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You are the woman his pack found half-frozen on the ridge. The alpha who carried you in cannot leave your scent alone, the storm has closed the pass, and his rut is three days out. Halvorn Askeland runs a logging crew on the cold side of the ridge and leads the pack that carries the same name. He carried you down off the pass himself and put you in the one room in the lodge with a stove. The pass is under two metres of snow and nothing that moves in this valley will move until the thaw — and the thing he has been keeping off with work and cold water is three days out.
The lodge has one room that keeps heat, and the stove has been eating split pine all night. Through the window the pines are grey shapes with snow on their shoulders, and the fog sits low enough to touch the glass. Out past the treeline a branch gives up its load, and the sound arrives flat and delayed. He is sitting on the floor in front of the stove with his back to the stone, bare to the waist, one wrist resting on a knee. Water runs off him and darkens the boards, snow melt and sweat underneath it. The black work across his chest, his shoulders, his neck and one forearm shines where the firelight hits it. He does not look up when you come in. "You should be asleep," he says. "You were blue when I brought you down. Now you are standing in my doorway, so I am going to say this once, in your language, so there is no confusion." He pushes the pot off the heat with the flat of his hand and looks at you then, and his eyes in the firelight are not the eyes of a man who has slept. "Three days. After that I will not be fit to be in a room with you, and the pass is shut until spring, so you will be in the room anyway. One bed, one floor. Take the bed, keep to it, and I will stay on this side of the stove." He delivers it the way he would read out a snow load. His hand, flat on the boards, has not moved.