Chapter 24
Wan morning light leaked through the grubby windows, turning the concrete room the color of old bone, but Harper was warm.
For a second, she didn’t understand it.
Warmth meant something had slipped, that danger had moved while she slept.
Her pulse kicked.
Then she felt him.
His chest pressed to her back, rising and falling in a slow, steady rhythm her nervous system recognized before her mind did. Heat soaked into her spine, her ribs, the backs of her thighs—every place he touched.
She didn’t move.
Instead, she let herself have it. One breath. Two.
His breath ghosted against her neck, gentle against skin that had known nothing but cold for days. She’d curved into him in her sleep, as if her body had simply gone where it wanted to go.
Toward him. Always toward him.
Her brain caught up.
The kiss. The northern lights burning overhead. His hand in her hair. The moment he’d given in—just long enough for her to feel it—before he’d shut it down and rebuilt his defenses in real time.
We should get inside.
His voice stripped clean of everything that had been in his eyes seconds before.
She lay motionless and tried to reconcile the two versions of him. The man who’d kissed her like restraint was a losing battle. And the one who’d walked away from it like it meant nothing.
He’d wanted it. She hadn’t imagined that. She’d felt it in every line of his body, every shift of muscle, the way control had snapped and something deeper had taken over.
And then he’d buried it.
She understood why.
They were being hunted. Survival came first.
He was right. God, she hated that he was right.
She shifted. His body tensed for a fraction, then loosened as he woke. They separated with the careful precision of two people pretending the proximity was accidental.
“Morning,” she said. Because silence felt worse. She ran her fingers through her hair, trying to tug it into some semblance of tidiness.
“Morning.” He was already moving—rolling the tarp, feeding their small fire, out the door for a perimeter sweep without a glance back.
Always the goddamn perimeter.
The man who’d swayed with her to scratchy radio music and murmured Russian words for blue was packed away with everything else.
His body operated like a machine tuned to exact tolerances.
Except—
A beat too slow when he turned toward the door. A faint sheen of sweat along his hairline. Something was off this morning. Not just physical. Controlled—but thinner. Like something underneath was costing him.
She noted it but said nothing. He’d tell her he was fine, and it wasn’t relevant.
Her stomach cramped but there was no food left. The energy bar was gone. The condensed milk a memory.
Pav melted snow in the tin mug and handed it to her. His fingers brushed hers. Too brief to matter. Too deliberate to ignore.
She drank her water, and then it was time to move.
Pav led.
The forest pressed in around them, dense and muffled, branches heavy with snow bending low enough to choke the sky. Sound didn’t carry here—just the steady crunch of her boots, the soft exhale of her breath turning to fog, the occasional crack of a branch giving way under weight.
He pushed the pace.
Not as hard as yesterday—but close enough that her feet complained with every step. Her skin was raw and wet inside her boots, but she ignored it and kept up.
An hour in, something changed.
Nothing obvious, but his breathing altered. A fraction faster and less controlled. His walk had lost its usual economy. She narrowed her eyes at his back. “Pav.”
“Yeah.”
“How are you feeling?”
“Fine.”
She stared at him. “Your breathing’s changed.”
He glanced over his shoulder, eyebrows raised. “We’re walking uphill.”
She pushed through the burn in her lungs. “You walked uphill yesterday, no problem.”
He said nothing and walked on. He didn’t look back or adjust his pace.
Infuriating man.
She let it go—not because she believed him, but because the slope was steepening and breath was currency she couldn’t afford to waste.
Ten minutes later he halted. The trees thinned and the ground dropped away. She stopped dead.
A gorge split the mountainside open—steep, jagged, the bottom swallowed by shadow. It wasn’t wide but it was deep enough that one wrong step would end it.
Ice glazed the rocks along the rim, turning the surface treacherous.
Her stomach dropped and she hugged her waist, scanning left and right. “Can we go around?”
His mouth flattened. “We don’t have time.”
He moved along the edge, reading the land with expert eyes. “I’ll go first. Follow my line.”
Her breath came sharp in her throat. “I don’t know if I can do this.”
He looked at her. “You can.”
No reassurance or comfort. Only certainty. Damn him.
