Panic coiled in Preston’s gut like an angry snake, twisting up his insides and making him want to tear apart everything in sight.

No one had seen Ashley for nearly two hours.

He’d sent out the search party an hour ago, men on snowmobiles and skis, as Ashley’s friends paced the lobby mindless with worry, desperate to go out and help. But they weren’t experienced enough to face the potential dangers of snowbanks at twilight, and it wouldn’t take much for one missing person to turn into two or three.

Preston knew his way around this mountain and the marked slopes, the trails that veered off track. And he was better than most at staying upright over tricky terrain. It would have to be enough, because there was no way he could stay here any longer, sitting around, useless and afraid.

He told only the resort manager that he was heading out, too, explaining that he couldn’t sit there and wait, acting like Ashley’s wellbeing wasn’t the only thing crashing around his head.

If she was—

No.

He couldn’t think like that—wouldn’t think like that. She was fine. She’d just gotten a little lost, that was all.

Except he knew, with a frozen well of pinpointed fear in his heart, that getting lost in this environment for two hours would only lead to one thing, if left unfound.

He wasn’t going to let that happen to Ashley.

Suited up, he slipped out while he had no one’s attention and took out the last remaining snowmobile, heading for Ashley’s last known location—the black diamond slopes. Logic told him she could only have gone straight down—that she didn’t really know how to turn and swerve, and the natural bumps and valleys of the trail would’ve determined her course. He followed the trail, gliding over the tracks left by the other snowmobiles looking for her, heart sinking at the obvious knowledge of it all—that the search party hadn’t found her on this same trail, so why would he? What made him think he would have success all on his own, as a one-man search party, when a team of twenty strong hadn’t yet been able to spot her?

But he couldn’t let it discourage him. Maybe they missed something; maybe he could call on the connection he felt with her, sense his way to the right location. He always felt a pull towards her, something strong and hot in his gut, like a hook clinging to his pelvis and tugging, drawing him close to her. It was as if some kind of magnetic force existed between them, and he wasn’t strong enough to resist it.

These were all desperate thoughts of a man crazy with fear but it was all he had to go on, so he searched, and he hoped, and even when the sun started dipping behind the mountain and he’d travelled the same trail more than a dozen times, he refused to give up. He widened his search field with each pass, heading far off-piste and into snowbanks designed to immobilize. His face was frozen, his hands stiff on the handles, and he could hear the snowmobile sputtering, running out of gas, slowing him down…

He’d long since seen the last light in his peripheral vision, the remaining search party members heading back, and was that a helicopter he could hear in the distance?

How long had it been?

His hope diminished as rapidly as the sunlight, darkness expanding in his chest and coiling around his heart, resting heavy in his gut. The wind had picked up, blowing snow across the landscape, obscuring his vision, and blanketing the world in an impenetrable white. Hopelessness drifted over him like an icy shroud.

And then he saw it—the cut of pink in a mound of untouched snow, thirty feet from an abandoned lookout cabin. And the darkness around his heart squeezed tight and punched the breath from his lungs.

The snowmobile groaned to a stop, spitting out its last reserves, and Preston swallowed the thick lump lodged in his throat as he hopped off on frozen legs and stumbled in the direction of that slip of pink, focused on nothing but getting to it, touching it, breathing in the life of it…

He found her on her side, dusted with snow, knees drawn up to her chest and eyes shut. Her lips were blue, eyelids too, the rest of her skin almost translucent and her hair frozen in icy spikes across her face.

But she was breathing, and that was enough.

“Ash—” he said, falling to his knees beside her, voice cutting off as he pressed a hand to her face and felt nothing but ice. “Ashley.”

She didn’t respond, but he didn’t expect her to. She was lucky enough to even be breathing.

She needed help—immediate help. It took his sluggish brain a moment to think of what to do, then he fumbled in his pockets, searching, numb fingers coming up empty until eventually he felt the hard edge of his walkie-talkie

He brought it out, pressed the button, and heard nothing. No static.

“Hello? Someone there?”

Silence, as if it was little more than a lump of empty plastic in his hand. He pressed the button harder.

“Hello? Does anyone read me?” Panicking, desperate, he fiddled with the signal, turning the knob this way and that, urgency making him clumsy. “Is there anyone there?”

Nothing.

