The mountains didn't care. That was Dante's lesson, hammered into Kara's bones over the next brutal days. The Alpujarras, south of Granada, were a world away from the orange-scented plazas of Seville. Jagged peaks clawed at a hard, blue sky. Ancient terraces clung precariously to steep slopes. Pine forests gave way to barren rock and scree fields that shifted treacherously underfoot. The air was thin, sharp, and bitingly cold, especially at dawn and dusk, a stark contrast to the lingering warmth of the valleys below.
The cave refuge was abandoned before full light the morning after the shooting practice. Dante led Kara on a punishing trek higher into the sierra, following goat paths invisible to her untrained eye. Their new shelter was even more primitive – a shallow overhang beneath a looming granite outcrop, partially screened by a dense thicket of thorny gorse. A freezing stream tumbled nearby, its water ice-melt cold. Dante called it 'defensible'.
The training intensified. It was no longer just about the gun. It was about the mountain itself, and the predators – human and animal – that inhabited its shadows.
Running became a daily torture. Dante set a relentless pace, scrambling up near-vertical slopes, leaping across treacherous ravines, pushing through dense, scratchy undergrowth. Kara's lungs burned in the thin air. Her bandaged feet, barely healed, screamed protest on the sharp rocks. Her muscles trembled with exhaustion, threatening to buckle. Dante never slowed, never looked back to see if she followed. He simply expected her to keep up. Falling behind meant vulnerability. Vulnerability meant death. The lesson was implicit, brutal, and absolute.
"Faster!" His command would slice through her ragged gasps when she faltered. "Move like you mean it! Think Lorenzo's men take breaks? Think they get tired?"
Anger, as he'd taught her, became fuel. She focused it on the burning in her legs, the stitch in her side, the despair threatening to swallow her. She imagined Lorenzo's face on every rock she climbed, on every impossible incline. She pushed harder, gritting her teeth until her jaw ached, forcing her trembling limbs to obey. The landscape blurred into a punishing haze of grey rock, green scrub, and aching blue sky. She fell. Often. Scraping knees and palms raw on the unforgiving stone. Dante never helped her up. He'd just stand, waiting, his expression impassive, until she dragged herself upright, blood mixing with dirt, and stumbled on.
Food was sparse and utilitarian: tough strips of dried meat, hard cheese, stale bread from Dante's pack, icy water from the stream. Hunger became a constant, gnawing companion. Sleep, when it came, was thin and fractured, haunted by gunshots and blood and her mother's silenced scream. She woke shivering in the pre-dawn cold, damp from the mountain dew, muscles screaming from the previous day's ordeal, only to face it all again.
One afternoon, as they traversed a high, windswept ridge dusted with patches of stubborn, grimy snow, Dante stopped. He pulled a long, wicked-looking knife from a sheath at his belt. The blade was dark, unpolished steel, honed to a razor edge that caught the weak sunlight.
"This," he said, his voice flat in the thin air, "is more reliable than a gun up here. Quieter. Doesn't jam in the cold. Doesn't run out of bullets." He flipped it in his hand, catching it by the blade near the hilt, offering her the handle. "Hold it."
Kara took it. It felt heavy, solid, colder than the mountain air. The worn leather grip molded slightly to her palm. It was a tool, like the guns, but somehow more primal. More intimate.
"Grip," Dante instructed, adjusting her fingers. "Thumb braced here. Not too tight, not too loose. Control." He stepped back, gesturing to a gnarled, dead pine stump nearby. "Strike. Thrust. Like you mean to pierce wood. Or flesh."
The word 'flesh' hung in the air. Kara looked at the stump, then at the knife in her hand. Imagining driving it into something living… someone… sent a fresh wave of nausea through her. She hesitated.
"Do it," Dante commanded, his voice devoid of patience. "Or put it down and walk away. But know this: if Lorenzo's hounds corner you up here, and your gun fails, this blade might be the only thing standing between you and a slow, ugly end. Hesitation is death. Make the choice."
The image Dante conjured – cornered, helpless – cut through the nausea. The anger, banked by exhaustion, flared again. She stepped towards the stump, raised the knife, and drove it forward with a grunt of effort. The blade sank deep into the rotten wood with a solid *thunk*. She wrenched it free.
"Again. Higher. Lower. Sideways. Think of arteries. Think of tendons. Think of survival." His voice was a cold, relentless instructor. "Speed matters. Precision matters. But intent matters most."
