“Can they find us here?” Stacy asked. “This place is pretty well-hidden and not everyone can make a trek through the wilderness like us crazies.”

“Trust me,” he answered. “They’ll find us, and they’ll make it here. And it won’t take them long to figure it out. We need to put as much distance between us and them as possible—and fast.”

I leaned my head against Michael’s shoulder. It finally felt as though his body temperature had gotten warmed back up to normal. He wrapped his arm around me as we listened to the conversation being had.

“How fast?” I asked.

“One day,” Rob answered. “Maybe two.”

“So we can stay here tonight then?” I asked, noticing his skeptical look. “You three really look like you need to rest and stay warm for a night. It won’t do us any good to try to run tonight if you can’t actually run.”

I was pretty sure my logic convinced him because Rob slouched even further back against the wall of the cave and sighed.

“Yeah, one night here. But then we need to leave first thing at morning light, and we need to make good time and leave no tracks,” he said in a sleepy, fatigued voice.

Stacy went back inside the tent and Adam followed in after her with a blanket wrapped around him. Michael was tending to the fire as I helped Rob get to his feet to go inside the tent too. It was warm in there and everyone would sleep soundly and get much needed rest until morning.

“Hey Rob,” I asked, just before he walked into the tent.

“Yeah?”

“Why are you so afraid of these guys?”

“I’m not afraid,” he said as he straightened his back and stuck out his jaw ever so slightly.

“Yes, you are,” I said. “I’ve seen you in enough situations now to know that you’re afraid of all these cops and the officials they’re controlling.”

“You don’t even know what I look like when I’m afraid,” he said as he tried to brush it off.

“You’re wrong,” I said. “I do. I saw your face the night of that party. The night that you pulled Michael away and left me there after I had been shot. I looked at Michael’s face first and I expected to see anguish there. But when I glanced up and saw your face, that surprised me. You were afraid. Not for yourself, but for me. We barely knew each other, and I didn’t even know whether to trust you or not then, and yet I knew that you were pulling Michael away, not to save yourself but to save us all. And the reason that I knew that was because I could see the fear on your face. You were afraid that I was going to die.”

“You almost did,” he said flatly as if trying to move the focus off of himself.

“That was the only time I’ve ever seen you afraid,” I said, not letting this go. “Until now. You’re afraid now, Rob. You’re afraid of these cops and from the sounds of it, all the cops up the eastern seaboard. I want to know why.”

For a moment, Rob looked like he wasn’t going to answer me. He took a step closer inside the tent and I sighed thinking that I wasn’t going to get an answer to my question, at least not tonight. But then he stopped. He turned back around to look at me and met my eyes.

“The guys are bad, Lisette. I know that you and Michael and Adam have seen ‘bad’ before. I’ve heard the stories about your father, and about some of the things that you guys have endured. But I’m telling you that these guys will stop at nothing to continue what they’re doing and to amass untouchable power and wealth. They will do more than just find us and kill us. They’ll make us watch as they dismember us in front of each other piece by piece. These guys are the stuff of horror movies.”

A chill ran up my spine and I felt like I was going to instantly be sick. I tried to push the paralyzing anxiety down. We’d been through a lot—Michael, and Adam, and me. We would get through this too.

“Goodnight,” I said to Rob.

He looked stunned, as if he had expected me to act scared or shaken, or to ask him more about this deadly threat that was on our heels. But I didn’t see the point in any of it, especially not in being scared. It served no purpose, and right now we were all in survival mode so anything that didn’t serve a purpose had to be mentally tossed out.

Rob went inside the tent, which left only Michael and I in the cave as he stoked the fire for the last time tonight. Michael walked over to me and gently held me in his arms as he kissed me on the forehead. His skin was warm now, extra warm thanks to being near the flames. When he took my hand to walk into the tent, I rooted my feet in place, and it caused him to look back at me in surprise.

“I don’t want to go in the tent tonight,” I said. “I want to sleep out here in the cave by the fire.”

“But it’s going to dip below freezing temperatures tonight,” he said. “And there’s still a few hours left until first light.”

“I know. But we have the fire and the fur blanket that you have in your pack. I want to sleep out here under the blanket and keep the fire going—just us.”

“Okay,” he smiled.

Michael pulled the thick blanket from his backpack and set more wood onto the fire. He laid the blanket out on the ground and placed our packs at the top to use as pillows. Then he laid down on his back and motioned for me to join him. When I curled against his body and laid my head on his chest, I sighed, and it felt like heaven. The kind of real heaven that you sometimes dream about in your sleep, where all of your fantasies and most heartfelt dreams come true, not the commercialized illusion of golden gates and old white men sitting atop of clouds that institutionalized religion pushes down everyone’s throats.

