Cage of Ice and Echoes, page 19
Oh, yes. The well-worn route, made by the repetitive tread of boots and press of the snow machine, reveals precisely how Leo spent his time alone.
He’s been here daily, perhaps multiple times each day, keeping watch for us. The numerous grooves and indentations, evidence of hundreds of passes from boots and machinery, show his relentless commitment, his undying vigilance.
His neurotic obsession.
“This hurts my heart.” She rises, her gaze raking across the bleak stretch of hills to the North. “I’m surprised he’s not here now.”
“These are new.” I gesture at a fresh path of boot imprints. “He was here this morning.”
The older tracks were made by ski runners. The snow machine hasn’t been here in a while. He must’ve run out of fuel.
Yet he kept coming, his constant presence in this spot obvious in the worn snow, the paths beaten down by tireless pacing. In every footprint, I feel his concern, his anticipation, and his unwavering resolve to be here the moment we emerge.
I feel it because I went through the same damn thing when he and Frankie retrieved the coal.
It’s a symptom of the bond that tethers us.
As we resume walking, a figure materializes on the horizon, a distinct shape against the white hills.
Leo.
He charges down a path so deeply etched into the snow it might as well be part of the landscape.
Instantly, Frankie’s stance shifts from exhaustion to action, a spontaneous release of energy. With an excited squeal that pierces the frosty air, she takes off running.
He quickens his pace, eating up the distance with his long legs, a far more controlled gait than her reckless, full-on sprint. She shrugs off her pack and rifle, dropping them mid-stride, and they meet in a crash of bodies, their embrace a desperate tangle of arms.
I hang back, watching them with a flood of warmth in my chest.
The chill of our surroundings dims in the heat of their reunion, their famished kisses, creating an ephemeral bubble of happiness.
When he lifts his head and finds my eyes, I approach them slowly, soaking in the silent laughter and shared joy emanating from them.
I need to tell him she died on my watch, that I almost broke my promise and didn’t bring her back to him.
But not now. Not in this moment of perfect relief as I join their embrace.
His arms envelop me, thawing the cold that settled in my bones and softening the aches from the long journey.
With Frankie trapped between us, I rest my nose in his braided hair. He smells as familiar to me as my own skin. But beneath the usual woodsmoke and mechanic oil, there’s something new. I sniff him again.
Jet fuel.
“You started the plane.” I lean back, meeting his mismatched eyes. “Did you hot-wire it or find the key?”
“Both, actually.” He perches his chin on her head, grinning. “I bypassed the ignition, got it running, and decided to roll it forward a few inches…”
“No.” My eyebrows shoot upward.
“Yeah. The key was under one of the tires.”
“Beneath its wings…” Frankie stares up at us. “Lie the answers. So what did he do? Park the plane and physically push it over the key?”
“Yep.” He kisses her brow. “The gauges show full fuel, and comms appear to work.”
“But we’re out of range.” Her lips curve down.
“Unless another aircraft flies over.” He looks at me. “The other one never returned.”
It’s been six weeks. It’s not coming back.
“How about a hot shower and a meal?” Leo hauls my pack off my back, giving me instant, blissful relief. As he shoulders the weight, his eyes fall on her. “Want a piggyback ride?”
“Nope. I have a few more miles left in me.” She bends and stretches her legs. “Kody might need a lift, though.”
With a grunt, I snatch her pack off the ground and give her ass a hard swat. “Let’s go.”
On the hike back, Leo doesn’t press us with questions. But she senses his need for answers and fills the silence with every detail of our one-month journey.
She recounts the long, frigid nights we spent huddled in our tent and doesn’t hold back on her disdain for outdoor bathroom breaks, which never got easier for her.
She mentions my nightmare, addressing her concerns about it. Then she moves on to the moose I tracked, which led us across the frozen lake.
Leo, usually a ball of tension, walks quietly at her side, his demeanor calm, attentively listening.
It’s her retelling of the plunge into the ice-cold lake that brings him to an abrupt stop.
Her voice trembles as she describes the terror of falling through the ice, the bone-chilling cold, and the struggle to reach the surface.
“I remember being trapped under the ice, then…nothing.” She shrugs. “There’s this huge hole of nothingness in my memory. Not a tunnel. No bright lights. No angels or demons or anything. One minute, I was in the water, and the next, I was lying beneath Kody on solid ground.”
Leo’s gaze slams into mine, demanding answers.
“Her heart stopped.” I run a hand down her arm, holding his stark stare. “I performed CPR.”
His reaction shocks me. The brother, who’s always quick to anger, remains stoic, his expression thoughtful.
She jumps in, detailing how my prompt intervention brought her back from the brink twice. First from drowning. Then from hypothermia.
There’s a new maturity in his silence, a depth to his calm that wasn’t there before. He absorbs every word, nodding at times, his face betraying nothing of the turmoil he must feel hearing about her death.
When she finishes, the silence stretches between us.
“I’m glad you’re both safe.” His gaze lingers on her before shifting to me. “Thank you for bringing her back.”
To me.
Those two words hover at the end, but he doesn’t say them. With regard to Frankie, there’s no more me or mine.
There’s only us.