He swung over the edge and started down, each step placed with his now familiar precision. Weight committed only when the footing proved itself. The body of a man who knew exactly what it could do.
Except something was off. He was a fraction too slow correcting.
Her heart stuttered. “Pav—”
He tested an ice-crusted rock, balancing his weight. With one arm trapped in the sling, the correction came late.
His boot slid.
“Pav—”
For a fraction of a second he was still upright—balance gone, control obliterated—
The mountain took him.
It wasn’t clean. His body hit the frozen ground, then again, the slope taking him, throwing him down in a brutal, grinding tumble. Rock. Ice. Frozen earth. The sound of impact brutal and awful against the mountain silence.
“Pav!”
She scrambled over the edge before the scream finished tearing out of her.
Half-climbing, half-falling. Her hands scraped for holds that weren’t there. Ice gouged her palms. Her boots skidded and she slammed into the slope, caught a root, toppled forward.
Don’t think. Move.
Thorns tore at her skin and branches whipped her face—heat, then wet—but it didn’t matter. Nothing mattered except the dark heap at the bottom.
He wasn’t moving.
No. No.
She hit the ground on her knees and crawl-stumbled the last distance across rock dusted with grit and ice.
“Pav—”
He was on his back, arm free of his sling. Eyes open, blinking at the sky.
He’s alive.
Relief hit so hard it bordered on pain—caustic enough to morph into anger.
Thank God. He’s alive.
Blood spotted his hair—fresh and bright, welling through the stitches she’d placed. His breathing was ragged.
But he was conscious. When she skidded to her knees beside him, his gaze was unfocused for a second before it tried to sharpen. “You should see the other guy.”
Her chest tightened.
Idiot.
She wanted to hit him and kiss him at the same time. Instead she pressed her hand to his forehead. Heat scorched her palm. Burning heat that was nothing to do with adrenaline or exertion.
“Pav… you’re burning up.”
“I’m fine.” He batted her hand away.
She caught hold of his wrist, locating his pulse with her fingertips. Way too fast.
“You have a fever. I need to see the wound on your chest.”
“It’s nothing.”
She shot him a look. Nothing didn’t feel like this. “I’m checking it.”
She unbuttoned his collar but he grabbed her hand.
His eyes were glassy, focus slipping in and out like a signal dropping. When he spoke, the words dragged, thick and misaligned. “Not here, Harper. Not… we can’t—”
She stared at him.
It took a second. Then it landed.
He thought she was—
Jeez. Heat flared up her throat. “Pav. I’m checking your wound. That’s all.”
“Oh.”
A slow blink. Like it took effort to process.
“Right.” His mouth tipped into something that might have been a grin on any other man. On him it looked disjointed. He waved his acquiescence. “Go ahead.”
Her stomach dropped. If Pav—controlled and impossible to wrong-foot—was misreading her like this, then this was already bad.
Worse than bad.
She freed her hand from his grip and pushed his shirt open.
The wound had turned.
The butterfly strips she’d placed were lifting at the edges, the adhesive failing against heat and sweat.
The skin beneath was angry—red and swollen, radiating heat into her fingertips.
The laceration itself was weeping cloudy fluid, the edges soft and angry.
Faint red lines branched outward from the wound, tracking beneath the skin in thin, creeping paths.
No.
She sucked in a breath to steady her voice. “Pav. How long has it been like this?”
“It itched.”
Like that explained everything.
She swallowed hard, forced her hands to still as she assessed the heat, the swelling, the spread.
“Pav. Your wound is infected.”
His gaze drifted. “Hmmm?” He came back, slipped again.
“It’s spreading,” she continued, voice sharper now. “You need antibiotics. Without them this becomes sepsis.” She met his gaze. “Sepsis will kill you. Do you understand?”
For a second, he came back to her.
Clear. Focused. The elite operator cutting through the fever.
“There’s a town.” His voice was gravel, dragged up from somewhere deeper than the fever. “Eight klicks east.”
“Klicks?”
“Kilometers.” He swallowed, Adam’s apple bobbing with the effort. “Five miles. We can make it.”
Like failure wasn’t part of the plan.
Even if his body had other ideas.