Chapter 22
twenty-two
Luke.
It was fucking Luke Garrison.
Greta grabbed the front of his vest before he could step off the bank.
“Two feet down from that willow root, the bank’s undermined.” She held his eyes, not asking if he’d heard her, just making sure he had. “You feel it shift under you, you get out. You understand? I pull the rope, you come. No argument.”
He looked at the willow root. He looked at the truck in the water. “Understood.”
She clipped the line to his vest’s D-ring, ran it back through the guide belay, and handed the tail to Hansen without looking away from Bear.
She was already reading the current—the angle of the debris moving past the cab, the speed of it, the way the water was pushing the truck’s undercarriage downstream by slow degrees.
Her mouth was tight. Whatever she was feeling, she’d put it somewhere she could get to later.
He looked past her at the bank.
Hank Goodwin stood twenty feet up the shoulder, in his department rain gear, one hand on his duty belt, watching.
He hadn’t moved since Bear’s rig had pulled in.
He wasn’t on the radio. He wasn’t directing anyone.
He was just standing there in the spinning lights with the look of a man running numbers in his head— not on how to get Luke out of the water, but on what version of this scene he could bring to the county attorney in the morning.
Bear turned away and stepped off the bank.
The creek hit him like a cold fist — full-body, no easing into it, the water already at mid-thigh at the shallows and moving fast enough to push him sideways on his first step.
He leaned into the current and kept going, the line running out behind him, and the noise of the rain and the water swallowed everything except the sound of his own breathing and the scrape of gravel rolling under his boots.
By the time he reached the truck, the water was at his chest.
The driver’s window was still above the surface. Barely. He grabbed the door handle — it didn’t move, frame buckled in the roll — and pulled himself up the door’s edge to look in through the glass.
Luke Garrison’s face stared back at him from six inches under water.
No. Not under. At the surface, nose and mouth still above it, but the waterline inside the cab was at his chin and rising, and his eyes were huge and bloodshot and terrified. He had one hand pressed to the glass. The window between them was intact.
Bear braced his boots on the side of the truck and hit the window twice with the heel of his palm. On the third hit he used the glass breaker on his vest, and the window cratered in a sheet. He got an arm in, swept the glass off Luke’s shoulder and neck, and grabbed the seat belt clip.
Luke grabbed his arm with both hands.
“I’m so sorry.” His voice was slurred, wrecked. “I’m sorry, I’m — I didn’t mean to, I’m sorry—”
“Stop talking.” Bear got his thumb on the belt release and pushed. The buckle held. He worked it again. “Luke. Luke. Look at me.”
Luke looked at him.
“I need one hand.”
Luke let go of his right arm. Bear worked the buckle, felt it give on the third push, and got his arm around Luke’s chest.
He’d spent twelve years building the physical control he now had over himself.
In the bar at twenty-six, he’d been drunk and wrong and the man had been goading him, but none of that had mattered once his fist had connected.
There’d been no precision, no calibration, no space between the swing and the result.
Just force and consequence. In the years since prison, he’d turned himself into something else— a man who could haul a hundred-and-eighty-pound drunk out of a submerged truck without losing his grip, who could feel the exact amount of pull needed and apply it and no more.
He started pulling.
Somewhere in the back of his head, in the quiet place below the noise of the water: Logan at Valor Ridge, asleep in the bunkhouse by now or watching something on his phone, safe above the floodline.
And Greta up on the bank, the rope in her hands, and the solid certainty of that.
And the sobriety chip in the chest pocket of his vest, tucked under the trauma shears, right against his ribs where he’d worn it for years.
He pulled harder.
Luke came through the window frame in a scramble of wet denim and gasping breaths, and Bear got him up across the door’s edge…
And that was when the bank went.
Right where Greta had said. A chunk the size of a dining table crumbled into the water, and the current surged, hitting the door and knocking Bear sideways.
The water closed over his head.
Cold. Dark. The rope pulled taut against his chest like a fist.
Luke’s arm was still in his grip. He held on.
He thought: pull the rope.
He thought: Logan.
The rope snapped tight a second time — Greta, he knew it was Greta without seeing anything — and he got his feet back under him in the silt and drove upward.
His head broke the surface and he pulled air in with his whole chest, and Luke came up half a second after, coughing creek water.
Bear turned upstream, locked both arms across Luke’s chest, and drove for the bank.
Hansen was in the shallows to his knees, reaching. Bear shoved Luke at him, and Hansen got him by the collar and hauled.
The truck groaned behind him. He didn’t look back. He kept moving, slogging through the current with the rope still tight across his chest, and climbed the bank on his hands and knees while the roar of displaced water told him the truck was going.
By the time he made the shoulder, the cab was gone.
He stood on the asphalt and breathed.
Luke was on his hands and knees five feet away, coughing in long, guttural heaves.
The EMTs were already coming up the shoulder at a jog, and Bear stepped back and let them come.
He unclipped the line from his vest. His hands were steady.
He focused on that fact, on the steadiness of his hands, while the rest of him tried to catch up to the last ninety seconds.
Lila Garrison came out of the dark at a dead run, still in her clinic vest over rain gear, her face doing something he’d never seen it do before — the composure stripped all the way down, nothing underneath it but terror and relief going to war.
She dropped to her knees in the wet gravel beside her brother. “Luke. Luke, look at me.”
Luke looked at her. His eyes were wet, or maybe that was the creek.
“I’m sorry,” he said again, and she put both hands on his face and her head went down against his, and Bear turned away.
