Total pages in book: 49
Estimated words: 48039 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 240(@200wpm)___ 192(@250wpm)___ 160(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 48039 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 240(@200wpm)___ 192(@250wpm)___ 160(@300wpm)
“You okay?” Axel throws the words over his shoulder without looking back.
“Fine,” I lie.
“Sav—”
“Move,” I say, because the longer we stand still the more heat Evan loses, and the more time I spend staring at the notch to my left where one misstep is a fall I can’t solve.
We move. We make the next switchback. And then it happens.
The ice under my right boot looks like snow. It isn’t.
I step.
The ground goes.
I don’t scream—only because there’s no time. The world tilts. The ledge below yawns like a mouth.
And then Axel is there.
I don’t see him move. One instant I’m losing; the next I’m slammed into a wall of heat and muscle and breath. He grabs the back strap of my pack with one hand and the trunk of a scrubby pine with the other, body twisting with brutal economy. The rope burns across his forearm where his sleeve hitches. He grunts once, low and violent, and wrenches us back to the trail like he decided gravity works for him now.
My boots find purchase. I shove into him without thinking, both hands fisting in his jacket. We’re fused chest to chest, breath to breath. The world shrinks to the thud of his heart under my palms and the clipped, savage sounds he makes when he’s terrified and furious at the same time.
“Savannah,” he says, voice shredded. “Are you hurt?”
“I’m okay,” I manage.
He doesn’t believe me until his hands verify it, sliding quick and competent down my arms to my wrists, my ribs, my hips, hard enough to reassure, careful enough not to take anything I’m not offering. Heat rolls off him like a furnace. The cold doesn’t exist while he’s touching me. Nothing exists except pressure and breath and the way my body answers his without permission.
“Ax.” My voice is unreliable. “We’re good.”
He swears under his breath in Spanish, a word I’ve heard him say three times in my life: when his sister spun out on black ice in ninth grade, when my father’s heart stopped for nine seconds in the ambulance, and right now.
Captain coughs pointedly, not unkind. “Lovers’ quarrel later. Downhill now.”
Axel releases me, but not all the way; his palm stays at the back of my pack for the next fifty yards like he doesn’t trust the trail not to eat me if he blinks. I don’t tell him to stop. I like the feel of his hand there too much. I like the implicit claim in it. I hate that I like it. I keep moving.
The lot appears like a miracle. We load Evan into the ambulance, crank the heat, start warm fluids. His numbers climb, grudgingly. His face slowly loses the death shadow.
“Ride with him,” Axel says, and I don’t argue. He knows what I am in the back of a rig: stubborn enough to wrestle a body out of the dark. He also knows exactly how the inside of that box messes with me when our past is breathing down my neck.
I climb in. The doors close. The world becomes white noise and warm air and the measured beeps that let my shoulders drop a centimeter. I keep my hands moving, my words steady, the blanket tucked like it’s a promise I’m not breaking.
Through the small window, I watch Axel in the passenger seat of the engine pacing us down, eyes flicking to the mirror like he’s willing the ambulance to get there faster. Every time he looks back, he finds me. Every time I find him, my pulse does something that isn’t professional.
Devil’s Peak General swallows us and spits us back out twenty minutes later, Evan alive and cussing about pancakes. Captain claps his shoulder and promises him a lecture about jackets when he’s discharged. I wash my hands at the sink until the sting of the scrub matches the sting under my skin.
When I push out into the evening air, Axel is waiting on the side of the bay, one shoulder to brick, head tipped up like the sky wrote something he’s trying to memorize.
He straightens when he sees me. The look he gives me is not casual. It’s the kind of look that strips you to the bone.
“You okay?”
I nod that I am.
“You’re sure?” he says. No preamble. No flirting. Just the thing that matters.
“I’m sure.” My voice comes out low. “Thanks to you.”
His jaw ticks. He stares past me toward the ridge, eyes going dark in that way that says he’s replaying a dozen angles and none of them end with me on my feet.
“Axel.”
He looks at me. I step closer and stop where his heat touches my face.
“I had it until I didn’t. You had me when I didn’t. Thank you.”
His throat works. “Don’t make me watch that again.”
The words hit deeper than they should. I hear everything he didn’t say under them: I can’t lose you. Not like that. Not like anything.