My last rescue plays behind my eyes. The fishing vessel. The storm. The basket compromised. The woman’s face as the current took her. I’d chosen wrong then.
I’m not making that mistake again.
I dive under the surface, but I can’t find her. I pop up, take a breath, and go back down and, this time, my hand finds her. I grab the collar of her jacket and yank, hard, dragging her against me. She thrashes until she registers who’s got her, then freezes for half a second, just long enough to meet my eyes in the gray, and that’s when the next wave dumps a thousand gallons of Pacific straight into our faces.
She twists in the jacket, tries to fight the water, and I clamp her under one arm and kick us both toward the surface. For one insane, idiotic heartbeat I wonder if she’s going to punch me for dragging her. Instead, she clamps her arms around my neck and hangs on for dear life, choking, hair in her eyes.
Up above, the helicopter’s spotlight stutters over us, hunting.
My head breaks water and I scream, “Here! Here!” and then go straight under again because the current’s decided to fuck with us until we’re dead.
I don’t let go of her. Not now, not ever. I hang on to her and kick and kick and finally surface again, this time with enough air to scream up at the bird above us.
Zade’s voice shouts in my ear: “Hold. Hold. Basket inbound, swimmer. You got her?”
“I got her,” I scream. My teeth hurt from clenching. My arms already feel like rebar, and the cold’s starting to stall my brain, turn everything into a slow-fading tunnel.
But I’m not letting go.
I get a hand under Scarlett’s chin, tilt her face up, keep her above the chop.
The basket comes down. It swings on the wind, pendulums out thirty feet, and I know Zade and Crew are doing their best, but the gusts are tossing it everywhere. I time the heave of the water, get us close enough that I can use the wave to heave her in.
She’s almost in, but then the basket lurches, the wire cable yanking it away and nearly pulling her with. I grip the back of her jacket, haul her belly-flat onto the rim, and wedge her legs in myself until she’s locked in place. She’s gasping, eyes wild, but alive.
“Hoist!” I roar. My voice is shredded. “GO!”
The basket rises. She’s in it, face up, staring at me, one hand reaching out before the wind pulls her away. She mouths something—my name, maybe. I hope so. Could be “asshole.” Either way, I’d take it.
I go under again, and when I resurface, the basket is on its way up with Scarlett in it. The helo hovers, keeping station—barely, but holding. I grit my teeth and swim toward the tail rotor, and then the light dies, and there’s nothing above me but black ocean and a sound in my ears like a train barreling straight down.
The cold is shocking. The drysuit is failing somewhere along the seams—a freezing trickle races down my neck, under the collar, and the salt stings my eyes open wide. I’m still holding the cable, still trying to keep myself oriented to where the bird is, but the current’s dragging me sideways, and my legs aren’t kicking like they should.
I exhale. Suck in a lungful of air and only get half of it, because my ribs are locked up and the water’s in my mouth, my sinuses, my ears. My whole world is wet and noise, a soup of rotor thunder, wave crash, radio static, the bone-deep ringof adrenaline drowning out everything else. I try to shout, try to signal, but the comms are full of nothing but hurricane. The harness is heavy; my arms are bricks.
Gotta fight. Gotta?—
Chapter Thirty-Three
Dean
I come up out of the dark the same way I went under it. All at once. No easing into it, no soft climb toward the surface—one second there’s nothing and the next there’s a ceiling I don’t recognize and a smell I do. Antiseptic.
Hospital.
A hand is wrapped around mine.
I turn my head, and my brain rattles in my skull. My vision goes white, but when it clears, I see Scarlett sitting in the chair pulled up to the rail. She looks like hell. Nothing like that polished woman with the fake, too bright smile who first set foot on my ferry. Someone’s oversized cardigan swallows her to the wrists. Her hair’s dried in salt-stiff waves. There’s a scrape down one cheekbone I don’t remember her having, and shadows under her eyes so dark they look bruised. She’s watching me like she’s been watching me for a while.
“There you are,” she whispers.
I try to sit up. Everything in my chest lights up at once, a deep ache that saysdon’t,and a machine somewhere to my left starts complaining about it.
“Don’t.” She presses a hand flat to my shoulder. There’s an IV taped to the back of it. “You’re not allowed to do the thing where you pretend you’re fine. They pumped half the sound out of your lungs.”
My mouth is dry. I work my throat until words come. “How did I?—”
I stop. Because I’m chasing the last thing I have and it isn’t much. The basket going up with her in it. The light dying. Black water and a sound like a train coming down on me. Then nothing. Then here.
