Chapter 41
LUCY
Saltwater rushes into my mouth and nose, burning all the way down. Through the water, the sky above has gone that dismal gray I mocked earlier, and I’m suddenly desperate for the hopeful sunrise.
But my body is a dead weight, waterlogged and useless, and for a few terrible seconds, I wonder if it’s too late.
Then something wraps around my arm and jerks, wrenching my shoulder so hard the joint pops. I scream into the depths until strong, warm arms lock around my waist and I’m propelled upward.
I break the surface choking on ragged breaths. The world comes back too bright, too loud, too cold, but the brilliant multi-colored sky above beckons me to fight as oxygen tries to breathe life back into my lungs.
Someone’s shouting, swearing at me, his deep, panicked voice powerful and brittle at the same time. His arms lock around me so hard it hurts, and water pours off both of us in cold sheets as he drags us to chest-deep waves.
“Lucy, baby, breathe,” Hatton says my name like a curse and a prayer, over and over, voice ragged with emotion. “You have to breathe—”
The current pushes and pulls at us both, but his arm is an iron band around my stomach as he bends me slightly forward to help me cough the water out, giving me firm strikes of his palm between my shoulder blades.
“There you go, Lucy. That’s it. Get it out. You’re doing good, baby.”
The words are strong and encouraging, but his arm trembles where he holds me, and his warm chest shudders against me.
I hack until my ribs ache, until my lungs burn clean, until the saltwater stops coming up and real air replaces it.
The mouth of the marsh is closer now—I must’ve drifted with the current—and the cordgrass is a pretty, vibrant green in the morning light with the tidal creek winding dark and glassy beyond the mouth of the inlet.
The watercolor sunrise splatters everything in shades of amber and rose—the water, the sky, even the mist hanging over the water’s surface.
It’s stunning. How could I have ever hated it?
Hatton turns me around to face him, and his agonized expression nearly finishes what the ocean started.
“I thought I lost you.” The admission seems to break free from his chest.
His eyes are bloodshot and red-rimmed as they search my face, wild with terror so naked it makes my stomach drop. He holds on tighter, like if he lets go for even a second I’ll slip right out of this world.
I guess I almost did.
“What were you doing?” His words come out gutted. Not angry or frustrated, just destroyed. Heartbroken. “You can’t do that, you hear me? Fuck, Lucy, you can’t leave. Not like that. Not ever.”
Shame and embarrassment flood me, hot and suffocating. I want to disappear beneath the surface again, shrink small enough that he can’t see me. Because I just did the thing I can never take back and now someone knows just how broken I really am beneath every mask I’ve ever worn.
I want to scream at Hatton for dragging me out. I want to beg him to never let me go. I want to apologize for everything. I want to punch him in the chest for making me feel so exposed.
None of that makes it past trembling lips. My jaw is locked from cold and humiliation. My throat aches with the effort of holding it all inside.
I try to push away from him, but his arms tighten around me. My objection comes out garbled with coughs and emotion.
“I’m fine.”
“No, baby. You’re not fine.” But his voice is gentle. “And you don’t have to be.”
His dark hair is plastered to his forehead by water and the backward cap that somehow still made it out of the current. His hands visibly shake against my arms, and he’s holding me hard enough to bruise.
“But you can’t leave like that. Please don’t do that to the world. Please don’t—” He swallows, and his eyes flash with pain that splinters me apart. “Please don’t do that to me.”
“Hatton,” I try to say more, but my throat closes up and he pulls me into his chest. One hand splays across my back, the other cradles the back of my head, pressing my face against his sternum where his heart hammers so fast it feels like it’s trying to break free.
“Shh, it’s okay, Lucy. You’re okay.”
The water swirls around us, warmer from the marsh but cold from the open ocean, pushing and pulling at our bodies with a rhythm that feels almost like breathing.
He holds me against that current almost as if he’s vowing to hold me steady against everything else too.
The insistent tides in this world can try all they want, but Hatton Fury is not letting go.
He keeps saying my name, softer now, but no less desperate.
“You’re okay, Lucy.”
“I’ve got you, Lucy.”
“Lucy, you’re safe.”
I can’t fight him, and I don’t want to. Not when he’s saying everything I’ve needed to hear for so long.
