Page 44 of Break For Me
The release comes quiet. A shudder. A deep clenching in my abdomen. A spill of heat across my knuckles that I catch in the hem of my shirt. My vision whites out for two seconds. I breathe through my nose. I hold completely still. Adrian doesn't stir.
The shame arrives immediately. A black tide that rolls in behind the pleasure. I used his body. Not his body—his proximity. His weight against me. The idea of him.
But the proximity was not offered for this. It was offered for warmth. For survival. I took something that was given as medicine and turned it into something else entirely.
I pull my hand free. I wipe it on my shirt. I adjust my waistband. The evidence disappears. The shame doesn't.
I tighten my arm around him. I hold him against the cold. And I don't sleep.
The sky lightens.The grey behind the snow goes from charcoal to ash to a pale, flat white. The snow has stopped. The accumulation is four inches—a clean, unbroken blanket of white.
Adrian stirs against me. His body tenses. The moment of waking. The rapid processing of data. He feels me. He feels my arms wrapped around him. He feels the configuration of his body against mine and the logical conclusion of what that means.
He goes very still.
"Morning," I say.
He sits up. The cold air hits the space where his body was. The absence is a physical thing—a hole in the heat map. He puts on his glasses. Adjusts them on his nose. His face is neutral. Composed. The wall has been rebuilt.
"Killian?"
"Breathing. Stable."
He nods. He reaches for his medical bag. The routine engages. Vitals. Dressing. Drain. The clinical machinery resumes its function. The man who slept against my chest retreats behind the surgeon. The surgeon doesn't look at me.
I stand up. My joints scream. My left hand is a fist of heat inside its bandage. I straighten to my full height and look out at the white world below.
The hillside is pristine. Four inches of fresh powder, completely unbroken. The trees are frosted. The silence is absolute.
Except.
Twenty yards down the slope, emerging from behind a stand of pine, a line of dark depressions breaks the perfect surface. Boot prints. Deep, evenly spaced. The tread pattern is crisp in the fresh snow. They come from the east, follow the contour of the hill, and pass within forty feet of our overhang before continuing north along the ridge.
They are fresh. Made during the night. Made while we slept.
Someone walked past us in the dark. Someone close enough to hear us breathing.
I count the prints. Two sets. Parallel. Moving with the disciplined spacing of men who have been trained to sweep terrain. They didn't find us—the overhang is obscured by rock and brush. But they were here.
The hunt has moved from vehicles to foot.
I step back under the overhang. Garrett is already awake, reading the expression on my face.
"Two sets of tracks," I say. "East to north. Military spacing. They passed us during the snow."
Adrian looks up from checking Killian’s vitals. His face is still composed, but his hands have stopped moving. He heard me. He understands.
I pick up the Makarov. I check the magazine. Four rounds. I took six from the hallway. I’ve fired none. But four is what I have, because the spare magazine was in the truck, and the truck is a dead machine at the bottom of this hill.
Four rounds. Two enemies confirmed. An unknown number of them somewhere behind us. A post-surgical patient who can't walk. A surgeon who can't fight. A medic with a shotgun and twelve remaining shells.
I look at Adrian. He looks at me. His hands resume their work on the blood pressure cuff. Steadier now. The mechanic, working.
"Pack up," I say. "We move."
The snow stretches below us. White and vast and no longer empty.
Chapter Thirteen
