Page 78 of A Killing Cold

His hand rises from her arm, lowers again, a helpless gesture. “Let’s go” is all he says, and then he’s drawing her out into the snow.I don’t have my coat, she wants to tell him, but she sees the look on his face and swallows down the words.

The snow is deep enough to catch at her legs. She has to take three strides to every one of his, and his grip on her wrist yanks her along, but she presses her lips together and doesn’t make a sound. His head swivels constantly. “This way,” he mutters sometimes.

The girl is getting tired—but it’s his steps that slow first. He stumbles, catches himself against a tree. He shakes his head, straightens up.

“Have to keep moving,” he says, and takes two steps.

And then he falls.

He tries to rise once, pushing himself up on one arm only to collapse again. He lies in the snow, face down, head turned to the side so she can see his eye, open only to a slit.

“Mr. Liam?” the girl says. “Mr. Liam. We can’t slow down.” She grabs his arm. She tugs on it. Tugs again. He isn’t getting up. She sinks down, kneeling beside him. She looks around. There’s no one else here. No one to tell her what to do, where to go.

The sun is almost gone. The woods are getting dark. Dark, and oh so cold.

She lies down beside him and waits for him to wake.

35

“He fell,” I whisper. The scraps have stitched themselves together. I was never afraid of him. Not really. He was the knight, not the ogre. We tried to get away. “Nick hurt her. Liam—he must have tried to help. That’s why he brought her here, to get away. But Nick found out where she was. He was there. I remember him standing there.”

Watching me die.

Connor’s hands are shaking. I still can’t seem to feel warm. “I told Mom about meeting you,” he says. “Dad told me to keep it a secret, but I slipped up. She must have told Nick. If he went up there—if Nick hit him and then Dad got away and got you, but then…”

A sound escapes me, like a cry of pain. Connor startles. I look at him, my vision blurring. “You believe me,” I say.

He pauses, but it’s not because it isn’t true. I can see him thinking it through—because he wants to be deliberate. He wants to be certain. And he wants both of us to know that he means it when he says, “I believe you.”

“And you didn’t know who I was,” I say.

“No, I had no idea.”

“And bringing me here wasn’t some kind of trap? To find out what I knew? If I was going to cause trouble?” I demand.

“No, of course not. I wasn’t even sure about bringing you, but Mom convinced me,” he says. “Not that I didn’t want you to come,” he adds quickly. “It’s just, my family can be a lot. Even without… all this.”

“But you found me. On the other side of the country. If you didn’t know…” How could it be a coincidence?

“Fate?” Connor suggests.

“I don’t believe in fate,” I say flatly.

He regards me, and for all the horror, there’s something like wonder in his eyes. “That day, all those years ago. We spent hours together, in the snow. You told me that you didn’t like the cold. That you wanted to go where it was always warm. I said you should live in Los Angeles. It’s where my mom is from, and it’s warm there all year long. You said you were going to move there and go to school for books—you said it like that, go to school for books because books are where they keep all the interesting stuff.”

I make a skeptical noise. “You think I moved to Los Angeles because you told me to?”

“Maybe,” Connor says.

“Los Angeles is a big place.”

“And I found you. Stumbled in off the street and there you were in black-and-white,” Connor says.

“So we’re back to fate.”

“It’s enough for me,” he says.

A strained laugh forces itself between my lips. “We should have just eloped.”

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