I don’t know why I let myself go under. I don’t know why I let myself get to this place, with nothing left but the cold and the grief and the endless, ruthless ocean. All I know is that, despite my best and worst intentions, once again, deep down I was desperate to be saved.
And Hatton rescued me.
“I wasn’t trying to—”
But the lie dies on my tongue. Standing chest-deep in the place I chose to disappear, we both know exactly what I was doing.
So I just shake my head.
“I wanted it to stop hurting,” I whisper instead, and my voice comes out so small it barely carries over the gentle lap of the tide against our skin. “It hurts, Hatton. All the time.”
“I know. I know, baby.”
His forehead drops to mine, and his trembling hand comes up to cup my face.
“But you don’t get rid of the pain by leaving the rest of us behind to mourn you. You just make somebody else carry it.”
The words press hard against my throbbing heart like a finger to a bruise. The quiet truth of what sinking would’ve done to the people I left behind hits me harder than any wave. He’s right.
I’ve always tried to run away to save others, even when I knew what it felt like to be the one left behind. I felt it when Luna was taken from us. Benoit. And I still ran. I’ve been carrying Brylie's absence for mere hours, and it’s unbearable.
What would my permanent absence do to my parents? To Luna and Nox? To the man holding me right now like I’m the only thing keeping him tethered to the shore?
He must sense his words hit their mark, because he loosens his hold just slightly to swipe away water droplets from my cheek with his thumb. The caress is so, so gentle, despite that hand being the one that killed someone just last night.
For me.
His breath fans warm across my frozen lips.
“You don’t have to do this alone anymore, Lucy. Let me carry it now. Just let it all go, baby. Right here.” He kisses my forehead, then brings me into his strong embrace, cradling my head to his chest. “Give me your pain. I can take it.”
Shaking, my hands rise underneath his embrace and curl over his biceps to hold onto him. My palm brushes his raised burn scars on his right arm, drifting until my hand lands over smooth inked skin.
The handprint tattoo.
I’m not holding him in the right direction, but my hand still fits inside the print. And though I don’t know the whole story, I know what matters most.
Hatton was loved so much that a woman protected him with her entire body. Probably until her dying breath.
Hatton would do the same for you.
The thought hits me in the chest with so much certainty that I gasp. My hands grab onto him tighter. I press into him closer. And then…
And then I break.
I collapse against him as the first sob rips out of me like something tearing loose from its foundation.
It leaves me raw and tasting iron. My cold cheek presses against his warm chest, and his heart pounds so loudly it drums against my ear.
His arms crush me to him even tighter, and I shake, all the strength leaving my legs at once.
Hatton holds me up when I can’t hold myself.
All the shame, the grief, the bone-deep exhaustion—it spills out as ugly, gasping wails that pull from the very bottom of my stomach in convulsive, graceless jerks. I don’t even try to hold them in anymore, and Hatton rocks me gently where we stand.
I haven’t cried like this since I was seven years old, curled in the corner of a warehouse, weeping over the lifeless creature I loved so much and who died trying to save me. Even then, I’d been forced to stop when my nightmare came back.
But no one tells me to stop now.
I cry for Brylie. For Benoit. For Luna and Nox and the lives we were all supposed to have together.
For the girl I was before the warehouse and the girl I’ve been pretending to be since.
For the parents I always ran from and my trauma never let me fully forgive.
For six months of sleeping with a gun under my pillow and flinching at wind chimes that are supposed to be whimsical and make me happy.
For telling myself I wasn’t lonely when I was the loneliest shadow that flickered in and out of people’s lives.
I cry for the boy holding me in the water too—the one with roses where someone he loves shielded him and scars where she couldn’t. I cry because I’m furious at him for being the only person to ever save me, and because I’m so, so fucking grateful he didn’t let me go.
I don’t know how long we stand there. Long enough for the tide to shift around our hips, the water warming as the marsh current swirls in and the ocean pulls back.
Long enough for the sobs to exhaust themselves into something quieter, a low, shuddering keening that tapers into hiccups and then into silence.
Long enough for the sun to climb higher and turn the whole world gold, the two of us standing in the center of it, holding on.
When there’s nothing left—when my body is emptied out and trembling and light in that dizzying, numbing sort of way—I go completely limp against him. He catches my weight with ease, like he was already braced for it.
“I can’t believe you found me,” I finally whisper through trembling teeth, my voice so ruined it barely carries.