For a moment I feel Julian slipping away from me—and with a great effort I kick again and connect with Donovan’s nose, breaking it with a crunch and a spurt of blood. He reels back, dazed, clutching at his face and snarling like a wounded animal. The lighter snaps shut and falls. I pocket it, adjust my grip on Julian, and sidle to my right, down the slope of the riverbank, down to the iced-over surface that I hope is solid. Please, I think, allow me passage across the ice. Please let it be frozen at least several inches, enough to hold my weight, which isn’t much, really.

With breath held, I slide carefully onto the ice. It feels firm enough here at the edge. Unable to continue crawling without the use of my arms, I rise slowly to my feet, listening for every subtle shift of the ice. Halfway across, I am convinced it will bear me safely to the other side, and I am convinced also that there is no way Donovan will follow me on this precarious journey—but I hear him sliding down the bank, shouting at me to come back.

“You’re fucking crazy!” he yells, but that doesn’t stop him from stepping out onto the ice himself. “You can’t have him!”

I can’t help it—I turn around as he gains his footing, holding out his arms to distribute his weight.

“Go back!” I shout, throat raw with the cold. “It won’t hold both our weight.”

He ignores me, sliding forward, and I hear the telltale crack, the sound ice cubes make when you drop them into a glass of warm water.

Trying not to panic, I ease my way toward the other side of the river, my heart jittering as the ice complains beneath my feet—but the bank is just ahead, and in moments I am there, climbing up onto solid ground on the other side.

Donovan has made it halfway across the river when there is a great rending crack.

Even in the dark, I can see the whites of his widened eyes fixed upon me with terror as the ice splinters under his feet—and then he is gone, and all that is left is a hole in the ice, gaping open like a mouth to the dark waters below.

I wait.

My heart is a cold fist. Any minute now, I think, Donovan will burst up from the water, coughing. We will have to work together to make it back, and then perhaps we can finally put all of this behind us.

But I wait, and the long minutes unspool. I cannot stop shaking, whether from the cold or from imagining what he must have experienced as the current took him away from the only opening, the only way out.

It was terrible to be chased by someone I thought would hurt me without hesitation; yet somehow it is even more terrible, now, to look at that empty black hole in the ice and know I am alone.