Chapter 25
The wolf became our shadow. It loped behind us, even as the incline became grueling and the hours tracked on. It followed when the temperature dropped and the winds became heavier, battering us with cold, and it was still there when the first tuft of white floated down from the sky.
I watched the icy speck land on my horse’s neck, where it promptly disappeared. Turning my face upward, my breath caught.
A flurry of delicate flakes rode the air like feathers, sweeping left and right as they dropped. They were the purest white, blindingly bright against the smoke-colored clouds above, dancing in the sky from every direction.
“First snow?” Harthon asked. Like me, gloves now protected his hands and he wore a heavier cloak, the hood pulled over his head.
“It’s beautiful,” I said, voice full of wonder. A flake landed on my nose, kissing it with cold. “I didn’t realize snowfall could still happen.”
The Domus had made the world gray and cool. The weather was consistently gloomy, never leaning toward extremes, never giving us anything as wondrous as this. I’d seen beauty in that butterfly, in the greenery of Harthon’s garden, but I didn’t know it could still come from the skies above.
“The mountains are one of the only places that retained some traits from before the Domus. I imagine it’s the elevation,” he shared.
The flakes landing on his cloak managed to hold their form for a second before melting, like they wanted to lend him some of their beauty before they died.
A smile played across his lips as he observed me from beneath his hood.
I brushed a snowflake from my eye. “What?”
“I think showing you this world may be one of my favorite things to do.”
“It has to be annoying. Me not knowing anything.” Domus knew it was annoying to me.
He responded with a leisurely shake of his head. “It’s a gift, being the one to share all this with you—getting to see that look in your eyes every time you discover something new.”
The humming in my chest had nothing to do with the heat there. Harthon already tangled my insides into addictive shapes. When he was sweet?
It made my heart throb, like it wanted to leap out of my chest into his hands. Like it belonged to him.
Maybe it already does.
The thought rocked me, because it felt entirely right.
Before I could analyze it further, my horse jerked to a stop. Harthon had grabbed the reins, face hard. “Stay on the horse this time,” he demanded.
I followed his line of vision to a large tree, beside which a burlap lump was being swallowed by snowflakes. It could easily have been mistaken for a mound of dirt.
He and Aric dismounted in tandem, weapons in hand, and cautiously crept toward it. Harthon reached it first and toed it with his boot. When it didn’t move, he grasped the top and pulled. A pile of bones sat on the ground. By the shape of the skull, they were human.
His attention wasn’t fixated on the skull, though, but the side of the pile. He crouched, fingering something, muttering words I couldn’t hear to Aric. He stood, and the two of them studied the ground around them.
With more caution than before, they returned, troubled expressions across their faces.
Harthon put his weapon away and swung onto his horse. “From here on out, unless we’re under attack, no one here steps down from their horse without our signal first.”
I looked at the pile of bones, which Harthon had covered again with the burlap. “What did you find?”
“A trap,” he said grimly. “Whoever that was, they stepped in one, and were left to die in the elements.”
Well, that was ominous. “Why would they have been left here? You set traps to capture something. Not to leave it.”
It was Aric who responded. “My guess? It’s an old trap that was forgotten by people who used to live here.
That tells us two important things.” He cut me a look from atop his horse, eyes dark.
“One, there are probably more old traps here for us to step on. And two, these people like to set traps big and strong enough to capture humans. Just because these people have changed locations doesn’t mean their habits would. ”
If I hadn’t spent so much time trapping animals myself, I might wonder how he knew those traps were meant for humans.
But small game—which was the majority of available food for the last fifteen or twenty years—required lighter traps.
Spring them too heavily, and a rabbit would turn into a pulverized mess.
Either these people were terrible trappers, or they had specific prey in mind. The human-shaped kind.
Nerves pricked along the back of my neck. “Do you think the wolf will step in one?”
“If it’s smart, it’ll follow our tracks,” Harthon said. “Any traps will likely get our horses first.”
I didn’t want that to happen, either. But with the snow beginning to coat the ground, it would be nearly impossible to spot any traps until we were on top of them.
“Hopefully that was the only one they forgot,” I said, like speaking it aloud might make it true.
Not an hour later, we’d fallen into a miserable silence as we trudged onward and upward, snow covering the world in a thin blanket of white. I was wondering how we’d stay warm tonight when, for a second, I thought my horse lost its footing.
But then it squealed—haunting, guttural sounds—and collapsed. I fell from the saddle, rolling away before its muscled body crushed me.
Instantly, I knew.
Harthon reached my side with unnatural speed, eyes frantic as he turned me onto my back and ran his hands over my body. After I caught my breath and reassured him I was fine, he examined the horse and confirmed what I already guessed with one bleak shake of his head.
A boulder sank in my gut. My horse’s front leg was crushed in a brutal trap. The noises the animal made…I couldn’t bear them.
“We can’t repair this, and it won’t survive up here,” Aric stated sullenly, producing a blade.
My ears started ringing. I nodded.
He did it quickly. I couldn’t watch, but I heard it—the sudden, eerie quiet.
That boulder grew heavier.
We couldn’t afford to dwell on it. I woodenly mounted Harthon’s stallion and tried to find comfort in his warmth as he came behind me, arms encircling me as he caught the reins.
“If we lose another, we turn around,” Aric said.
No one disagreed.
We didn’t lose any more horses or the wolf for the remainder of the day—only every ounce of heat I held in my body, save for the sphere radiating in my chest. By the time night fell, we’d nearly made it through an upper pass on the mountain and officially set foot in First.
A few small boulders provided our shelter for the night, shielding us from the worst of the wind.
While the snow had stopped, the wet ground and chill of the air were unrelenting.
