Chapter 37
Whoever took her…whoever laid a hand on her…I’m going to tear him open with my bare hands,
Not arrest him. Not restrain him.
Break him.
Skull against gravel. Teeth on stone. His face will be unrecognizable to the world.
Blood was on that cruiser…
Every bump we hit on this road shakes the thoughts loose again and again until I’m choking on them.
I need her in my life. I have to see her. And my baby girl…
Rio braces against the dash as the truck fishtails around a bend, but he doesn’t tell me to slow down. His gaze remains fixed on the overgrown pine trees of the quarry service road as they blur past, jaw tight, eyes cold.
“I know what you’re thinking,” he says finally, his words barely audible.
I grit my teeth. “Yeah? What?”
“Same thing I am.” He stares through the windshield. “Which one of us gets to kill him?”
I wasn’t thinking that.
It’s me.
But I swallow the words. Rage won’t help her. I force myself to breathe, to think, to stay ahead of any and every scenario yet to come. Preparation is everything, but I know nothing about the enemy this time. Least of all, why he would tell us to go to the quarry.
The curve of the road stretches out, the tree line pulls back, and the sky yawns open in a pale, merciless sweep.
The land shifts. The air changes.
The quarry rises ahead.
The cliff comes into view.
And someone is standing at the edge, looking down.
Mike Ingram.
The world narrows to a tunnel. The way he leans forward as if looking down at something…or someone.
My Freya, my baby…
I slam the truck into park before it stops moving, grab my gun from the glove box, throw the door open, and hit the ground running with my weapon drawn…
Mike turns, and one split second stretches thin. Time slows as he turns his gun on me.
The earth scrapes beneath my boots as I charge toward the edge, every sound sharpening, every breath burning hot and metallic in my throat.
Then, his barrel lifts—
I don’t stop.
I’m going to kill him for taking them from me.
A shot cracks across the quarry, echoing off dead stone, and an instant heat tears through my thigh pocket, ripping muscle, staggering my stride for half a heartbeat.
But I don’t fall.
He expected me to go down.
He expected pain to matter.
It doesn’t.
Not after he erased the future I was building.
Another shot is fired from behind. Rio’s.
Mike’s shoulder jerks back in a burst of red, making him lose his balance.
Now he’s mine.
I hit him like a freight train.
The impact slams us both into the gravel. His skull bounces off the rock with a sick crack. He chokes on a scream as I roll on top of him, my knees pinning his shoulders, my hand closing around his throat.
“You took my girls,” I snarl, squeezing harder. “You fucking…”
I can’t even finish my words, rage and tears and the heat of loss building in my throat, behind my eyes.
He gags, kicking uselessly beneath me, fingers clawing at my wrist. “Wh…”
The word doesn’t leave his throat, so I loosen my grip just enough to make him talk.
“Where is she?” I demand.
I don’t recognize my own voice. Rage tears through my veins.
“You fucking touched her.” My hands tighten again before I can stop them.
A wet, choking rattle leaks out of him, something catching in his throat.
He stole everything I ever wanted.
And then…
“Anton!”
Freya?
She’s alive. Calling my name.
I let go, shoving his collapsed body into the dirt.
Rio plants his boot on Mike’s throat.
I run so fast, I nearly slide off the edge of the cliff, but I quickly drop to my stomach.
And there she is.
She’s perched on a ledge just wide enough for her boots, bound wrists caught on a root jutting from the stone. One wrong shift. One crumble of dirt…and she’ll fall.
She lifts her face toward me. Those big, brave eyes find mine, and my entire damn world breaks open.
I reach my hand toward her, but the ground under me shifts, loose gravel sliding down in a cascade. Pebbles rain past her, tapping her shoulders, bouncing off her feet.
If I move again, I could kill her. I glance around the area, hoping, praying there is some way to shimmy down, to gather her in my arms and pull her up from the gaping hole in the earth that threatens to swallow her.
There’s no way down where I could also bring her up.
The helplessness hits like a sledgehammer. I’m right here. Inches away. And I can’t reach her. If she falls now, all I’ll be able to do is watch.
Raw pain sears through me.
“We got you, Freya,” I say, my voice not as steady as I’d like. I’ve never had this much emotion tearing through me. “Gabriel is coming with equipment. Callum is coming. Just a few more minutes.”
Please hang on.
She holds herself together. “I’m okay. I have a good grip on the ledge.”
But a tear slips down her cheek.
She’s staying strong for me. For our baby. And she is so fucking fierce, I almost crumble under the weight of my love for her.
She’s fighting for us.
So I fight for us, too. I’ll be her anchor, her voice, her strength when hers wavers.
“Look at what you did, honey.” I school my voice into calm. “You caught a goddamn serial killer. Hell of a first year with a badge.”
A tiny sob breaks out of her—surprise, relief, disbelief tangled into one sharp sound.
I keep talking. It’s all I can do. She’s in pain, terrified, hanging on by will alone with our baby in her belly.
