Chapter 237: Jake
Something tears loose inside me and I don’t even try to catch it.
I see her limp in a slick of red. I see her thrown like trash into black water. I see my brother disappear after her into waves twice his height. For one pulsing second I’m sure I’ve lost them both—my whole world ripped out of me—and the only thing that makes sense is to follow. Boots off—one, two—I’m already stepping up on the rail. Two men to find her. The two of us with her, like always, like it was supposed to be. And if we can’t… if Reid and I freeze and sink, that has to be better than learning how to breathe without her.
Then I see Nick’s face.
The thing I’ve only ever seen coiled in Reid uncoils in me. It wraps my heart and brain and squeezes until there’s nothing left but heat and target.
“You’re dead,” I tell him. Not a threat—a promise.
He looked big next to Madeline; next to me he’s a fucking insect. I put him on the deck in under a second. Then it’s just meat and bone and the sound my fists make. Cartilage folds; teeth click; his head bounces off nonskid. I don’t remember words. I don’t know how long. I know he stops looking like a person. I don’t know if he’s breathing. I don’t care.
Cruz and a dockhand get their arms under mine and pry me back, centimeter by centimeter. I jerk toward the rail again and Cruz snarls in my ear, “She needs you breathing,” and that sentence drags me back into the right life.
We hit the harbor. I clear the last feet of air to the dock and run for the Grayling. My hands are ruin—skin flayed, knuckles already ballooning, a finger crooked wrong—and I don’t feel any of it. I round the bow and crash into the sight of her like it’s a wall at sixty miles an hour.
Almost every inch of her is blue or red. Her hair is still her—fire and gold spilled over wool—and that hurts worse than anything. The rest… I don’t want to name it, but she looks like a... corpse.
Reid is bent over her, talking like he can pour air into her lungs with a story. “Move,” the medics bark, shouldering me out. They bark at Reid too and he sets like a dog with a bone until one of them catches his eyes and says, flat and lethal, “If we don’t help her now, she’s gone.”
He lets go. I can tell he doesn't want to
There’s an ambulance glaring white at the pierhead, and blue lights stacking along the quay. The helicopter thumps low, circling to meet us and take her somewhere with more machines than this town can offer. Cops flood the Vigil and stop, shocked, at the mess I left of Nick. I still don’t know if I killed him. I still don’t give a fuck.
They lift Madeline to the dock on a board. Fishermen, deckhands, Charlie, Finn, Liam, half the damned town—gasps, curses, a woman sobbing into her hands. A medic rips her shirt down the center—lace bra, pale skin, a chest caved wrong, purple and black bruises blooming everywhere. “No pulse!” she yells, kneeling astride and starting compressions. I hear ribs grind and want to rip the world in half. Another medic seals an oxygen mask over her mouth and nose. “She’s going—she’s leaving—bag her—”
“Clear!” Defib pads slap wet skin. The charge whines. Her small body bows off the board and drops. Nothing.
Again. “Clear!” Jolt. Nothing.
“Move! Move!” They run her at a dead sprint into the ambulance. Only when the doors yawn do I hear myself—I’ve been screaming the whole time, in harmony with Reid. People don’t know where to look: at the angel-white girl on the gurney, or the two men unraveling beside her.
We climb in. A medic says, “No,” like the word could stop us, and we don’t even pretend to listen. Doors slam. Siren up. The box becomes the whole world.
Inside is fluorescent and frantic. They’re on her with everything: compressions hammering broken ribs, bag-valve squeezing air into the mask, fingers searching her neck and groin for anything to count, scissors chewing through fabric, wrappers and gauze and tape flying. A pressure dressing swallows the torn place at her side and still leaks red. Another medic splints the ruined wrist, as if the rest of her isn’t already coming apart. The helicopter’s rotors thicken the air above us; the driver leans on the horn like rage can part traffic.
I wedge into the rear corner, knees braced, hands dripping pink on the diamond plate, and lean down until my mouth is at her temple. Reid’s already there on the other side, crying without shame, his hand wrapped around hers like he can anchor her with grip alone.
“Madeline,” I say, and it breaks on her name. “Trouble, breathe for me. Stay. You stay. I’m here. He’s here. We’re not letting you go.”
The monitor stays flat where I want peaks; the medic calls numbers I hate; the woman on compressions counts under her breath, voice tight and relentless. Every push drives a sound out of me—half prayer, half growl.
“This is my girl,” I tell anyone listening—God, machines, the inside of my skull. “You don’t get to take her. Do you hear me? You don’t get to take her.”
“Charging—clear.” Jolt. Her body lifts. Drops. The medic with the bag says, “Rate?” The other says a number that isn’t a number I can live with. I bare my teeth at the ceiling like I could bite fate.
“If you come back,” I whisper into her hair, “I’ll spend the rest of my life making it easy to breathe. I’ll buy the house by the cove, I’ll name a boat after you, I’ll give you my name or Reid’s—one of ours—whatever you want. I’ll give you all my mornings, every bit of summer, every mile of ocean. Just—” my voice cracks—“just stay.”
I look at the medic and want to break him for not being God. I look back at her and want to will air into her lungs with my own.
“Come back,” I tell her, voice low and vicious, like a command only she can hear. “Come back to me. Come back to us.”
The ambulance screams toward the landing zone. They keep working. We keep talking. The line stays flat. And every second that ticks is a life I refuse to live without her.