Page 28 of The Bratva's Innocent Pregnant Bride
Whenever we came to a clearing, Dan tried his phone again, but due to the storm there was still no signal. “Did you tell anyone where you’d be this morning?” he asked. When I shook my head, he nodded briskly. “Neither did I. But the lift operators know we went out.”
People would eventually begin a search party for us, and anyone else unlucky enough to get caught out in this mess, but if we didn’t find shelter soon, or if the harsh wind and snow didn’t ease up, they’d only be finding our frozen corpses.
“Stop worrying,” he said. “I’m from Moscow, remember? I know my way around a snow storm.”
He had the audacity to smile at me, even with his lips turning blue and the tips of his ears bright red because he’d given me his hat. I shouldn’t have goaded him. Now I was getting him killed. I pushed past him, traipsing onward, shoving aside the anger at myself and trying to get it back on him where it belonged.
We came to the other side of the forest, faced with nothing but a vast expanse of white, interspersed with harsh, rocky uprisings. Tears welled in my eyes as I grabbed his hand to keep him from continuing on and getting lost in the swells. There was a brief moment of heat on my cheeks before the tears froze and I swiped them away.
“We can’t go out in that,” I said, throat raw from the cold.
We had to have been wandering in that forest for more than an hour. The storm was nowhere near abating, and in fact it was only getting worse. I looked up at him, about to say we should turn back and look for a fallen tree to hunker downunder. To my astonishment, he was still smiling, looking off into the distance.
He raised his arm, pointing, pulling on my hand to face me in the direction he wanted me to look. As I squinted through the wall of white, I saw a vague, brown outline when the wind blew a path through the falling snow.
“That’s a house,” he said, pulling me close and wrapping his arm around me to stop my shivers, brought on by hopeless fear as well as cold. “Don’t let go. We’re going to make it.”
We sank up to our shins with every step and had to fight against the howling wind. Every few feet, Dan would stop and find the outline again, getting ever nearer despite seeming like we were being pushed backwards.
It felt like I’d been slogging through wet cement for days but we finally came up to the building. It was an old ranger shack that looked like it had been unused for quite a while, but the roof was sound and the walls were sturdy. Dan managed to break in and hustled me inside, following close behind me and slamming the door against the raging gusts of snow trying to get in with us.
It was instantly quieter and I fell onto a bench with a few hard cushions on it, letting my head fall forward in exhaustion. The small cabin consisted of two rooms. I could see several bunks in the next room, with blankets at the bottom of each one and a rack of towels, first aid supplies, and bottles of water. Besides the bench I huddled on, there was a counter with a few chairs pulled up to it. A big metal woodstove took up half the front room and there was a bright yellow call box on the scuffed wall.
As soon as I saw it, I hauled myself up and fumbled the receiver off its stand, hearing nothing but dead air when I held it to my ear. “No signal.”
He nodded briskly as I sat back down, fighting the shivers that wracked my body. “For now. It could come back online when the storm stops. Or my phone will start working again.”
His optimism was both comforting and irritating. I still had that nagging guilty feeling like this was all my fault somehow, but had I invited him to follow me? Didn’t I tell him to get his ass on the easier trail? Didn’t I tell him to leave me the hell alone?
There was a chance I’d be back at the lodge by now, but there was also the chance I’d be trapped out here alone, or worse, still traipsing around the forest because I hadn’t seen the cabin until he pointed it out. I hated feeling beholden to him almost more than I hated feeling guilty. There was no way I would be grateful we were trapped here together. No way.
Dan made a quick round of the small place, finding a box full of logs and building a fire in the stove before pulling the limp flannel curtains across the windows to block the drafts that rattled the panes.
I watched him, my face too numb to do much more than stare. I sat on my hands and breathed into my neckwarmer, feeling myself slowly return to a normal temperature.
“There’s food,” he said, sounding altogether too pleased with himself as he held up a container of protein bars he found in one of the cupboards over a sink. He tried the sink and after a few groans, water sluggishly poured out. He pulled the bench I sat on closer to the fire and sat beside me. “We’ll be fine. This is actually getting cozy with the fire.”
I stared at him, smiling down at me like everything was peachy, and I jumped up. “Are you kidding me? This storm could go on for days and no one knows where we are. This mountain ishuge. We could be stuck here for days after it ends before anyone finds us.”
This didn’t alarm him the way it should have. He clearly wasn’t thinking about what happened when the protein bars ran out, when the box of logs was depleted and the fire died down. No. If I wasn’t mistaken, he looked delighted, almost like he planned the whole thing to get me alone.
Chapter 19 - Daniil
The fire wasn’t as big as I would have liked, but there was only a limited amount of wood in the cabin. It wasn’t a great place, but it was solid and I was glad to be out of the storm. A little while longer and we might have lost a few toes.
As soon as Paisley warmed up enough that her teeth were no longer chattering, she started letting me have it. I could read her like a book, from the moment we first got to the edge of the forest and it seemed like all was lost. The guilt and self recrimination was clear in her anxious blue eyes, and I knew most of the anger she was letting out on me was really aimed at herself.
I sat with my hands outstretched, the feeling coming back into them as the fire slowly heated the small space, letting her rant. It was pretty cute—at first. And maybe she was right about one thing. I wasn’t exactly heartbroken to get her all to myself. But then she came out with something that made me snort with laughter.
“Do you really think I planned this?” I asked when she accused me of just that. “Little girl, I didn’t even know you were heading out this morning. Was I happy about it? Yes. Did I plan it? No. And honestly, I’m beginning to not be so happy about it.”
She glared at me, finally shrugging out of her parka, her anger warming her up faster than the fire ever could. Was it possible that stung her pride a little? Good, now she knew what it felt like.
“You’ve been hounding me since day one,” she said. “Why wouldn’t I believe you somehow managed to get us lost?”
“I managed it? Just like I called down the storm?”
“You’re as bad as the assholes at Axon,” she sputtered, after making sure I understood exactly how serious our situation was. “Always thinking you know everything. Going down trails you had no business on.”