Kara stabbed and slashed at the unresisting wood until her arm ached and sweat stung her eyes despite the cold. The stump became Lorenzo, became the faceless men who had invaded her home, became the embodiment of the terror that chased her. She focused the burning anger, the crushing grief, the chilling fear, down the length of the blade. Each strike was a silent scream. Each thrust was a denial of the victim she'd been.
Later, by the meager fire Dante allowed only after dark, deep within the overhang's meager shelter, he taught her to sharpen the blade. The rhythmic scrape of stone on steel was a grim lullaby. Her hands, already raw from rock and gun, blistered from the knife work. Dante tossed her a small tin of salve without comment. She applied it in the flickering firelight, the greasy substance stinging before offering a numb relief.
Silence stretched between them, broken only by the crackle of the fire and the mournful sigh of the wind through the rocks. Kara stared into the flames, the knife resting heavy on her lap. The physical exhaustion was profound, but it was the mental toll that felt crushing. The constant vigilance. The suppression of grief. The forced embrace of violence. She felt fractured, a collection of raw nerve endings and simmering rage held together by sheer will and Dante's cold imperative to survive.
"Why here?" she asked suddenly, her voice raspy, surprising herself. She hadn't planned to speak. "The mountains? Why not… somewhere else? A city? Another country?"
Dante poked at a log with a stick, sending sparks spiraling upwards like dying stars. "Cities have eyes Lorenzo owns. Borders have checkpoints he controls. Airports, trains, buses… traps." He glanced at her, his face shadowed. "The mountains are old. They remember cruelty, but they don't take sides. They offer hiding places for those who know how to find them. And they kill the unprepared. Quickly. It's… efficient."
"Efficient," Kara echoed, the word tasting bitter. Efficient like the massacre of her family. Efficient like Dante's lessons in killing. "How long?" The question was out before she could stop it. "How long do we hide? How long do I… learn?"
Dante's gaze remained fixed on the fire. "Until you're ready. Or until Lorenzo finds us. Whichever comes first." He tossed the stick into the flames. "Sleep. Tomorrow starts before light. We cross the high pass."
Sleep was a battlefield. Kara lay wrapped in the thin, scratchy blanket Dante had produced, shivering despite her proximity to the fire. The cold seeped up from the stone floor. The wind howled like a grieving spirit. And the nightmares came, vivid and suffocating.
*She was back in the villa hallway. The scent of cordite and blood thick in the air. Her mother lay on the marble, the dark stain spreading. But this time, when Kara tried to run to her, her feet were rooted to the spot. She looked down. The rose quartz rosary was tangled around her ankles, the beads glowing faintly. She tried to scream, but no sound came out. Then, the man from the top of the stairs was there, the one Dante had killed, his eyes wide and vacant, blood bubbling from his lips. He pointed a trembling finger past her. Kara turned. Standing in the shattered terrace doorway was her father, Kecent, but his face was wrong – blurred, shifting, dissolving into Lorenzo's cold, merciless features. Lorenzo raised a gun, not at Kara, but at her mother's body. He smiled. And pulled the trigger…*
Kara jolted awake with a strangled gasp, her heart hammering against her ribs. Cold sweat coated her skin. The fire had died down to embers, casting long, dancing shadows that looked like grasping hands on the rock walls. The wind still moaned. She lay rigid, breathing hard, the nightmare's terror clinging like cobwebs.
A low sound reached her – not the wind. A rhythmic scrape. Stone on steel. She turned her head slowly.
Dante sat a few feet away, his back against the rock wall. He wasn't sleeping. He was sharpening his own knife, the one he always carried. The firelight glinted dully on the blade as he drew it methodically across a whetstone. His face was impassive, lost in some private focus, but his eyes… in the dim, flickering light, they held a bleak, hollow emptiness Kara hadn't seen before. The cold, calculating intensity was gone, replaced by a weariness that seemed etched into his soul. He looked less like a predator and more like a ghost haunting his own life.
He sensed her gaze. The scraping stopped. His eyes lifted, meeting hers across the dim space. That bleak emptiness vanished instantly, shuttered behind the familiar, impenetrable flint. But for that fleeting moment, Kara had seen it. She had seen the cost of the life he led, the weight of the violence, the burden of the debt that bound him to her. He wasn't just stone. He was scarred stone, weathered by a thousand storms she couldn't imagine.
He held her gaze for a heartbeat, his expression unreadable. Then, without a word, he went back to sharpening the knife. The rhythmic scrape filled the overhang again, a grim counterpoint to the wind.
