Greta’s breath caught.
Jonah stepped forward, arms outstretched as if to catch her. “Greta, please?—”
She ducked under his arm and ran. Her boots slipped in the mud but she didn’t fall, pushing forward with single-minded focus. The deputies looked up as she approached. The one with the clipboard stepped toward her, mouth open to say something, but she was already past him, eyes fixed on the dark shape half-submerged in the mud.
Bones. A jumble of them, weathered and stained, protruding from the earth like broken branches. A femur. Part of a pelvis. A fragment of jawbone. Fifteen years in the ground, uncovered by the flood, and still unmistakably human.
The jacket lay nearby, half-buried but intact, the leather dark with age and water. Greta’s heart stuttered. The stitching along the sleeve was visible even in the dim light—rough, uneven, done by hands that had been in a hurry. And there, on the left shoulder, a patch so familiar it made her chest ache: a black and white design, the name of the band running across the bottom.
She dropped to her knees in the mud, her hand already reaching out.
A deputy moved to stop her. “Ma’am, please don’t?—”
She ignored him, her fingers closing around the edge of the patch. The leather was stiff, cold, and slick with mud, but she knew it immediately. The patch wasn’t straight—it tilted slightly toward the back, where Alice had been in too much of a hurry to get it on before school to check the placement. And there, visible when she lifted the edge with her thumb, the small, dark scorch mark on the leather underneath—the shape of the iron, pressed down too hard and too long.
“Ironing it,” she whispered. “She was ironing it and left it on too long.”
Her voice sounded strange to her own ears, distant and cracked. The deputy was still talking, his hand on her shoulder now, but she couldn’t make sense of the words.
All she could see was Alice at sixteen, standing in front of the ironing board in the laundry room, her hair damp from the shower, her face flushed as she leaned over the jacket.
“It’s not straight,” she’d said, her voice high with frustration. “Ugh, I’m going to be late.”
Greta had laughed, rolling her eyes at her twin’s drama, and offered to fix it.
“Forget it,” Alice had said, already running for the door. “I’ll do it tonight.”
She never came home.
Greta’s lungs locked up, making it impossible to pull in air. Her vision blurred, the scene in front of her doubling and then tripling. The jacket in her hands became two jackets, then three, the patch wavering and indistinct. Her knees buckled, and she felt herself tilting forward into the mud, her weight suddenly too much for her legs to support.
Strong hands caught her under the arms, stopping her fall. Not the deputy—someone bigger, someone whose hands were callused and steady, holding her upright when she couldn’t do it herself. She looked up, expecting Bear, but the face above her was lean and weathered, with a wild beard and dark eyes that held a depth of understanding that made her want to look away.
Evander.
And then Bear was there, running full-out across the open ground, his face set in lines Greta had never seen before—raw fear barely contained under the rigid control she’d watched him maintain for two years. He pushed past Walker, past Boone, past the deputy still standing with his hand out, and dropped to his knees in the mud beside her.
“Greta. Oh, Christ, Greta.”
She couldn’t speak. Couldn’t do anything but cling to the jacket, her fingers locked around the edge of the patch as ifit might disappear if she let go. Bear’s hands—his enormous, careful hands—closed over hers, not pulling, just holding.
“Let me,” he said, his voice dropping to the register she’d only heard a handful of times—in his bedroom, in the dark, when he’d been inside her and everything else had fallen away. “Let me take you home.”
She shook her head. “It’s her.” The words came out ragged, broken. “The jacket. The patch. I helped her put it on—” She stopped, the sentence unfinished. Fifteen years. Fifteen years of searching, and now this—a jacket in the mud, bones in the ground, and a scorch mark under a patch she’d watched her twin sew on the night before she disappeared.
Bear’s arms closed around her, one hand coming up to cradle the back of her head. He was warm—so warm—and solid in a way that made her want to collapse against him and never move again. His chest rose and fell against her cheek, his heart hammering under her ear. He said nothing. Just held her, his breath coming in careful, measured pulls as if he was counting them.
She felt him shift, his weight redistributing, and then she was being lifted—effortlessly, as if she weighed nothing—and cradled against his chest. Her face pressed into the hollow of his throat, the familiar scent of him—sweat and pine and the faint trace of the soap he used—filling her nose. The jacket was still in her hands, clutched against her chest, the patch rough under her fingers.
Bear turned, his stride long and purposeful as he carried her away from the water’s edge. Behind them, she heard movement—the shift of bodies, the quiet exchange of words she couldn’t make out. When she managed to lift her head, she saw the Valor Ridge men had closed ranks, forming a wall between her and the scene at the creek—Jonah and Hatch and Walker and Boone andGhost, standing shoulder to shoulder, their backs to her, facing the deputies and the remains and the long night ahead.
Bear carried her past the trucks, past the deputies’ vehicles, past the place where Atlas waited by her Jeep, his ears forward, watching her with worried eyes. He didn’t stop until he reached his own truck, parked at the edge of the clearing. Only then did he ease her down, letting her feet touch the ground while keeping one arm firmly around her waist.
“I’ve got you,” he said, his voice low and steady in her ear. “I’ve got you, Greta.”
She looked up at him, at the face that had become as familiar to her as her own—the dark eyes, the beard, the lines at the corners of his mouth that appeared when he smiled. Right now, those lines were deep with worry, his eyes fixed on hers with an intensity that made her chest ache.
“It’s her,” she breathed. “It’s Alice.”
