Chapter 236: Reid
By the time I hit the Grayling’s deck, the first thing I hear is Cruz—voice hoarse, command cracked—“Jake, you need to stop or you’ll kill him.”
I whirl, soaked and shaking, and see my brother straddling Nick on the Vigil’s bow, ramming fists into his face again and again and again. The water’s eased for a beat and our hulls are close—close enough for two of the Grayling’s men to gamble the jump. They barely make it, skid on the slick deck, and sprint for the wheelhouse to bring her around. Cruz is half-wrapped around Jake’s chest, trying to haul him back without giving the bastard an inch, and Jake is gone—voice gone, eyes gone, everything in him gone. “This is my girl,” he’s snarling, knuckles a blur. “You hurt my fucking girl—if she dies—if she dies—” He doesn’t stop, just says it like a prayer and a sentence all at once.
I freeze, shocked clean through, because I thought I was going to be the one to do that. I have never, in my life, seen Jake lose it like that.
Another Grayling hand lunges across the gap, grabs Cruz’s elbow; together they wrench Jake back a foot, then another. The Vigil shudders, then noses for harbor under borrowed hands. The Grayling pivots too—young Noah barking headings, his crew moving like they’re one body—and it shakes me loose. I run.
They’ve got her midships under the gunwale, men fussing with a pile of wool blankets and a med kit that looks insultingly small against what’s been done. One guy’s pressing both hands hard over the torn place in her side—the shard’s gone; Nick must’ve ripped it free—and blood keeps welling anyway, dark in the rain. “Space,” someone says when they see me, not unkind, and they make room like they know I’ll kill anyone who doesn’t.
“She’s not waking up,” the deckhand at her head tells me, apology breaking his words. They’ve propped her on towels; they’re counting breaths. Despite the blankets, her lips are still that wrong purplish-blue, her skin white as snow.
I look at her and something in me lets go. A tear slips before I can stop it. I couldn’t care less who sees it.
Her jaw and neck are mottled blue-purple where fingers closed. There’s blood matted in her hair at the back of her skull. One wrist hangs in a way it shouldn’t; the other arm is slashed along the length of it, a clean, ugly line. I slide my hand to the hem of her shirt, lift—just enough. My knees nearly buckle. On both sides, low along her ribs, I can see where the cage has caved—bruising blooming, swelling wrong. The men glance at me, quick and quiet, like they’re already making peace with the worst.
But she’s breathing. Barely—almost not at all—but she is.
I yank the blankets higher and tuck them around her, slide my thigh under her head and lift it onto my lap. I tilt her chin just enough to keep her airway open, hover my fingertips under her nose like a fool who needs proof and feel the ghost of air against my skin. “Hold on,” I tell her. It comes out sand. “Hold on, Madeline. Hold on for me.”
I keep talking because silence feels like permission to let go. “The first time I saw you,” I tell her, bending enough that my mouth is at her temple, “my heart was yours. Instantly. Do you hear me? It’s been yours ever since.” I blink hard and the world wobbles. “You are the love of my life. You’re everything I ever wanted and didn’t know how to ask for. My entire fucking heart is yours.”
Her lashes are wet. A breath catches. I take it like a promise and keep going, words steadying my hands. “You like your coffee too sweet and you pretend not to, and you fall asleep in cars in under ten minutes, and you talk to seals and raccoons like they’re neighbors. You leave your socks everywhere and I want to step on a thousand of them if it means you’re there to laugh at me. You make this town look new. You make the ocean make sense.”
Another whisper of air brushes my fingers. I match my breathing to it, slow and even, like I can trick her lungs into remembering. “Listen to me. Mornings, nights, all the in-betweens—I want them all. I want the blueberry place and the stupid milkshakes and the way you bounce when you’re happy and every book you’re going to pile on my nightstand. I want to see you in the wheelhouse for sixty more summers and watch you name whales and argue with the wind.”
Rain needles my neck; the harbor line is a gray smear ahead. Somewhere behind me a man says “stretcher ready,” someone else calls “ETA four,” Cruz’s voice checks in with the Coast Guard and a clinic I hope can do enough until a chopper can do the rest. The world keeps moving; I keep talking.
“I know it’s hard,” I whisper. “I know you’re tired. I know it feels easier to sleep. Don’t. Please don’t. Don’t leave me after showing me what the world looks like with you in it.” Tears blur the hot red and cold blue of everything until it’s just us. I angle her a little more, clear her mouth with a thumb, listen for that faint scrape of air, and when I find it I want to fall apart. “Breathe, baby. That’s it. That’s it. I’ve got you. I’m not letting go.”
I slide my hand under the blankets, find her good hand, and bring it to my mouth. “You’re coming home,” I tell her. “You hear me? You’re coming home. I’ll carry you. I’ll carry you as far as it takes.”
I talk the entire time. Through the gray mouth of the harbor. Past the bell. Past the bait shack where this started. Over the slap of rain and the grind of wipers and the engine’s tired hum. I tell her everything I never said, and everything I said once and need her to hear a thousand times more.
And I do not stop.