Kara turned away, facing the cold rock wall. The echo of the nightmare still trembled in her limbs, but the image of Dante's bleak eyes superimposed itself. He was as trapped as she was. Trapped by the past. Trapped by loyalty to a dead man. Trapped in this cycle of violence. The realization didn't bring comfort. It brought a strange, chilling kinship. They were both exiles in this harsh landscape, bound together by blood and vengeance. She closed her eyes, the scrape of stone on steel the only lullaby offered.
The crossing of the high pass the next day was a descent into a frozen hell Dante hadn't fully prepared her for. What looked like patches of lingering snow from the ridge below revealed itself, as they climbed higher, as a vast, windswept expanse of ice and crusted snow filling the saddle between two jagged peaks. The air was thin and brutally cold, stealing Kara's breath and burning her lungs with every gasp. The wind screamed like a banshee, whipping stinging granules of ice into their faces, threatening to tear them off the narrow, exposed trail Dante navigated with grim certainty.
Kara's worn boots, inadequate for this terrain, slipped constantly on the icy rock beneath the thin snow cover. Her hands, wrapped in thin gloves, were numb blocks. Every step was agony, a battle against gravity, cold, and the suffocating altitude. Dante moved ahead, his figure a dark smudge against the blinding white, seemingly unaffected. He didn't speak. Conserving energy was paramount.
Halfway across, disaster struck. Kara misjudged a step on a patch of black ice hidden beneath a dusting of snow. Her foot shot out from under her. She cried out, arms flailing, as she plummeted sideways off the narrow path, tumbling down a steep, snow-covered scree slope.
The world became a terrifying blur of white and grey. Icy gravel scraped her face, filled her mouth. She hit a rock, hard, driving the air from her lungs. Pain exploded in her ribs. She tumbled further, completely out of control, the slope seeming to go on forever.
Suddenly, a jarring impact. She slammed into something solid and unyielding. Dante. He'd thrown himself sideways, intercepting her chaotic fall, wrapping his arms around her and twisting his body to take the brunt of the impact as they slid together another ten feet down the slope before grinding to a stop against a cluster of large boulders.
Kara lay gasping, crushed against Dante's chest, her face buried in the rough wool of his sweater. She could feel the hard pounding of his heart against her cheek, hear his ragged breaths in her ear. The world spun. Pain radiated from her ribs, her scraped face, her jarred limbs. Snow filled her collar, melting into icy trickles down her back.
Dante shifted, pushing her slightly away, his grip firm on her arms. "Are you hurt? Broken bones?" His voice was tight, strained.
Kara tried to speak, coughed, spitting out snow and gravel. "Ribs…" she managed, wincing as she tried to draw a deeper breath. "Sore. Think… just bruised."
Dante's eyes scanned her face, her torso, his expression grim. He probed her ribs with impersonal fingers, making her gasp. "Probably bruised," he confirmed, his tone clipped. "Can you stand?"
With his help, she struggled to her feet. Her legs felt like jelly. Every muscle screamed. She looked up the slope they'd tumbled down. It looked impossibly steep, impossibly far. The wind howled, mocking her.
Dante followed her gaze. His jaw was set, a muscle ticking furiously. He looked… furious. But not at her. At the situation. At the mountain. At the relentless pursuit that forced them into this frozen gauntlet. He scanned the slope, then the sky, which was darkening ominously to the west.
"Storm coming," he muttered. "We can't stay here. We have to go back up. Now." He pointed to a slightly less steep section of the slope littered with larger boulders. "That way. Use the rocks for handholds. Move carefully. One slip and we both go down, and this time, there might not be a stop before the bottom."
He didn't wait for her agreement. He started climbing, finding footholds and handholds on the icy rock with practiced ease, testing each one before putting his weight on it. Kara followed, her movements slow, clumsy, fueled by terror and the dregs of adrenaline. Her ribs protested with every lift of her arm, every twist for a grip. Her numb fingers fumbled. Snow swirled, reducing visibility. The wind tore at her.
Halfway back up, her foot slipped again. She scrabbled desperately, a cry tearing from her throat. Dante's hand shot out, clamping like iron around her wrist, hauling her back onto the narrow ledge he'd found. He didn't let go immediately. His grip was bruising, his face inches from hers, his flint-grey eyes blazing with a fierce, terrifying intensity in the storm-light.
"Focus!" he snarled, his breath warm against her frozen cheek. "Look only where your hands and feet go! One step! Then the next! Nothing else exists! Do you understand? Nothing!"
