Page 28 of Growly Trapper Daddy
I kill the engine and lift her down, and that's when she sees it, the dark stain spreading slow down my sleeve where the graze finally decided to announce itself properly.
“Colt. You're bleeding.” Her voice goes sharp with something that isn't fear exactly, more like the particular fury of someone who just realized the person they love got hurt keeping them safe.
“It's nothing. Barely felt it.”
“That is not nothing, that is definitely blood, and you're going to sit down and let me look at it right now, or so help me.” She's already pulling me toward the single chair by the stove, already reaching for the small first aid kit hanging by the door like she's catalogued this shack's contents the same way she catalogued that mansion, and something about watching her do for me exactly what I did for her three weeks ago, checking, wrapping, insisting, settles deep and warm in my chest.
“You're better at this than you were with your own ribs,” I tell her, hissing a little as she cleans the cut.
“I had a very good teacher.” She ties off the bandage with hands that have gone steady despite everything they've been through tonight. “There. You'll live. Barely.”
I catch her wrist before she can pull away, and pull her into my lap instead, careful of the arm but not careful of anything else. “I've got you. All the way home this time.”
She curls into me, and for a long moment neither of us says anything at all, just breathing together in the small warm circle of the stove's light, the storm outside finally starting to ease off after a night that felt like it might never end.
“You're mine,” I tell her eventually, quiet now instead of urgent, my hand in her hair. “Have been since I pulled you out of that wreck. They tried to take that from me tonight. They failed.”
“I'm yours.” She says it plain, no hesitation in it at all. “Have been for a while now, I think. Longer than I probably should have let myself admit.”
What happens after that is quiet and slow and entirely ours, no urgency left in it now that the danger's actually behind us, just two people proving to each other with more patience than words that they're both still here, still whole, still choosing each other on purpose instead of out of fear. I hold her through all of it and after it, her head on my chest, my hand finding hers in the dark, the stove crackling low and the snow finally starting to taper off outside.
“You're safe now,” I tell her, quiet. “I'll burn the world before I let anyone take you again. We'll go home. You'll give your testimony. Levon answers for what he did. And then you're staying right here, with me, for good.”
She lifts her head, that same stubborn, quirky smile finding her mouth even after everything the night put her through. “Bossy mountain man. I think I like the sound of that.”
“Good.” I kiss her slowly, certain, nothing rushed left in either of us. “Because I wasn't asking.”
We stay like that a long while. I clean the last of the blood off my arm with what's in the pack, feed her what rations I've got, and she curls against me on the narrow bed while her breathing evens out into real sleep for what might be the first time all night. Kane and the team will handle the rest of it, the mansion, the stragglers, the paperwork Silas needs to make this clean. I'll take her home once the roads let us, to the one bed, to the life we're actually going to get to build now instead of just talking about building it.
They tried to take her. They failed.
She's mine, and she chose that for herself tonight as much as I ever claimed it, guard counts and hairpins and all, and I intend to spend the rest of my life proving I noticed that difference and it mattered to me.
The mountains are quiet now. The threat's fading with the storm. But what I feel for her isn't going anywhere at all.
I pull her closer, careful of my arm, careless of everything else. “Sleep, darlin'. I've got you. Always.”
She sighs against me, already halfway to sleep.
I close my eyes at last.
The hunt is over.
My woman's home, and this time she helped bring herself there.
Epilogue
Nora
I stand in the middle of our home with a paintbrush in one hand and one of Colt's old flannel shirts hanging open over my shoulders. The wood stove crackles in the corner. Snow taps against the windows, gentle now instead of the kind that used to make my chest go tight with old fear. Outside, the mountains are quiet and white and exactly where I want to spend the rest of my life. Inside, the canvas on the easel is almost finished, two small figures on a mountain trail, a huge bearded one loaded down with traps and rope, a smaller one behind him carrying nothing but an oversized pencil. I finally got around to painting the drawing that started all of this months ago, back when I was too scared to ask him what it meant that I was sketching the two of us into a future neither of us had said out loud yet.
He knows what it means now. We both do.
The Levon case wrapped up three weeks ago. My testimony, backed by Colt's, by Mason's, by evidence the whole team spent weeks building once the mansion raid gave the marshals everything they needed to move, put him away for the rest of his natural life, no parole hearing that will ever see daylight. No more looking over my shoulder in parking lots. No more flinching at engines I don't recognize. Just this cabin, this man, this life that started with a car crash and turned into something I never once saw coming and wouldn't trade for anything I used to think I wanted instead.
I hear the truck before I see it, that low familiar rumble coming up the long drive, and my stomach does its usual small, happy flip. He's home. I set the brush down in a jar of water and pad barefoot across the worn floor to meet him.
The door opens and cold mountain air rushes in with him. Colt fills the frame the way he always does, tall, broad shouldered, beard dusted with snow, the collar of his jacket turned up against the wind. His eyes find me immediately, and something in his whole body seems to loosen the second they do, like he's been carrying the day's weight and just set it down at the threshold.