Ours.
He knows I fucked her, and his ability to embrace that without explosion marks a new chapter for us. But I know he has questions, concerns about how he fits in this inexperienced, unexplored dynamic and what it looks like going forward.
As he searches my eyes, I open my expression and let him in. I let him see everything.
My connection with her has evolved and deepened. Sex was just one part of it. I’m certain he noticed the change the second he saw me. I’m not the only one who’s grown and matured over the past month. I feel different. Lighter. More complete. He sees it in my eyes, in the set of my shoulders, in the twitch of my lips.
He growls at that but says nothing.
There are things to discuss, details to share, boundaries to establish, but I’ll let him initiate that conversation when he’s ready.
“You guys are doing the thing again.” Frankie resumes walking.
He gives me a final look and catches up with her, entwining their hands. “What thing, love?”
“The silent conversation with your eyes.” Keeping her gaze forward, she holds out her other hand for me. “Sometimes I feel like a third wheel in your bromance.”
I grip her offered hand, matching their strides. “Every look shared between us whispers your name, woman.”
“Mm-hmm.” She presses her lips together, but the corners pull upward.
“You’re not the third wheel.” Leo bends in, laying it on thick. “You’re the heart that keeps us breathing.”
I narrow my eyes at him. “By breathing, he means panting.”
She bursts out laughing.
The final miles feel both interminable and fleeting, each step bringing us closer to the end of our journey. When we finally reach the door of the cabin, I pause, letting the significance of the past month wash over me.
I don’t intend to ever return to that hunting cabin, but whenever I think back on it, it will no longer be a place of terrible loneliness in my mind. I’ll remember it as a harbor of survival, rebirth, discovery, and love.
Sharing a look with the two people who are my future, we step over the threshold together, ready to face what comes next.
After a hot shower and a hard sleep that feels too long and not long enough, I stir from the warmth of the hearth.
The fire has dwindled to embers, but the residual heat lingers.
Frankie lies nestled against me, her breaths even and calm in sleep. Leo, however, slipped out of our embrace at some point.
I lift my head, but my search is brief. He sits on the floor across the room, back against the wall, legs bent, his gaze fixed on us.
Pushing myself up, I breeze past him with a nod and navigate the cabin’s cold, sparse interior towards the armory. Hidden inside one of my old quivers is a bottle of cherry vodka, my last project before our ingredients ran out. Retrieving it feels like unearthing a piece of the past meant for this moment.
Returning to Leo, I join him on the floor and set the bottle between us. We drink in silence, the kind that only brothers who’ve shared lifetimes of unspoken words can appreciate.
Yet, amid this comfort, the need to clear the air intensifies.
“I missed you.” It’s a simple truth, as easy to voice as breathing.
His response comes with a half-smile. “We’ve been apart for longer stretches. Every time you went hunting, it felt like you were gone for months.”
“It was different this time. Everything feels more dangerous and desperate.”
He nods, his gaze fastened on her. “Everything is changing.”
“Yeah, it is.” I watch the way he studies her peaceful form. “And so are we. Our relationship has shifted, including with her, in a positive direction.” I tilt my head. “I know this is new, and we’re still adjusting, but I’m struggling to read you. What are you thinking?”
“I don’t know, man.” His voice lowers, a confessional tone creeping in. “While you both were gone, I went through hell. Anger, worry, jealousy—it all got twisted up in my head. Every single day, I thought about setting out after you, following your tracks in the snow.”
“But you didn’t.”
“I made it to that point on the hill every day, the one where you can see for miles. And every day, I stopped myself. I paced back and forth, fighting with everything inside me.” A sigh escapes him. “But I calmed down, every time. Because I knew. I knew you would take care of her. You promised me you’d bring her back safe, and despite all the shit snarling in my head, I trust you.”
The glow from the dwindling fire casts shadows on his face, giving his admission a stark intimacy. “So I went back to the cabin, slept on it, and the next day, I’d find myself back at that spot, pacing again. That’s why the snow there is so worn down. It became my stopping point, my waiting spot…my boundary I wouldn’t cross.” He meets my gaze, his eyes clearer now than I’ve ever seen them. “As the days passed, I grew calmer, more accepting. I reached a point where nothing else mattered but seeing you both return to me. It didn’t matter what happened between you out there, how close you became, how often you were fucking her, or if you were stealing her heart away…as long as you came back to me, happy and healthy.”
“Leo, I…” My throat tightens. “I didn’t steal her heart. I couldn’t even if I tried. She fucking loves you.”
“Didn’t stop me from thinking it.” He shrugs slightly, but the tension in his shoulders has lifted. “I told you to bring her back. And you did. That’s all I needed.”
The simplicity of his statement, the trust he placed in me, adds a new layer to the bond between us.
In the quiet that follows, we sit side by side, passing the vodka and watching over her as she sleeps.
His admission not only reveals the strength of his feelings for her and her happiness but also our faith in each other.
No matter what happens, the three of us are bound by something stronger than circumstance and more powerful than the doubts and fears that might seek to divide us.
“This is fucking good.” He tips back the bottle, his throat moving with a deep swallow, and passes it to me. “Might be your best batch yet.”