“You got justice for Zoe,” I continue, encouraging her, hoping my words fill her with strength, “and every woman nobody came looking for.”
She laughs nervously. Every bit of her fear runs straight into me.
“You saved yourself,” I say, my voice breaking, “and you saved our baby.”
But then she shifts. Pebbles slide beneath her boots. I jerk forward, instinct screaming to grab her, but I freeze before I make anything worse.
It fucking destroys me that she’s down there, my hands inches away, and I can’t touch her.
Then, sirens wail in the distance.
“Do you hear that, honey?” I say, fighting for control as my breath stutters. “Just keep looking at me. Stay with me. You got this.”
She nods quickly, a broken, trembling motion. “Yeah. I got this,” but she’s convincing herself of something she doesn’t believe.
Fucking hang on, Freya. Please.
The sirens grow louder, echoing down into the quarry, and she hears them. Hope lights in those big chestnut eyes.
Tires grind to a halt behind me. I glance back. Callum. Gabriel. Already out of their vehicles. Gabriel throws a harness to the ground.
“Rescue equipment is here,” I reassure her.
I need her to hang on for just a little longer.
“You’re fighting like hell down there. Strongest thing I’ve ever seen.”
“I don’t feel strong,” she whispers.
The admission knocks the air out of me.
“Well, you are.” The words are pulled from my goddamn soul. “And when I get you up here, I’ll spend the rest of my life making damn sure you know what you’re made of.”
Gabriel’s boots grind to a stop beside me. His head snaps toward a thick juniper trunk set several yards back from the cliff’s edge—deep-rooted, solid, exactly what we need.
“Anton.” He glances at my leg and tosses me the end of the rope with the belay attached.
“You take the anchor point,” he commands.
Every instinct in me screams to be the one going down that cliff, to put my body between her and free-fall. But with a bullet in my leg, I might kill us both.
Gabriel is one hundred percent composed as only an ex-Navy SEAL can be. I have to trust him because, with my leg damaged like it is, much as I want to gather her up into my arms, this is the right way around.
My thigh is on fire as I run thirty feet from the cliff’s edge to where I find an anchor point. I loop the rope low around the trunk of a pine and yank. It holds.
In the distance, at the edge, Callum pries Mike Ingram out from under Rio’s boot and starts to cuff him. Rio sees me and stands, but before he comes to me, he thunders his boot into Mike’s rib cage with one last vengeful whack.
Then he runs over. “Tell me what to do.”
I explain how to secure the rope as a double safety, and I call out to Gabriel, harnessed up at the edge. “Secure!”
He drops over.
Now, I can’t see Gabriel.
I can’t see my future.
All I see is the slow unwinding rope as I hope and pray my friend is the heroic beast he’s always been.
Wind whips through the trees around us. Sirens throw a kaleidoscope of lights across the gray expanse, and the whole scene feels one second from breaking apart.
All I can do is hold this line and wait.
Then the line tightens and shakes with tension. Does he have her on now?
I tighten my grip until my knuckles go white. Rio shifts beside me, adding weight. The tree groans but stays rooted.
An eternity stretches. It’s a challenge to keep the terror from settling in my chest—the thought of her losing purchase, of the flexi cuffs giving out unexpectedly… Every breath is a fight.
Finally, there’s a faint shout, and Callum, who stands at the edge watching the rescue, calls over to me.
“He’s bringing her up!” He gives a thumbs-up.
Relief washes through me. My future, my woman, my baby…all secure at the end of that rope.
Rio and I pull. Hand over hand. Rope burns against my palms. My leg is shaking so violently, I’m amazed it holds. But I haul anyway. I will not be the weakness in this line.
A shadow rises at the edge ahead.
Gabriel first.
Then Freya.
Tears cut glossy lines through dirt on her cheeks, and she’s trembling.
I drop the rope and move as fast as my leg allows. She’s barely standing when I reach her, and I take her instantly into my arms, crushing her against my chest. She grips me with a force I didn’t know she’d still have.
My fucking warrior.
“Anton…” Her voice breaks against my chest.
“I’ve got you,” I say, kissing her hair, her temple, anything I can touch. “God, Freya, I’ve got you. Nothing’s getting near you again.”
Her hand slips down to my thigh, and her eyes fly up to mine, dread flooding them. “You’re hurt?”
I glance down, only now finally taking a look at where the bullet hit. Metal glints through the tears in my jeans. My compass. I reach inside my pocket and suck air through my teeth. My old keepsake must’ve taken part of the hit, too.
The casing is crushed inward, the glass blown out, the needle is gone, maybe buried in my skin.
I look at the ruined thing in my hand. This compass has lived in my pocket for years, a reminder to never lose trust in myself, even when so many times I did.
“Oh no.” Another tear rolls down her cheek. “Your compass.”
But when I look at her—my woman, the mother of my child, the future I didn’t think I’d ever have—everything inside me lines up. My intuition led me exactly where I needed to be once again.
“I don’t need it anymore.” I cup her face in my hands. “You’re my true north now.”