We drove thirty miles an hour faster than anyone else on the road, jumping lanes, switching gears, and avoiding any sort of traffic the entire way.

Leon’s breathing troubled me. It head grown heavy, much like the circles under his eyes. The stress was finally getting to him. I thought back to last night when he climbed into the bed beside me. Maybe I wasn’t the only one that needed someone there during times like these.

We decided to stop in Kilstad, a little ways north of Karlstad, to stay away from people and the possibility of being found. From what I researched, there were no more than two hundred people that lived in Kilstad. Maybe staying somewhere more heavily populated would have been better, but the last time we tried that, we had been tracked down.

Leon and I didn’t even stay in a hotel that night. We drove along until we came across a gravel road that led to a hidden lake an hour before sunset. Nothing too big, but there was a small chalet on the other side. I was apprehensive spending the night in someone else’s chalet, but I was assured that it was not inhabited given the time of year. The family that spent their summers there, as we saw given all the photographs throughout the chalet, had winterized the chalet and went back to the city. We would be safe here for now, maybe even a couple nights.

Leon spent the remainder of the diminishing sunlight cutting wood around the lake. I watched from the window of the chalet as I prepared something to eat. The family had left cans of soups, pastas, and food that would survive the winter. Luckily, I found spaghetti in a can and another  full of pasta sauce in the cupboards. Run on propane, I set the stove up and boiled water to start dinner. As I waited, I would glance through the window, watching Leon position a piece of wood and then swing at, shattering it into two, never missing the center of his target or failing to make a clean cut. He had been working nearly an hour before I had even began dinner and I could see him wiping the sweat from his brow and a dark blotch of sweat forming through his white shirt. The pile of wood he had split was growing and it was much larger than what we needed for a day or two. I turned around to place the pasta into the now boiled water and turned down the heat. I glanced back to see Leon carrying wood back to the chalet, drenched in so much sweat that his shirt seemed entirely transparent. I quickly threw on a fuzzy coat I had found in the front closet and stepped outside.

“Do you want help bringing it in?” I shouted to him as he walked back to his pile. He responded with a thumbs up. We spent the next few minutes taking four to five pieces at a time to form an organized pile outside the chalet.

“Thank you,” he said, stretching his arms and yawning. “I’m exhausted”. He was soaked through his shirt and I could only imagine how cold that would’ve been now that he wasn’t swinging the axe.

“I made dinner, maybe get changed into something warm and then we can eat, yeah?” I suggested. He smiled and sighed in relief. We entered the chalet again, the smell of fresh pasta and the basil in the sauce hitting our senses as soon as we inhaled.

“I’ll be no more than a minute” Leon said, walking towards the bedroom he had claimed his own. I sat down, serving us both and waited for him. We sat in silence once more and ate dinner. We hadn’t eaten anything other than complimentary breakfasts and at small pop-up restaurants since we had left Cologne. It felt so good finally eating a home cooked meal and being able to relax doing so.

We cleaned up after dinner and brought in some wood that would last us the night thanks to the indoor woodstove. Within ten minutes of starting the fire, the chalet began to feel a little warmer, although we could still our breath when we exhaled.

“What do we do now?” I asked Leon, glancing across the couch to where he sat.

“We wait” he said, the intensity and danger in his eyes almost stopping my heart.

Next Chapter: Chapter Eight