left them. One under the mattress, one under the cushion of an armchair and one behind the toilet. Satisfied, I moved to the curtain and Tyson lifted his head, watching me as I peeked outside. The sun was just cresting the mountain and my lips parted as colours splashed through the sky. Yellow, amber, gold, the most beautiful mix of light I’d ever seen. The snow glinted like starlight and I watched in awe as the frozen world came to life.
Nicoli grunted in his sleep and I dropped the curtain, turning to him and biting on my thumb as I surveyed his face. I wished I could see beneath that beard. I wondered if his jaw was square or round. I wondered if his features would look as fearsome as they did like this. I wondered if there were more scars lurking beneath it all.
His brow was creased with lines and I sensed his sleep wasn’t restful as his fingers twitched and balled. I wouldn’t wake him though. It wasn’t my business to disturb him from his nightmares. But I couldn’t help but wonder what haunted this wild man.
I started moving around the room, checking his drawers and hunting for clues about my saviour’s life beyond this place. What had brought him up this mountain in the first place? Why did he want to be so alone? Was he searching for something out here, or escaping something? Or did he just like the solitude and I was intruding on every inch of it?
As I pulled open a drawer in the cabinet near the fireplace, I found a stack of old newspaper articles inside. I frowned as I took them out and read the headlines.
Sloan Calabresi kidnapped from her wedding in suspected Romero gang attack.
Guiseppe Calabresi’s body washed up in Sinner’s Bay.
Calabresi/Romero child born between feuding families.
Was Nicoli involved with these people? I tried to rack my brain for any of this sounding familiar, but only came up with the usual hollow echo where my memories should have been. That echo gave me the awful, gut-crushing feeling of knowing I’d been someone once, and yet the entirety of that person had been carved out of me like seeds from a pumpkin. Now I was just a jar full of hate and vengeance waiting for redemption.
“What the fuck are you doing?” Nicoli’s voice made me lurch around in alarm and the articles dropped from my hand, scattering across the floor. He was standing, his blanket pooled at his feet, his chest bare and his expression furious.
He took a step forward and my heart lurched with panic. I dove for the armchair, shoving my hand under the cushion and snatching the knife into my grip. Strong hands pulled me upright and a shriek of fright escaped me as I tried to whirl around, the blade angled to slice into flesh. He caught my wrist with his free hand, squeezing as he snarled in my ear and I gasped as his fingers hit a pressure point and the knife dropped from my hand, my grip going slack.
I mouthed a curse as I thrashed against him and he twisted me around in his hold, pushing me down into the seat and placing his hands down on the arms of the chair to cage me in.
My lip quivered as he loomed over me and I screwed up my eyes as I waited for his hand to strike me or his fingers to slide around my throat. His heavy breaths made my hair flutter and I cracked an eye when he didn’t punish me, wondering why he was hesitating.
“You think I’d hit you?” he asked, a note of disgust in his tone.
I nodded. Obviously I thought that. It was what men did when they were angry.
“Winter,” he growled the name he’d christened me with and my toes scrunched up in a way I was somehow sure I hadn’t experienced before. “I would never and will never lay a hand on you, do you understand?”
I frowned, shaking my head. Because I didn’t understand. I’d made him mad, therefore I would be punished. That was the only world I knew. There was a twisted sort of security in that. But he was standing there refusing me one of the few things that made sense in my small, dark existence. It was like standing in a lightless tunnel between two expanses of fog, the way forward as unclear as the way back.