He released her wrist, leaving a band of icy fire where his fingers had been. Kara nodded, swallowing hard, her heart pounding against her bruised ribs. She forced her gaze down, blocking out the dizzying drop, the howling wind, the ominous sky. One handhold. One foothold. Then the next. Dante moved just ahead, a solid anchor in the whirling chaos.
By the time they hauled themselves back onto the relative safety of the pass trail, the storm had hit in earnest. Snow fell thick and fast, driven horizontally by the gale. Visibility dropped to near zero. The cold was bone-deep, penetrating layers of clothing Dante had insisted on – layers Kara now understood were barely adequate.
Dante didn't hesitate. He grabbed her arm, pulling her close. "Stay with me! Step where I step!" He turned them away from the exposed pass, plunging back down the slope they'd originally climbed, seeking the scant shelter of the rocks below.
They stumbled and slid down the treacherous slope, blinded by the blizzard. Dante navigated by instinct, pulling Kara relentlessly forward. Kara focused solely on his back, on placing her feet in the indentations his boots left in the fresh snow, on not falling again. The world narrowed to the howl of the wind, the sting of ice on her face, the burning ache in her ribs, and the iron grip on her arm.
Finally, he dragged her into a shallow depression beneath a massive, overhanging boulder. It offered meager shelter from the direct onslaught of the wind and snow, but the cold was still paralyzing. Dante shoved her down against the rock face, then crouched beside her, pulling a small, foil-lined emergency blanket from his pack. He shook it out and wrapped it tightly around her shoulders, tucking it in roughly.
"Stay. Don't move," he ordered, his voice barely audible over the storm's roar. He pulled his own hood lower, then began digging frantically at the snow piling up at the entrance of their meager shelter, using his hands and a flat piece of rock, trying to build a crude windbreak.
Kara huddled under the crinkling blanket, shivering uncontrollably. Her clothes were damp from snow and sweat. Her ribs throbbed. Her face stung from the ice pellets. She watched Dante work, his movements swift and desperate in the blinding white. The foil blanket trapped some body heat, but the cold seeped up from the ground, through her boots. Her teeth chattered violently.
Dante finished piling the snow as best he could, then crouched back beside her in the cramped space. He pulled his knees up, wrapping his arms around them, conserving heat. He was breathing hard, plumes of vapor condensing instantly in the frigid air. Snow dusted his dark hair and the shoulders of his jacket.
Silence stretched, filled only by the banshee wail of the wind and Kara's uncontrollable shivering. The cold was a living thing, gnawing at her core. She curled tighter into a ball, pulling the blanket over her head, trying to trap every molecule of warmth. She thought of the villa's central heating, of Consuela bringing hot chocolate after school, of her mother wrapping her in a soft blanket on the sofa. The memories were like shards of glass.
A violent tremor racked her body, turning into a sob she couldn't suppress. She was going to die here. Frozen. On a mountain. Because her father killed a man's sister. Because Lorenzo wanted revenge. Because Dante owed a debt. The unfairness, the sheer, brutal pointlessness of it, crashed over her.
She felt Dante shift beside her. Then, abruptly, his arm wrapped around her shoulders, pulling her sideways against him. He tucked the edges of the foil blanket more tightly around her, enveloping them both. His body was a solid wall of heat against her side, radiating through the layers of clothing. He didn't speak. He didn't offer comfort. He simply held her, his grip firm, anchoring her against the storm's fury, sharing his body heat – a practical, desperate measure against the killing cold.
Kara froze, shocked rigid for a moment. The proximity was jarring, intimate after days of cold distance. She could feel the hard muscle of his arm, the steady, deep rhythm of his breathing. He smelled of snow, cold wool, gun oil, and something intensely, fundamentally male and alive. It was overwhelming. Terrifying. And, against the encroaching ice, undeniably vital.
Slowly, incrementally, the violent shivering subsided. The shared heat beneath the crinkling foil began to seep into her frozen limbs, a tiny bastion against the arctic onslaught outside. She didn't pull away. She couldn't. Her survival depended on this fragile pocket of warmth, on the solid, unyielding presence beside her. Dante remained rigid, staring out into the blinding white chaos beyond their meager snow wall, his profile a stark, unreadable mask in the storm-light. He offered no words, only his heat and his strength, a silent pact against the indifferent fury of the mountain. The debt to a dead man, it seemed, demanded more than just training.It demanded survival,shared breath by stolen breath in the heart of the frozen void.