A Night by My Fire

The kettle sang and moments later she reappeared with a steaming cup she tried to press into his hands. When he

made no move to take it, her grip came back to his cheek. Pinching his mouth open, caught between balancing the cup and trying to force him to drink, River fought him. He yanked on her wrist.

She yanked back.

A pained noise passed his lips even as she poured the hot liquid into his mouth. It had to burn all the way down. That was the point.

Choking on water heavily laced with honey, he trembled.

She tipped the cup up from the bottom and pressured him to drink more. “Swallow it all. It will help your core temperature rise.”

There was the warmth of water pouring down his face, not only from where the beverage spilled, but from his eyes. Tears.

He would have done almost anything she demanded at that point, falling into the delirium of hypothermia. Lost to her care, every last scalding drop was swallowed. When he was practically convulsing, her fingers gave him what he wanted. She pulled the drink away and let him breathe.

Standing over him, watching the great beast suck in air, she stepped out of the man’s reach.

He was furious even ill as he was, calculating something that made her wish she had left him floating in the lake.

It was his attention on her hair, the way he studied the two thick, messy braids hanging to her waist. She knew, with just one look that he fantasized about choking her with the ropes.

Almost superstitiously, she stroked her hands down his would-be murder weapon, brushing off some of the collected dirt.

River sneered.

Chapter Two

It wasn’t the discomfort of Stephen’s ankle that woke him, but that of his neck—angled back sharply atop an unfamiliar, lumpy couch. Sweating under coarse wool blankets, he fumbled at the cumbersome layers, exposing a damp chest to much cooler air. From the muddled inability to focus his eyes, he was certain the bitch had poisoned the drink she forced on him all through the night.

But the foul-mouthed woman was nowhere to be seen. There was no sound of shuffling feet. Her jacket was gone.

Pressing palms over raw eyelids did nothing to shut out the sharp memory of why he was there—the fall into the water... the pain. He should not have been alive. Those who had tried to kill him certainly would never have expected he might survive their treachery or that a filthy woman might have pulled him from the water.

The callousness one would expect from a disappointed employer... Stephen should have seen it coming. One low flying plane, one open door overlooking tundra, and one boot to the chest. All the while Stephen had just stood there, too dumbstruck to even flail when the man who had practically raised him shoved his body into freefall.

Mikhailov had thought it through... plotted. If the drop hadn’t killed Stephen, the encroaching inability to move once ice froze in his veins would assure fatality. He’d lay suffering for his failure where exposure, wild animals, or simple starvation would finish the job.

But his former boss hadn’t counted on unsolicited, stupid compassion.

It didn’t matter. Everything was lost.

And for what? For a single missed assassination after so many perfectly fulfilled assignments? For the target’s assistant to unexpectedly jumping in front of a well-aimed bullet when beyond all reckoning she saw him pull the gun?

Since boyhood, since Mikhailov had taken him from the orphanage, Stephen had followed every last rule, exceeded where others had failed... lived the demanding monastic lifestyle required of a dedicated soldier.

What was one failed mission?

Mikhailov said kill, he’d ripped the target to shreds with his bare hands. Mikhailov said steal, he’d dragged back twice as much as he’d been sent for. Mikhailov wanted interrogation, carnage, anything... Stephen had delivered.

Still, he’d been thrown to his death for a single mistake.

Abandoned.

He was nothing now. Purposeless.

The latch clicked, the cabin’s door swung in. The woman looked up briefly, stomping snow from her boots, and froze when she found him awake. In one arm was a basket of wet laundry, three fresh caught fish dangling from the fingers of the other.

Tossing the catch aside, she approached, a dark gaze running over his face for signs of sickness, softening to find the eyes that stared back at her were lucid. “Looks like the fever broke.”