“What are you?—”
“No time to argue.” He swung up behind her on the horse. “Hold onto me. The water will make us lighter.”
“Oliver—”
“Trust me.”
He saw the moment she decided to trust him. Saw her jawset, her fingers tighten on his. Then they were in the water together.
The current hit them like a fist, but the horse was steady. Oliver wrapped his arm around her waist and pulled her hard against him as the river tried to tear them off the steed.
“Don’t let go!” he shouted over the roar of water.
“I won’t!”
They went under. The horse gone from beneath them.
The world became cold and dark and chaotic. His lungs burned. The current was enormous, indifferent, and it had her, it had both of them, and he locked his arm tighter and kept pulling along the rope with his free hand. He could feel her nails through his coat. He could feel the river trying to take her from him.
And there, in the cold dark, in the half-second between one pull and the next, when he didn’t know which way was up, the thought arrived.
If she dies, this was all for nothing.
He meant the mission. He meant James and the testimony and the months of careful work that had brought him to this freezing river. That was what he meant.
Except it wasn’t.
He knew it wasn’t, in the same moment the thought arrived, with the terrible clarity of a man who can’t lie to himself while he’s drowning. He didn’t mean the mission. He meanther. He meant the specific and irreplaceable fact of her, the green eyes and the steady hands and the voice that quietened when she was frightened. He meant the woman who had survived fourteen years of the unsurvivable and still, somehow, still, had the capacity to cheer from a riverbank. That was what he meant bynothing. Her absence. Her specifically.
The realization didn’t feel like a revelation. It felt like something he’d already known being confirmed.
He pulled them both toward the surface.
They broke the water, gasping. Megan’s weight was against his side, and she was alive, coughing and gulping air, her grip on his arm fierce enough to bruise. Webb’s hands appeared at the bank, grabbing Oliver’s coat, hauling them both up out of the current and onto solid ground.
They collapsed in a tangle of limbs. Oliver lay on his back, staring up at the gray sky, his chest heaving, the sound of the river filling everything. He was aware of Megan against his side. He was aware of her breathing.
He lay there and let himself be aware of it.
When he could manage more than one breath at a time, he turned his head to look at her.
She was already looking at him. With her hair plastered to her face, and her lips blue with cold, she should have looked wretched. She looked fierce. Alive in a way that struck him somewhere beneath his ribs.
“You came back for me,” she said. Wonder in her voice, as though she still couldn’t quite account for it. “You came back into the river.”
“Of course.”
“You could have died.”
Oliver sat up slowly, helping her do the same. Across the river, riders appeared through the treeline: Penharrow’s men. Too late. He reached for the rope and cut it, watched it unravel and float away in the current.
“Yes,” he said. “I could have.”
“Why?” The question was barely a whisper. “Why would you risk your life for me?”
He looked at her. The honest answer still sat in his chest, exactly where it had arrived in the cold dark under the water. He was not ready to say it, and she was not ready to hear it, and they had Penharrow’s men fifty yards away across a river and Webb already struggling to his feet.
“Because you deserve someone to risk things for you,” hesaid.
