I nursed my car along as the grand peak rose out of the vast, uninhabited valley. Save Charlie snoring in the back, I was alone in the dark, a circumstance that had never bothered me before, but with the weight of the starless sky hanging over me, isolation smothered my soul. Could I do this? Dump Charlie on my sister and return to my old life as if it was any better than what Leanne had done to me?
To Charlie, you mean. I corrected the dilemma waging a war in my brain as I eased around a tight bend, the car shuddering over the uneven ground. My heart told me that Safia wouldn’t mind one extra tiny mouth to feed, but the closer I got to her homestead at the peak of Christmas Mountain, the more my chest hurt, and I couldn’t begin to make sense of it. I loved that little boy, but I didn’t want to be a parent. I couldn’t be a parent—not permanently, stuck in Manchester on my own with no days off.
Then you’re as selfish as Damon was when he loaded that hit.
As if my car agreed with me, the ominous clanging grew louder, rattling in time with my painful heart, its discontent shuddering like an awakening beast. Outside, the sky seemed to darken, and my tyres slid on the icy road. Dread filled me, and in a last-ditch effort to distract myself from certain doom I sent my racing thoughts in a complete one-eighty and let Fen infiltrate my brain again. He’d always been good at that. Was good at it still, even eighteen months after I’d last seen him, and a year since I’d heard on the offender grapevine that in my absence from the prison he’d been stabbed on the lifer’s wing.
Jesus. Just thinking about it made me nauseous, a fact I knew without question, because every moment I hadn’t had Charlie on my mind, I’d thought about it. About him, and the reality that the vague horror story I’d heard in the smoking yard of HMP Manchester was all I knew of his fate, save the fact that he’d been hurt gravely enough to quit his damn job. A job he loved. Not that he’d ever told me that, but I knew. I could tell. I’d worked with dozens of prison officers, and they didn’t come more compassionate and kind than Fen.
Doesn’t mean you knew him, though. I mean, sure, we’d worked on the Pope case together, and our gut feelings on it had aligned, but what else was there? A couple of flirtations over locked gates and bad coffee? Dream on, Stone.
I wish. The trouble with dreams was that they didn’t take long to descend into nightmares. The images of Fen’s smiling face morphed into one of him bleeding out on the grimy floor of a prison cell. I flinched, and my wanker of a car chose that moment to give up entirely.
The engine sputtered and it juddered to a stop.
“Fuck!” I slammed my hands on the steering wheel, waking Charlie.
His startled wail pierced the air.
Cringing, I reached back to comfort him with one hand and rummaged for my phone with the other. I hadn’t told Safia I was coming, and she was going to be just delighted with me for dragging her husband down the mountain to rescue me in his pick-up truck.
Not.
I found my phone. Swiped at the screen with my thumb.
Nothing happened.
Literally nothing. It was dead, and in my panicked haste to leave Manchester behind, I’d neglected to pack a charger, or, indeed, anything that wasn’t in the overstocked bag Charlie took back and forth between my house and the city centre doss house Leanne called home.
Fuck. Actual panic began to replace the irritation singeing my nerves. I gave Charlie a carton of juice and got out of the car. My vintage Adidas crunched on snow and ice as though I was in fucking Greenland not rural England, and my heart surged higher in my throat. Jesus. It was a goddamn white-out. How had I not noticed while I’d been picking my way up the peak?
The answer to that was simple: I’d been too busy drowning in self-pity and thinking about Fen Hawthorne’s killer shoulders, and now I was stranded on a deserted, snow-slick mountain road with a toddler and a dead phone.
So do something about it. In my head, I reinvented myself as the kind of dude who carried tools in the boot of my car and popped the bonnet to look at the engine. It whistled in greeting, expelling a gust of steam from the burst radiator hose. I was no mechanic, but I knew enough about car engines to judge that without tools or at least a roll of gaffer tape, it was fucked until I could get it into my brother-in-law’s capable hands.
Which wouldn’t be any time soon, given that he had no idea I was floundering halfway up the bastardy mutant hill he called home.
The mountain heard me take its name in vain. Icy wind whistled past my ears and it dawned on me with a kick to my already thundering pulse that a broken-down car was the least of my worries. It was freezing, and I was stuck in the middle of nowhere with a toddler to keep safe, no passable route up or down the fell, and no source of heat to keep him warm until someone—anyone—came upon us. That could be days. Safia and Paddy won’t come down in this and who the hell would be stupid enough to drive on this road in a snowstorm?
Me, apparently. The same arsehole who’d declared himself a better parent than the flaky piece of shit Charlie had for a mother. Don’t call her that. How many offenders have you seen turn their lives around?
Lots. But I’d met plenty who hadn’t too. Some people were bad to the bone, and I’d been around long enough to know the difference.
Not that any of that mattered right now.
Another gust of wind seared the exposed skin on my face. I shivered and wrapped my coat tighter around me as I considered my options.
After a moment’s deliberation, they came to a sum total of one: sit in the car and pray for a miracle. If I’d been alone, I might’ve chanced trudging up the road in the hope of making it to my sister’s place before I was up to my knees in snow, but there was no way I was taking Charlie out of the car until I had a warm place for him to land.
Optimism at its finest, but I had nothing else. I shut the car bonnet and rounded the car to crawl into the back, leaning forward to flick the hazard lights on for as long as the battery lasted. Charlie had cried himself back to sleep. I tucked him up in the spare blanket I kept in his bag and rescued his juice carton, glad the tiny fraction of me that was a sensible human being had packed a few extras, some water, and some snacks. Could a child survive the end of the world on raisins and Ribena? I guess I was about to find out.
I couldn’t contemplate a reality where I would fall asleep with a snowy apocalypse bearing down on me and my two-year old nephew, but somehow I did.
A knock on the window roused me sometime later. Bleary-eyed and disoriented, I raised my head, half convinced I’d imagined it. Then the knocking came again, accompanied by a gruff voice with the kind of timbre that in any other circumstances would’ve warmed my chilled blood.
I rubbed my face and sat up, peering through the misty glass at the hulking shape outside. My city boy senses told me to open the window and see who the hell it was before setting foot outside of the car. But logic argued that the chances of an axe murderer climbing a mountain just to slaughter us were pretty fucking slim. It was a lot of effort for a tiny blood bath. It was Paddy. It had to be.
Fuck it. I opened the door and stood my wrecked trainers into the snow, sinking up to my calf.
Cursing out loud this time, I came upright, focussing on the tall, broad-shouldered angel who was looming over me, his piercing gaze tight with worry. His piercing cobalt-blue gaze that was nothing like the emerald-green that belonged to my brother-in-law.