Page 37 of Forbidden Protector

I'm just looking, because he's letting me, and some of what's written on this man was never meant to be read by anyone at all.

He's flat on his back now, one arm looped loose around me.

I can't see the tattoo on his back from here. But I saw enough of it, stitching his arm by firelight, to have it by heart whether I meant to or not: a mountain, black-inked, a ridgeline climbing to a summit between his shoulder blades, snow worked in pale negative space through what I'd swear, if I didn't know better, were couloirs.

"Holt."

"Mm."

"Your back."

He doesn't move to show me. "What about it?"

"It's a mountain."

"Is it?"

That's all he gives me. Not a name, not a why, not whose hands put it there or how long he sat still for it. I let it stay shut.

His heart is going slow and steady under my palm, and I've just been handed more of him tonight than in all the days before it. I'm not fool enough to spend it demanding the one thing he isn't offering.

Outside, the wind has quit completely. The stove ticks down to coals, and he pulls the blanket up over both of us without being asked. His arm is still looped around me like he has no intention of letting the cold, or anything else, back into this room tonight.

None of it has moved an inch, though: not the case, not the war, not the fence line his family's been guarding for a hundred and fifty years. It’s still sitting out there in the dark, patient, waiting for morning to remember it exists.

The case is still the case. The war is still the war. I say the line I said before we crossed this floor anyway, quieter this time, more for myself than for him.

"This changes nothing."

His hand finds the back of my neck, slow and sure, like he's already decided how this argument ends.

"No," he says. "But it happened."

ELEVEN

HOLT

She is asleep on the arm I shouldn't be using.

The stitches pull every time she breathes. It’s a low steady fire I could fix by moving her and have no intention of fixing. Her hair falls across my arm in a tangle my hand made, and her fingers rest over the scroll on my chest like she fell asleep trying to read the numbers underneath it.

Through the small east window there is nothing yet. The sky is black and the stars are still out over the plains.

Somewhere behind the dark shape of the Front, the day is coming but has not committed to it.

The stove has gone cold. It is the first day of March, and nothing that happened in this bed is going to survive what the morning does to it.

She wakes like I do. All at once, everything online, a full second of inventory before the body moves. I feel the change: breathing shifts, muscles go from slack to ready, and she holds there, taking stock. Whose skin. Whose arm. What she let happen and how much of it she is going to have to take apart before breakfast.

Then she stirs, and the cold finds every place she was.

Her eyes find mine. For half a second they are the eyes from last night, open and unarmored. Eyes of the woman who said my name into the dark still in them. Then they close, fast, practiced.

"Don't," she says.

"Didn't say anything."

"You were building up to something."