Chapter 8
“Hey,” Cyrus murmured, panic sharpening his voice. “Look at me. Jarek, open your eyes.”
Jarek’s eyelids fluttered. The gray irises were glazed with pain, tracking Cyrus’s face with slow, disoriented effort.
“Clinic’s... clinic’s warm?” Jarek whispered, his voice barely a breath against the generator’s roar.
“The clinic is warm. The animals are fine,” Cyrus said firmly. He reached up, tearing his own mittens off with his teeth, and pressed his bare, warm palms against Jarek’s icy cheeks. “You’re freezing. Come inside. Right now.”
Instead of moving toward the door, Jarek’s hands came up.
His large, calloused fingers wrapped around Cyrus’s wrists, not to push him away, but to anchor him there. Jarek’s grip was desperate, the leather of his work gloves biting into Cyrus’s pulse points.
“Cyrus,” Jarek rasped.
The single syllable carried so much raw, unadorned ache that Cyrus felt tears sting behind his eyes.
The wind screamed outside the shed, hurling snow against the boards, but inside the narrow, oil-scented box, the space between them collapsed entirely. The heat from their bodies mingled in the freezing air, their breath condensing into a single, shared cloud.
Cyrus leaned in. He didn't think about professional boundaries; he didn't think about Jarek’s stoic military silence or the strange, persistent distance the man maintained. All Cyrus knew was that this stubborn, beautiful, broken man had braved a blizzard to protect what Cyrus loved, and Cyrus was done waiting for permission.
“You don’t have to carry the whole world alone,” Cyrus whispered against the frozen line of Jarek’s jaw. “Let me take some of it.”
Jarek let out a broken, shuddering sound—halfway between a sob and a prayer.
Then Jarek’s arms banded around Cyrus’s waist, hauling Cyrus against his chest with an intensity that knocked the air from Cyrus’s lungs.
Jarek’s mouth found his in the dark.
The kiss wasn't hesitant. It was fierce, starving, and laced with an agonizing tenderness that made Cyrus’s knees go weak. Jarek kissed him like a man who knew he was dying of thirst—his lips cold and chapped from the wind, but the heat inside his mouth blazing like an open furnace.
Cyrus buried his bare hands into Jarek’s short, damp hair, pulling the man closer, parting his lips to welcome the deep, possessive slide of Jarek’s tongue.
Underneath Cyrus’s chest, Jarek’s heart was hammering a wild, erratic staccato against his ribs. Jarek held Cyrus as if the veterinarian were the only solid thing in a collapsing universe, pressing Cyrus back against the rough shed wall, their parkas rustling together in the narrow space.
It was everything Cyrus had dreamed of since the first day Jarek had walked into his exam room—raw, protective, and deeply, irrevocably tender.
When Jarek finally broke the kiss, he didn't pull away. He rested his forehead against Cyrus’s, his breath hitching raggedly against Cyrus’s mouth. A single tear had leaked from the corner of Jarek’s closed eye, freezing instantly against his cheekbone.
“Cyrus,” Jarek whispered, his voice cracking down the middle. “You’re... you’re the best thing that could have happened to him. To both of us.”
Cyrus smiled into the dark, his fingers gently caressing the warm skin at the nape of Jarek’s neck. “I’m not going anywhere, Sergeant. Now come inside before we both get frostbite.”
***
They moved through the side door of the clinic into the surgical prep area.
The radiant baseboard heaters were already ticking softly as the generator poured juice into the system. Cyrus immediately checked the recovery suite: the golden retriever was snoozing peacefully beneath his flannel blanket, his gums healthy pink, and the barn cat let out a raspy, grateful purr as Cyrus touched his ears.
“Everything’s stable,” Cyrus called out, walking back into the lit hallway. “I’m going to make a pot of coffee in the break room, and then we’re waiting out the worst of this blow.”
There was no answer.
Cyrus frowned. “Jarek?”
He walked through the swinging doors into the reception lobby.
The lobby was empty. Through the front glass doors, Cyrus saw the Dodge truck still idling in the drift, its headlights cutting through the blinding swirl of snow.
Beside the truck, a dark shape was moving.
Jarek had gone back out. He had Brutus on a short leash, walking the dog toward the clinic’s front entryway to bring him out of the vehicle.
Cyrus reached for the front door handle to wave them in, an affectionate reprimand already on his lips—*I told you to stay inside, you idiot*—when Jarek suddenly stopped dead in his tracks.
Fifty feet from the front door, right in the center of the unplowed parking lot, Jarek froze.
Through the glass, under the harsh glare of the building’s exterior floodlights, Cyrus saw Jarek’s right hand fly to his throat.
The ex-soldier’s body bowed forward sharply, as if he had taken a heavy-caliber round directly to the solar plexus. The crowbar he had been carrying slipped from his fingers, burying itself silently in the drift.
Then came the cough.
Even through the double-paned storm glass, Cyrus heard the sound—a wet, tearing explosion that sounded like canvas ripping in a gale.
Jarek dropped to his knees in the two-foot drift.
Brutus didn't run. The Malinois went wild with an agility and terror Cyrus had never seen in an animal. The dog lunged forward, throwing his entire eighty-pound body across Jarek’s lap, his front paws scrambling frantically against Jarek’s chest, letting out a series of high-pitched, piercing shrieks that cut through the howling wind like a siren.
“Jarek!” Cyrus screamed, throwing his entire weight against the lobby crash bar.
The storm slammed into Cyrus like a solid wall of ice as he burst through the doors. He didn't care about his coat; he ran in his scrub top and work boots, plunging into the drifts, his feet slipping on the slick gravel beneath the snow.
“Jarek! Stay with me!”
By the time Cyrus reached them, Jarek was on his side in the snow.
His watch cap had fallen off, his dark hair plastered with sleet. His eyes were wide, staring blankly up at the black sky, his jaw locked open as he gasped for air that wouldn't come.
Around Jarek’s head, the pristine white snow was painted with a violent, horrifying spray of frothy, dark arterial crimson.
A massive pulmonary hemorrhage.
Blood was bubbling up between Jarek’s lips with every ragged, hitching heave of his chest, spilling down his chin and pooling against his collar.
“No, no, no,” Cyrus chanted, terror turning his blood to liquid ice.
He dropped to his knees beside Jarek, heedless of the freezing slush soaking through his trousers. He grabbed Jarek’s face between his hands, wiping the frothy red foam from the man’s mouth with his bare thumbs to clear the airway. “Breathe, Jarek! Roll onto your side! Roll with me!”
Brutus was entirely out of his mind with panic.
The dog wasn't barking at Cyrus; he wasn't trying to defend Jarek from the veterinarian. The Malinois was on top of Jarek, whining with a frantic, guttural rhythm, his black snout violently rooting beneath the folds of Jarek’s heavy coat. The dog’s claws tore at the fabric, scratching with obsessive, pinpoint precision right over Jarek’s left breastbone—ripping at the canvas, biting at the third horn button of Jarek’s field jacket as if trying to tear out the poisoned organ himself.