They were out of range. Somehow, Ashley had managed to collapse in an area of dead air on this mountain.

Fuck, Preston, think.

There wasn’t enough juice in the snowmobile, and there was no one out here—at least not nearby. He and Ashley were alone, and it was on him to make sure she survived.

God, she had to survive. There was no other option.

She needed to get warm. That was the first priority. If she remained frozen, then—

No. He’d get her warm.

But he couldn’t think how, his useless brain failing him now, in his most urgent hour of need. There was no way of making a fire, with nothing around him but snow and ice and paralyzing wind. He had no gas in his snowmobile. If he stripped off his own clothes to wrap around her, she’d still be in the frozen snow and he’d be unconscious within minutes, and who would be left to look after her then?

She looked like an angel lying there, the bright colors of her snowsuit stark against the pristine white of the snow. Twilight lit her up with an ethereal beauty, highlighting the frozen streaks of her hair, her icy-blue lips and eyelids. She was like a painting, almost. If she wasn’t currently at risk for serious hypothermia—or worse—then he could’ve spent the night just staring at her.

The snowmobile was dead, so he had no way of getting her back to the resort. But the abandoned lookout cabin was within walking distance, and it was better than this—this relentless cold, the wind picking up and whipping ice across his skin, freezing him down to the bone as melting snow seeped through his clothes, and that was just him, his suffering. Compared to Ashley, he had it easy. Ashley had been through all of it and beyond, until she lay here now, silent, unmoving.

He got up on shaking limbs and picked her up—or tried to. The numbness was setting in, and she was dead weight with frozen bones. His grip on her loosened in an instant and the momentum had him falling back onto his ass, hissing at the impact, spluttering out curses as he stared up at the sky and willed it to beam down some help.

That was definitely a helicopter he could hear, throbbing like a bass guitar in the distance. Not close enough, and they couldn’t wait around and hope it came by this way.

Gathering all of his energy, all of his reserves and then some, he bundled her up again and hefted her into his arms, trying not to panic at how she didn’t quite flop against him like a regular unconscious person would when lifted—that instead she fell against him with a thud, arms and legs and head almost unmoving, stiff with cold and hard on his body.

All he had to do was get her into that cabin. It was a mantra he repeated in his head with each heavy-tread step—get her in the cabin, get her warm, save her. In the cabin, warm, save her. Cabin, warm, safe…

He nearly didn’t make it. The wind battered him from the front as he pushed his way forward, and it was like the cabin drew farther back the closer he came, getting smaller and smaller ahead of him until he realized it wasn’t the cabin drawing back at all, it was his vision drawing in, the edges darkening and his steps slowing, his chest a crushing pressure as he sucked in a breath, another, shards of glass behind his ribs and it was too far…too far…

And then he was at the door, and reality snapped back in with a distinct focus, enabling him to boot open the wood and stumble inside, into the darkness and the dry air, the snowless floor.

There was nothing inside but an old metal stool and a rickety desk, neither of which offering him much assistance. He scanned for a radio, some kind of phone system, but the place had clearly been gutted when the last person left, and all that remained was a terrifying nothingness. But they had walls, a barrier between them and the frozen air outside, and that put them in a better position than they were before.

He carefully lay Ashley out on the dusty floor and got to work, the time passing by in a haze as he concentrated on the tasks, on saving her life—

He peeled off her snowsuit, boots, the heavy sweatshirt beneath and the t-shirt, leggings and wet socks, and lastly her gloves. He left her cold and pale in her underwear, her skin holding a sheen of blue to it that made Preston’s stomach turn over.

Then he snapped his focus to removing his own clothes, down to his underwear, shivering, teeth chattering, paying no attention to his own state as he got himself in position behind her, his back against the splintering wall, hearing it creak alarmingly with his weight. The last thing he needed was for this cabin to fall down around them, not when it was the only thing standing in the way of Ashley freezing to death.

Blowing into his hands and rubbing them together for an instant in an effort to warm them up, he grabbed her under the arms and pulled her upright, then dragged her back until her shoulders pressed against his chest, his legs bracketing hers.

Then he wrapped his arms around her and closed his eyes, fighting against the violent shivers racking his body, the absolute dread at the feeling of Ashley not moving at all, nothing beyond short, shallow breaths.

In the distance, the bass of the helicopter grew louder.