“Are you okay?” I asked him in a quiet voice.

“Yeah, why? Are you?”

“Yes, but I wasn’t the one who trudged through a pitch black, frigid forest all night to get here while carrying an unconscious man on my shoulders.”

Michael chuckled and it felt so good to hear him laugh that it made me smile. I pressed my eyes closed and tried to imagine being back at our cabin in Asheville and talking about our plans for a garden while we drank whiskey and counted the stars in the sky.

“It wasn’t easy,” he said pensively. “I’ll admit that much. But honestly, all that I could think about was making it back here to you. Nothing else mattered. I didn’t feel or think about any other thing besides that, right up until I saw the faint glow of the fire coming from the cave in the distance.”

I pulled my body closer into his and clenched the fabric of his shirt in my hand that pressed against his chest.

“Are you tired?” I asked, already knowing the answer.

“Exhausted,” Michael said with a deep sigh. “And now that we are lying here together comfortably and I have let myself relax enough to feel anything, I can tell you that every single muscle in my body hurts.”

I ran my hand down his torso and onto the top of his waist.

“Every muscle?” I asked with heady breaths.

I felt my heart race inside my chest. Maybe it was fear of what was to come tomorrow, or maybe it was overwhelming relief that he had made it back to me. Whatever it was, something wasn’t letting me sleep, and was instead making my body restless and fidgety.

He turned his head down to face mine and looked deeply into my eyes. I felt the rise and fall of his chest become more pronounced against my cheek. The same feeling that I felt—the one that wouldn’t leave me alone to sleep, I could see in his darkened eyes too.

“That,” he said as he gently lowered my hand onto the crotch of his pants. “Is not a muscle. And I am not at all too tired to have you, Lisette.”

I lifted my head to kiss him, and savored the feeling of our soft, warm lips pressing together. Michael’s hand gently reached beneath my thighs and guided me up as I crawled onto his body, making sure to keep the thick fur blanket over us to shield us from the cold. The cave was perfect, with the warm glow of the fire and shelter from the wind outside. Or maybe it wasn’t perfect at all, and it was just the simple fact that we were together again that was all the “perfect” we needed. I closed my eyes and moaned gently as I felt Michael’s tongue encircle my own and I urged my body against his, feeling his swelling desire rub against my pelvis with a heat that was all the warmth we needed. With a bit of finessed effort, I slid my pants down and Michael looped his foot around them and kicked them aside completely. Then I worked on freeing him from his. The crackling of the fire mixed with the sound of the whirling wind outside covered the small noise that we both made as I guided him into my body and sat down against him, pushing his cock into me and trembling at the blissful sensation.

It was hard not to let the small moans and gasps escape my lips as I moved against him and felt him rub against the inside of my body in places that made my body quake and my skin tingle with anticipation. For a while he let me move and take control as he held me and trembled against the pleasure that I was giving him. But then, when the feeling inched closer and closer to being uncontrollable, Michael began to move with me in perfect unison as if our bodies were made to fit together for exactly this. When the climactic moment came near, Michael arched his back up and kissed me without stopping as we unraveled around each other. For moments that seemed like an eternity, shockwaves rippled through my body and echoed against my bones. When it was over, I collapsed down onto him and he held me so tightly against his chest that it felt as if he was holding on for dear life.

“I will never let anything happen to you Lisette,” he whispered against the top of my head. “We are going to get out of here, and out of the country, and we are going to completely rebuild our lives together somewhere else; however we want them to be. And I am going to love you forever, until the concept of love no longer does justice to what we have together.”

It was a beautiful sentiment, and I wanted more than anything to take comfort in it and know that it would happen just as Michael said it would. But the truth of the matter was that I was scared too. I wasn’t scared about the gory possible outcomes Rob had described, or because I was afraid of getting caught, or getting shot again. I was afraid because I couldn’t stand the thought of anything happening to Michael. I couldn’t bear how much I loved this man or how much I needed him and needed to know that nothing would ever happen to him. I was more afraid of losing him than I was of being pulled apart one inch of flesh at a time. The worry of something happening to Michael, or something separating the two of us permanently, was the stuff that my nightmares were made of.

“How can you be so sure?” I asked, not wanting to ruin the romantic moment, but needing concrete reassurance more than idealistic romance right at this moment.

“Because I cannot live without you. And because you and I have much more to do together in this life,” he said with certainty.

“Like what?” I asked, curious to hear what goals and dreams he had for our future together.

“What about having a child?” he asked, completely shocking me.