There was no fire to temper the cold. No one was known to live this high in the mountains, but neither Aric nor Harthon wanted to risk a flame.
I spent the night wrapped in Harthon’s arms, trying to focus on his heat rather than the frosty air in my lungs.
The soft kisses he’d planted behind my ear were a pleasant distraction.
I awoke from a dead sleep to more snowfall, the sky still dark.
Harthon crouched over me, appearing even more hulking than usual with his extra layers. He took my hand and peeled away the glove. “Wiggle your fingers.”
I moved them, muscles stiff, joints aching.
He replaced the glove before repeating the process with my other hand. “Can you feel your toes?”
“Yes.” Between the wool socks and leather boots, my feet were better insulated than my hands. “If I couldn’t feel them or move my fingers, what would that mean?”
“Frostbite,” he answered, tugging my other glove back on. “It means your skin is frozen and dead.”
It really was incredible how many ways there were for a person to suffer.
He flicked my nose. “Feel this?”
I batted his hand away. “Was that necessary?”
“Yes.” His mouth quirked. “I wouldn’t want to see this lovely nose of yours cut away.”
My lips twisted at that mental image.
He nodded to his horse. “Time to move.” The others were already in their saddles, horses snuffing impatiently.
Standing up was a lesson in pain management, the stiffness from my fingers extending to the rest of my body. “You shouldn’t have let me sleep in. I could have helped with the horses.” Even the wolf had woken before me, its vigilant stare on me as I forced my weak limbs to pull me into the saddle.
Harthon came up behind me. “I know you can help. But you don’t need to.”
Annoyance zinged through me. “And I don’t need you to take things easier on me.” I leaned on him enough. I needed to hold my own where I could.
“You think that just because we’ve laid together means I’ll take things easy on you?” Skies, how he got right to the point.
“Is that not true?”
“What we did in that bed changed nothing.”
I stiffened at the harsh phrasing. I mean, it’d changed some things.
He brought his head to my ear and clarified. “Because whether or not you let me inside of you, carella, I have always been determined to protect you, and I have always admired and respected your strength. None of those things have changed.”
My spine relaxed. “There’s a but.”
His lips brushed the shell of my ear as he said, “But protecting you sometimes means stopping you from running yourself into the ground just to prove your strength.”
All my tension ratcheted back up. “Some of us do not have a reputation to lean on.”
“But you do, with me. And you know I don’t give respect freely.”
No, he didn’t.
He lightly nipped my ear lobe. “I want you healthy and safe, carella. And I don’t mind battling you for that.”
“I think all your victories have made you over-confident.”
“Perhaps.” I could hear the grin in his voice as he said, “Or maybe it’s that I enjoy a good challenge, as I’ve told you before.” He drew away. “But we can battle another day. For now, we need silence.”
Cocky, arrogant man.
With the thread of frustration I still felt, it was easy to stay mute.
Descending the mountainside proved more difficult than yesterday’s climb. The thin layer of snow capping the ground hampered our speed and made steep drops more treacherous. The white also made us stand out against the slopes, which was why Aric kept us to the densest trees.
We’d just reached dry, snowless ground when he signaled to stop. “This is the last true rest we’ll have until we reach your path into the Domus,” he informed us quietly. “Enjoy it while it lasts.”
We packed away our heavy layers of clothes as Harthon distributed dried meat, cheese, and bread. In the context of travel, it was a feast, which meant he expected it to be our only meal for the foreseeable future.
Stefano, Joris, and I ate in silence while Aric spoke to Harthon and Conrad in hushed tones. He made his way over to us and lithely crouched down.
“From this moment forward, this is how it will go,” Aric started, tone implacable.
“You will do everything I say. You will not act independently. You will not make your own decisions.” He leveled me with his gaze.
“And you will not blatantly ignore a direct order, unless you want yourself or others here to die.”
I bristled at the pointed orders.
“This is not your Territory. It is not my Territory. It is a place that doesn’t play by any of our rules.
If you want any hope of making it out of here in one whole piece, you will not deviate from my lead.
I’m not dying for you, and I’m not putting myself at risk to save you because of some reckless decision. Understand?”
I allowed myself a final moment to brood before stiffly nodding. Aric was the expert here—or, as expert as one could be in such a wild place. Clearly, Harthon agreed. No amount of pride could make me argue with these facts.
Satisfied he’d made his point, he strode away. In his place, the wolf’s intelligent eyes remained fixated on me from a short distance away. Saliva dripped from its maw as I brought a piece of meat to my mouth.
I paused.
Then I smiled. Aric was going to hate this.
Setting my remaining bread and cheese aside, I stood and slowly approached the animal, holding the meat out like a peace offering.
The ridges of its ribs grew sharper as I neared, evidence it was living on borrowed time.
I paused ten paces away, wondering if it might lunge for the food, aware this was still a wild animal with very sharp teeth.
But just like yesterday, it sat on its hind legs. There was a pulse of gentle heat in my chest, and I…I wanted to know.
One step at a time, I crept forward. The wolf didn’t tense or twitch. Harthon’s sharp attention was a weight on my body, but with our need for silence, he couldn’t call out to stop me. He could rush me, sure, but we both knew that might spook the wolf into attacking.
So it was just me and this animal, this predator that was so much more than that. It was survival and untamed nature. A piece of life the Domus hadn’t been able to siphon away.
Two paces away, I could make out the rivers of gold and brown in its eyes, which watched me with a shrewd knowledge. Or maybe I was reading too far into it, searching for a connection that wasn’t there. One more step, and—
A bloodcurdling scream pierced the air, ripping the delicate moment in two with brutal hands.