“Thank you.” I take another drink, savoring the hints of cherry that Frankie inspired. “Thank you for waiting, for trusting me.”
His nod is slow, thoughtful. “How do you see this working? With all of us together?”
I consider his question, the complexities in it. “I don’t have the answers. But I know that what we have here, what’s left of our family, is stronger because she’s part of it. She needs us both as much as we need her.”
“And you’re okay with sharing…everything?”
“Everything.”
He looks back at her, then at me, a sense of resolve settling over him.
Our conversation meanders, questions about the journey, her fall into the lake, and how we’ll navigate the future. But underlying every word is a commitment to one another. We drink to that commitment, to the future, uncertain but faced together.
As she begins to stir beneath the blankets, our voices trail off. The way he stares at her, the longing in his eyes is unmistakable, a silent echo of my own feelings.
The sound of a delicate yawn drifts from the bed, followed by her drowsy voice. “Are you drinking without me?”
“She was craving spiked coffee,” I say, too low for her to hear. “Any beans left?”
He shakes his head, a small smile breaking through.
Rising to his feet, he sheds his clothes. Then, stark nude and unabashedly hard, he plucks the bottle from my hand, takes a mouthful, but doesn’t swallow.
With the confidence befitting a lion, he prowls across the room, climbs over her on the mattress, and pushes aside blankets, garments, everything in his way.
She gives him a sleepy smile and twines her arms around his neck.
He glides her legs around his hips and kisses her, letting the vodka trickle into her mouth. As she moans and laughs, he kisses her deeply and fucks her slowly just like that, one hand in her hair and the other stroking her sensual body.
I lean my head back against the wall, content to watch her sigh and writhe beneath him.
When they climax together, I don’t feel like an outsider. My heart is with them, brimming with our combined happiness. It reaffirms my belief that our lives will be like this forever.
The scent of the earth, overwhelming and pungent, invades my senses as I step out of the old pickup truck.
I paid a guy twice the truck’s value to borrow it for a couple of hours so that I could drive from one end of buttfuck nowhere to the other.
“Wow…okay.” Sirena joins me on the dirt driveway in a snow-frosted field, surrounded by mountains, untouched wilderness, and the icy waters of the Prince William Sound. “It’s pretty here.”
I hadn’t noticed.
The stillness is oppressive, broken only by the wind, which insists on smearing a fine mist across the lenses of my designer sunglasses.
The quaint little port town of Whittier, Alaska, isn’t a town. It’s a fourteen-story building on a harbor.
With a population of 250, nearly all its residents live under the same roof, which also contains the post office, church, laundromat, health clinic, and general store.
Evidently, one of the few residents who doesn’t live in the complex happens to be the person I’m looking for.
Alvis Duncan.
A name buried within the walls of my childhood home, hidden among flight logs, a piece of a puzzle I didn’t know I was assembling.
Sirena found him easy enough.
“That it?” I remove my shades and squint at a small airplane hangar perched on the edge of the field where the wilderness begins its reign.
“Yep.” She proceeds to the modest house beside it and knocks on the door.
My breath forms clouds in the cold air as I approach the hangar, its open doors beckoning me inside. The wind follows me in, passing through me like a frozen ghost, whispering tales of the past.
The day my parents died, their flight departed from the Whittier airstrip not far from here. I don’t know how Alvis Duncan is connected to that. He refused to tell us anything over the phone. The moment Sirena mentioned the flight logs, he disconnected the call.
That alone means he knows something.
With no other option, I’m forced to confront this situation in person, further delaying my search for Frankie.
Inside the hangar, a dismantled bush plane reveals the innards of a mechanic’s life. Tools of the trade scatter the space, including a forklift and flatbed truck.
No Turbo Beaver.
Not that I expected to see it here. It’s been twenty years since the last flight was logged.
I loosen my tie and tug at the cuffs of my sleeves, distinctly out of place. My expensive shoes shine against the dusty ground, the fabric of my tailored jacket fluttering in the grease-scented breeze.
Wealth is my cloak, shielding me from worlds like this. Yet here I stand, surrounded by simplicity and purpose. It’s unfamiliar, this proximity to manual labor and the grit of modest living.
But there are answers here.
My heart races at the thought of uncovering something, anything that could lead me to Frankie. The absence of clues has been crushing. I’m caught in a holding pattern where sleep evades me, and desperation constricts my chest.
With every passing day, the trail goes colder. Staler. Each tick of the clock is a drip of acid on the steel of my resolve, corroding layers of calm.
But as I pace through the hangar, I know she’s not the reason I’m here.
My restless steps stir up a cloud of dust that clings to my shoes and takes me deeper into a world far removed from my own. But I’m driven by a need to understand my family’s connection to this place.
The tread of footsteps approaches, drawing my focus.
Sirena strides in with a rugged-looking man in his fifties, his face etched with the deep creases of a life spent outdoors. A gray beard drapes over his chest, and his denim overalls struggle to contain his ample belly.
Her investigation into Alvis Duncan’s background revealed nothing out of the ordinary. He’s lived on this property his entire life, been married for thirty years, and earns his living doing mechanic work on small aircraft.
