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“When I first saw you, I thought you were an intolerable, arrogant maniac with a smart mouth and a pretty face. My mind is unchanged.”

“You wound me.” He grins in earnest, biting back a laugh that would ricochet off the trees.

He takes her hand, and as they begin their trudging up the mountain, he prays that they survive this battle so that he might live the rest of his life provoking that gleam in her eye which sparks in the face of challenge. If he can live out his days, only to hear that derision fall from her lips, he will die contented.

Walking up the slope is slower but less treacherous. He remembers how hypersensitive his hearing was on their journey down, his ears pricked for the sound of Dawsyn slipping. It would have been so easy for her to tumble downward, snap her neck, crack her skull on a hidden rock. How stupid of him to question the dexterity of a woman who survived twenty-four years on the Ledge.

Now, she climbs the slope several paces ahead of him, which gives him the advantage of knowing where she is and also gives him time to watch her. He will never again question the actions of his father, who risked everything to love a human woman. Some of them can be, he has learned, addictive. He can no more explain the compulsion to touch her than he can explain his need for sleep. He does not understand why he is bound to watch her any more than he understands the patterns of the wind. He only knows he tried not to, that he fought it, and that finally succumbing to her feels like a kind of blissful unravelling.

Indeed, watching Dawsyn helps him quiet the sounds of the mountain. He touches her often – hands on her hips to hoist her over eroded banks, his fingers on her lower back to guide her in the right direction. She does not need him, but he can think of nothing more sating than the idea that she might.

They continue well after the sun has risen. Its meager warmth leaves a blanket of fog hovering above the ground, and they squint to see through it. At the very least, it will obscure them from any Glacian looking through the gaps in the foliage above.

“Ryon, please, let us stop for water and food – unless you’re inclined to carry me the rest of the way.” She rests her back against a wide trunk, letting her heavy breaths slow.

Ryon lifts one foot on a knotted root and smirks deeply.

“You would, wouldn’t you? Carry me the rest of the way?” Dawsyn asks, her head tilting. “I can only imagine how your hands would wander.”

“You do not have to imagine.”

She shakes her head. “Do all hybrids have this much stamina? We’ve been trekking for half a day and night.”

Ryon shrugs. “Perhaps. Though I truly hope you never find out.”

“What if some other pretty-faced male in the Colony catches my interest?” she asks, amusement curving her mouth.

“Then, they will be found very suddenly uninteresting once I have finished with them.”

“How archaic. And what if it broke my fragile human heart?”

Excitement blooms through his veins, and in one swoop, he pushes her against the tree trunk, and she laughs.

He leans in, if only to be closer to the sound, his lips an inch from hers. “Who do you think of fooling? There is not one piece of you that can be considered fragile. And if you ever took up an interest with another, I’d leave you be and possibly suffocate in my own jealousy.”

“That somehow sounds appealing.”

Ryon nearly takes her there against the tree… nearly. But for her worn state and the threat on their shoulders, he would. Instead, he slides his nose along her jawline, smiles inwardly when she shivers, and then presses his lips once to the hollow beneath her ear. She smells, feels, heavenly.

“Weren’t you thirsty?” he asks innocently.

She pushes him away with a huff. “Do not start with me what you do not intend to finish,” she grumbles darkly and earns a deep chuckle from Ryon.

He does not miss the blush creeping up her chest and to her neck.

CHAPTERFORTY-ONE

They find the first hideout before nightfall. The temperature drops away like a stone into the Chasm as they gather kindling – Dawsyn using her ax to cut wood. Once more, she lights a fire inside the tiny cave and then lays herself against the chest of the half-Glacian, relishing in the feel of his warmth surrounding her.

When last they sat here, Dawsyn held a knife to his throat and threatened to kill him if he made advances toward her. Now, his arms wrap around her, and his hands rest along her thighs, rubbing feeling back into them.

She is a fraction of the size of him, lying this way. She cannot remove her furs, even with the fire burning in earnest. She cannot risk growing cold and weak in the night, but not all things need to be done unclothed.

“I’d never slept with a man before you,” she tells him, smiling when his hands freeze.

“You lie again. What of Hector?”

“I never slept alongside him. We came together, and then we parted. It was a transaction between friends. The first man to sleep with me was you, and it was on this mountain.”