Alexei hadn’t ant to wake up.
He slept like a soldier when he had to and like sothing wilder when he didn’t—half under, ears open, knife near hand.
But it was the way breath in a room changed that pulled him up. Sera’s. Small shift in rhythm, then the hush of weight being gathered instead of let go.
He didn’t open his eyes. Instead, he counted the heartbeats. The fra sighed. Cold pushed into the room. No one else moved.
He slid his hand off the blanket, found his boots by feel, and lifted them without knocking the heel on the floor.
He stood, weight on the edges of his feet, and walked to the stairwell before he pulled the door closed behind him. The rope on the peg didn’t rattle.
She didn’t touch it, so neither did he. In the stairwell he sat on the second step and laced his boots fast, thumbs pressing the knots flat so they would not click later. He tucked his knife in at his spine, checked his fingers in his gloves, and breathed once, slow, until the tightness in his chest decided to wait its turn.
Back in the living room, Zubair hadn’t stirred. The man could hear a pin drop if he had decided to hear it, but tonight he had chosen to actually get so sleep. Elias had folded himself into the smallest space he could find and put his glasses on the floor by his shoulder as if he might need them in a hurry. Lachlan was a sprawl of limbs and bad decisions, mouth open, snoring like a small engine.
Alexei eased the window open just enough. He took the cold hit in the face and shoulders and let his eyes water without blinking. Then he went out.
The storm had sanded the world down to blank. No ridges from yesterday. No human prints. The moon made hard white out of everything. The air tasted like salt and iron under ice.
He found Sera’s tracks in the first fifteen steps. He didn’t rush. He set his boots inside hers so his weight wouldn’t telegraph. He moved the way his grandfather had taught him in snow—knees loose, hips quiet, arms dead weight when they weren’t needed.
There was no longer a true north.
That was fine for him.
He never trusted a direction he hadn’t made with his own feet.
Her track told him what he already knew: she was not afraid.
Her pace was even, each footstep sure.
The wind pulled at the edges of the prints and made him shorten his stride to match the shallow lift of snow she had kicked aside. He watched where his rope would have dragged if he had brought one and kept away from edges that might give him away in sound.
The sll reached him a minute before he saw the darkness on the snow.
Blood.
Old enough to have turned a dark red color but not old enough to be dry. He slid behind a drift and took the slope on his belly, letting his coat take the ice burn.
She was crouched at the base of the windbreak, small in the white, solid in a way that had nothing to do with size. The carcass lay open, ribs spread wide, steam lifting where she had disturbed it. It was a seal, a big one.
Throat to belly torn when it had still been warm. Whoever had made it had left enough to feed a second ti.
Her gloves were off. She worked quick, her fingers red to the wrist, digging past the frozen crust into at that still had give. She didn’t waste motion. She didn’t look over her shoulder. She didn’t act like soone stealing from a table she wasn’t supposed to touch.
Instead, she fed.
It wasn’t the blood that hit him. He’d stood in rooms painted with worse. It was the rightness of it. The clean line between need and act.
He watched her take the first mouthful and go still from neck to knees while it hit her.
Her jaw tightened, her eyes went half-closed, her shoulders dropping that fraction you don’t show to anyone unless you choose to.
Heat climbed out from under her coat like a ghost you could see. A sound ca out of her... and a low hum rolled over the ice and through him as if the sound could travel in bone.
He stayed in the drift’s shadow, making sure that he was down wind at all tis.
She didn’t sll him. He was careful about how he slled when he wanted to be. He let the cold bite his face and counted his breaths and reminded every part of his body that he was here to see, not to be seen.
He thought of other nights and other ats. Not hers, but his. A stray dog in winter when you hadn’t eaten in three days. Fish eaten raw on a dock because the patrol had not let a cook fire through until morning. A deer dragged out of a ditch with three n who never said please or thank you, and all of them silent anyway. Nothing in those mories made him think worse of what she did now.
He did not move until she cleaned her hands on snow, slid her gloves on fast, and stood.
When she turned to go, he sank down behind the drift and counted to twenty so her eyes would not catch motion anywhere they didn’t expect it. Then he took a longer circle back, kept to the flat, set his feet in her prints where he could, and stepped around them where he had to.
There were a thousand ways to be seen from behind. He had learned most of them the hard way and taught himself to avoid all the rest.
He got to the tower first. He took the window at the corner where the fra didn’t squeal—not the peg Zubair had marked, the other one, the one that was a tight fit but obeyed without noise if you treated it like a stubborn animal.
Inside, he shut it slow until the seal caught, then breathed the warm dirt sll and put the room back the way it had been before he left it.
He returned to the couch. The blanket’s edge folded under him like he hadn’t moved it. He laid his knife within reach and slackened every muscle in order so his chest would lift slow and even.
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