Page 25 of This Frozen Heart

“You mean where you stabbed me?”

She gapes at me before giggling again.

“Don’t worry about it,” I assure her. “It will heal on—”

Gerta ignores me— which is not atypical— and unravels a scarf from her neck.

I watch as she wraps it around my wound. “That’s hardly sanitary.”

“I’m just trying to staunch the wound. We can worry about infections later.”

“Easy words for the one not at risk of losing an arm.”

Gerta rolls her eyes as she leans closer, wrapping her arms around me to tighten her makeshift bandage. The wound should remind me of the fact thatshe’sthe one who afflicted it. Instead, the proximity reminds me of when Gerta and I were still closer.

I’m almost so distracted, I don’t notice a hand reaching into the pouch on my belt.

I grasp her wrist. “Do you really think I’m delirious enough not to notice your touch?” I pause. That didn’t sound quite right . . .

Gerta blinks rapidly at me, like she wasn’t expecting those words from me either.

And then the ground rumbles.

“What . . .” I turn and get my answer in the form of a great deal of white moving down the path we took, charging toward us and growing in size.

Turning from my belt, Gerta’s eyes widen. “Avalanche!”

Chapter Thirteen

Gerta

Ihave lived in the Gaelic wilds for years. Yet, it isn’t until I ran into the one boy from my past I didn’t need to see again that my homeland tries so passionately to kill me. Probably because it’s trying to snuff out his traitorous life.

Unfortunately, I happen to be chained to the returned expatriate, so . . .

Kay turns from the sight of the rage tumbling down the mountain toward us and strides back to the ledge.

I force my feet deeper into the snow to anchor myself. “Oh, no, we’re not jumping off another cliff.”

“We are, actually.”

“Oh, no, no, no, no—”

“There’s a smaller ledge beneath this outlook where we could stand, and the outlook would shelter us.”

“There has to be another way.”

Kay snorts, and I’m surprised that his unflappable façade has fallen away for the moment. “There’s nowhere to run, and if we stay here, we will be either buried alive or swept away— or both.”

I narrow my eyes. Then I slide to the edge beside him and glance down.

Just as Kay said, there is a ledge beneath the cliff ledge just big enough for two people to stand on. The ledge itself looks fairly thick. It will probably stay in place when the avalanche pours down on it. Otherwise, it will crush us both.

“This is a bad plan,” I whisper. “We should just run for it.”

Kay looks back at me and raises an eyebrow.

I sigh. “Well, let’s just figure out how to get down there without dying while we’re trying to survive.”

---