Boone was at the back of the rig.
He wasn’t doing anything. Standing there in his ranch coat with the rain coming off the brim of his hat, watching Bear the way Boone watched everything — assessing, quiet, taking the full measure of a situation before he’d say a word about it.
When Bear got close enough, Boone gave him one look — a long, level one — and nodded.
That was it. No words. No hand on the shoulder.
It was enough.
Bear turned back to the scene, to the next set of headlights coming down Bitterroot Road, to the radio crackling in his vest. He worked the rest of the shift from there — sandbag relays at the low bridge, medical standby at the Peterson Road closure, two hours helping the county’s crew move equipment to the high staging area.
He worked alongside Hank Goodwin’s deputies without incident.
He did not look for Greta, and if she was in the same frame as him — at the staging table, at the fuel depot, at the sandbagging line — he moved to a different frame.
Not because he was angry. Because he couldn’t stand in the same space as her right now and not say something he wasn’t ready to say, and the unspoken thing between them was gathering weight with every hour he didn’t address it.
The storm broke around six.
He was sitting on the running board of the rig when it did — that specific quiet that came after heavy rain, not silence but the cessation of violence, the world remembering it had a baseline. Around him, the crew was starting to stand down. Radios going to standby. Coffee thermoses coming out.
He turned the sobriety chip over in his wet palm. Both sides. Back to front.
He was afraid of what the silence between them meant, and he’d been afraid of it for the last three hours, and he was running out of things to do to avoid finding out.
He found her behind the firehouse.
She’d pulled her Jeep around to the back lot, out of the flow of departing equipment, and she was standing at the cargo door stripping off her SAR vest, her soaked base layer plastered to her back, her braid half-undone and stiff with creek mud.
Atlas sat on the Jeep’s running board watching her, and when Bear came around the corner, the dog’s tail moved once before stilling.
Greta turned.
She looked at him, gaze sweeping up and down, doing a full inventory, and then she set the vest aside on the bumper and faced him.
“You ignored my line.”
“I heard you—”
“You ignored it.” Her voice didn’t rise. It came out flat and certain, the way she gave compass readings. “I pulled three times before the bank gave. Three. And you were still in the cab.”
He held her gaze. The bruise at her throat had gone purple overnight, and he hated himself for noticing it right now.
She stepped closer. She was still soaked and he was half-surprised she wasn’t steaming from the fury radiating off her.
“I have been doing this for nine years. Coldwater, Blacktail, the Cedar Creek collapse in 2019, the Henley Pass search that went four days in December. I have never—never—lost control of a scene. I have never stood on a bank and had to watch my anchor go under and not be able to do a damn thing about it.”
“I’m sorry,” he said softly. Because what else was there to say?
She pressed the back of one hand to her mouth for a half-second. “I couldn’t breathe, Bear. I couldn’t get air.”
“I’m okay.”
“You act like you’re invincible.” She gestured at him, a short, impatient sweep of her hand.
“I know how big you are and I know how strong you are, but none of that matters when Mother Nature wants to take a bite out of you.” Her voice finally fractured, just at the edge, just once.
She pulled it back. “You’re big and mean and a badass, but you are not invincible.
You are not expendable. Do you hear me?”
“I hear you.”
She sucked in a breath like she planned to say more, but stalled out. The dawn was gray and still behind her, the wet pavement reflecting the last of the emergency lights from the front lot. Atlas hadn’t moved. Somewhere around the building, radios murmured.
He waited until he was sure she was done.
“Luke was saying he was sorry. Over and over. Just—I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to.
” He stopped. Looked at the pavement between them.
“I have said that. In rooms, to people. Sat across tables from people and had to watch them decide whether my sorry was worth anything.” He looked up at her.
“I could not pull back and let his last words be an apology.”
Greta stared at him, eyes too bright. “It was stupid.”
“I know.”
“I could’ve lost you.” She closed the three feet between them and grabbed the front of his vest with both fists, the wet nylon crushed in her grip. She yanked him down and kissed him.
It had none of the heat of the woodshed, none of the tease or the dare. This was something else. She kissed him like she was still angry, like the anger and the relief had wound so tight they couldn’t be separated anymore.
He pulled her in, one arm around her back, and felt her breath hitch against his mouth.
Her radio squawked.
She pulled back and swiped at her eyes before keying the radio. “Unit seven, go ahead.”
He stood there and watched her reassemble herself into the SAR team leader, the handler, the woman who had nine years of flood scenes in her muscle memory and could recalibrate in a breath.
She was already turning away, already responding to whatever crisis was coming through the radio, already somewhere else.
But then she stopped and glanced back at him, and in that brief moment, he saw everything she hadn’t had time to say and everything she hadn’t found words for yet.
“Don’t be stupid again, Sasquatch,” she said, then walked away. Atlas dropped from the running board to her side as she rounded the corner of the firehouse and was gone.
Bear stood at the back of the Jeep in the gray morning.
He looked at the cargo door, still open, her soaked vest on the bumper. He looked at his hands, dried creek mud in the creases of his knuckles, and thought of the sobriety chip in his pocket.
He reached in and closed his fist around it.
Don’t be stupid again.
That had been his motto since he got out of prison, and he’d been doing a damn good job of it until recently.
Now he was stupid on a regular basis. Because of her. And Logan. And he didn’t know how to be smart when it came to them.
He sighed, dropped the sobriety chip back into his pocket, and went back inside to find out what still needed to be done.