Chapter 2

A harsh sound ripped from his throat—a laugh that sounded more like stone scraping stone. "You flatter yourself, Elena. If the Moon herself descended into this pit and told me you were crafted from my own rib, I would still throw you to the crows the moment we dig out of here."

"Then let me go!"

"No." His arm wrapped around her waist like an iron band, pinning her flush to him. "You are a fugitive of Blackridge. If you die, you die on my terms, in front of the Council, answering for your crimes. I am not letting the weather cheat me out of your execution."

"You arrogant, tyrannical pig..."

"Better," he murmured. His hand moved to the nape of her neck, his thick fingers tangling in her frozen hair, forcing her forehead to rest against his throat. "Keep that fire. Feed it to your wolf."

Elena squeezed her eyes shut. She wanted to bite him. She wanted to sink her teeth into the thick cord of his jugular and drink whatever warmth remained in his veins. But she couldn't move her jaw properly. Her lips felt like swollen wood.

The cold was an insidious monster. It didn't just hurt; it stole your thoughts. It slowed the firing of your synapses until every thought took an eternity to form.

"Mathias?" she murmured after a long, stretching silence.

"Still here, rogue."

"Why did the ceiling hold?"

"Limestone keystone," he answered. His voice sounded distant for a fraction of a second, muffled as if traveling through a drift of snow, before snapping back into sharp focus right beside her ear. "The primary arch collapsed, but the secondary shelf jammed against the north wall. We have a pocket. Maybe four feet of clearance above our heads."

"And the pack?"

"They know where I was tracking you. Torin will bring the excavation team."

"Torin hates me," Elena muttered, her head lolling against his shoulder. "He’ll bring shovels just to make sure the rocks are packed down tight over my head."

"Torin follows my orders. And I didn't give him permission to let me freeze under a mountain."

She let out a breath that sounded like a rattle. "How long?"

"Don't worry about the time."

"Mathias. How long until the air runs out? Or the frost reaches our cores?"

His fingers twitched against her neck. For a brief moment, the pressure of his arm felt unnervingly light, almost weightless, before tightening again with bruising force. "Three days. Maybe four, if the drift breathes through the fissures. We have enough snowmelt dripping from the cracks to keep from dehydrating. But we don't have four days if you let yourself sleep."

"I'm so tired," she whispered. The stone behind her seemed to be softening, turning into down feathers, inviting her to lean back and let the dark swallow her whole. The pain in her toes had vanished entirely—a dangerous, fatal relief. "My wolf... she's stopped answering."

"Elena. Look at me."

"I told you, I can't see—"

"I said look at me!"

His palm struck her cheek. Not hard enough to break skin, but the sharp sting of it exploded through her face like a flare of gunpowder. Elena gasped, adrenaline spiking into her bloodstream, her eyes flying wide in the dark.

"You hit me," she snarled, pure feral instinct rising to the surface. Her wolf bared its teeth inside her, awakened by the insult. "You touched me—"

"I’ll do worse than that if you close your eyes again," Mathias rasped. His chest heaved against hers, rapid and shallow. "You want to survive me? You want to prove that you're stronger than the Alpha who threw you out? Then stay awake, damn you. Fight me for this air. Hate me until dawn."

"I will," she swore, her fingernails digging through his coat, searching for purchase on his heavy frame, anchoring herself to the only solid, unyielding thing in this black hell. "I'll hate you until the day I die."

"Good," Mathias whispered into the freezing dark, his chin resting heavily atop her hair. "Then we have an understanding."

Elena pressed her face deeper into the crook of his neck, shivering uncontrollably as the frost crept higher up the cave walls, the silence of the mountain settling over them like a shroud.

Day Two arrived without sunrise.

Time in the collapse didn't pass in hours; it measured itself in the slow, rhythmic *plink* of meltwater dripping from a jagged slate overhead, and in the agonizing stiffness that cemented Elena’s joints. Every breath tasted like pulverized stone and ancient lime.

Elena stirred, her skull hammering with a dull, sickening ache. Her legs were dead weights, pinned beneath the heavy, unmoving bulk of Mathias’s lower body. Her nose was buried in the stiff shearling collar of his jacket, inhaled deep into the familiar scents of crushed spruce needles, cured leather, and the sour copper of dried blood.

"Still breathing, rogue?"

His voice came from just above her ear—rough, raspy, vibrating through the solid plane of his clavicle.

"Unfortunately for you," Elena croaked. Her throat felt lined with sandpaper. She tried to pull her right arm free from where it was pinned between their chests, her fingers aching with needle-like prickles as sluggish circulation fought against the frost. "Move your leg. I can’t feel my toes."

"If you can't feel them, moving won't help," he said. He didn't shift. If anything, the dead weight of him seemed more immovable than the previous night, heavy as an iron anvil pressing her down into the frozen gravel. "Conserve the friction. Every time you twitch, you shred another thread of calories."

"I need to check my pack," she grumbled, using her elbow to lever against his ribs.

He didn't grunt or protest the blow, only let out a dry, rattling exhale that barely stirred the loose strands of hair frozen against her temple. "You don't have a pack. It was sheared off when the snow shelf dropped us forty feet."

"I have my vest pockets, you arrogant bastard."

With clumsy, wooden fingers, Elena fumbled beneath the zipper of her torn outer shell. Her nails were blue-rimmed, her knuckles cracked and weeping clear fluid that had already crystallized into microscopic beads. Inside the deep interior pocket of her thermal vest, her fingertips brushed against something waxy and stiff: two flattened sticks of dried venison pemmican, wrapped in parchment.

A pitiful squeak of triumph escaped her swollen lips.

"Food," she whispered.

"Don't celebrate yet. It’s barely three hundred calories."

"It’s three hundred calories more than we had ten minutes ago." She peeled the frozen paper with her teeth, the savory scent of salt and smoked fat hitting her tongue like a lightning bolt. Her stomach cramped violently, a hollow spasm that made her double over against his sternum. She broke the stick in half, the cured meat snapping with a brittle crack in the sub-zero chill.

Blindly, she reached up in the blackness, searching for his face. Her knuckles bumped the hard ridge of his jaw, rough with several days of stubble. His skin was shocking to the touch—burning with a strange, prickly heat that made her nerve endings sizzle, yet underneath that top layer of friction, it felt oddly unresponsive, hard as petrified timber.

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