blink and the next. Pav scratched his chest, then checked the treeline one final time before he went back inside.
The fire had burned to a low, steady glow, the embers casting the room in shades of amber and shadow. The air was thick with woodsmoke and warmth and the quiet sound of Harper breathing.
He crossed to where she lay and lowered himself onto the tarp behind her, easing down on his good side, his injured arm secure against his chest in the makeshift sling.
Between her and the door. The position he’d taken the night before—his body placed between a threat and the person it was his job to shield.
Except after the kiss, it wasn’t just that anymore.
And he didn’t have a better explanation.
He pulled the edge of the blanket over himself. Her warmth hit him immediately, soaking through his shirt into the bruised and battered bones of his ribs.
She shifted in her sleep, a small unconscious movement, her back pressing into him as if her body had decided about him while her mind was elsewhere.
His breath hitched.
His brow came to rest against her hair.
It wasn’t an embrace. Not even close. Just the angle his body had settled into. The only position that didn’t pull at his shoulder or grind his ribs.
Her hair carried hints of smoke and river water.
He breathed in. Then again.
Sharing was the most efficient use of the blanket. It had nothing to do with wanting her closer.
Nothing.
Yeah. Whatever, Morozov.
He closed his eyes.
The list of things he wasn’t thinking about had grown longer than the list of things he was.
He shut it all down.
But it didn’t hold. Not where she was concerned.