Chapter 21
Tess’s body weight, accelerated by a plunge into free fall, would’ve drawn the rope tight with incredible kinetic force.
Tangled around Jacob’s right hand.
Washington nods. “Smart.”
“I only dropped a few feet,” Tess says, “before the descender locked.”
The physics would’ve been painful for both sides of the equation. To Tess, it must have felt like being hit by a truck in
midair: the carabiner yanking her harness to an instant dead stop, the straps digging into her flesh. She would’ve been whiplashed,
blood in her teeth, sweat in her eyes, dangling over the Chimney’s deadly plunge.
“And Jacob?”
“I couldn’t see him,” she says. “But I heard his voice.”
“Saying what?”
“Nothing.” A cold smile crosses her face. “Just screaming.”
Minute by minute, Washington is seeing a different Tess emerge.
The woman who first entered this cave should have been easy prey for an armed killer: a shy introvert abused by her mother and living vicariously through her adventure-seeking best friend.
It’s difficult to reconcile that version of Tess with this resourceful and capable survivor, underestimated by Jacob, maybe even underestimated by Detective Washington herself.
This new Tess was no victim. She could improvise.
She could adapt. She could fight with knives and rope and momentum and sheer whatever-it-takes ingenuity.
In a real way she was becoming Allie Merritt, the woman she’d idolized since her childhood.
And it wasn’t just about survival, either. There was a new motivation in play, visceral and hot-blooded and impossible to
deny.
Revenge.
“Dangling on that rope, my entire body ached.” The coldness grows in Tess’s eyes, like ice forming on a pond. “But when I
heard him scream up there, tangled in my rope, I knew the bastard who murdered my best friend was hurting even worse.”
Live-wire pain.
Jacob screamed until his lungs were empty in a raw voice he didn’t recognize. He was afraid to look at his right hand. It
had all happened in a fraction of a second, but somehow he’d perceived everything in perfect clarity: the braided rope slicing
like a noose around his knuckles, ripping the gun away, hooking his fingers, tightening, bending them into a dislocating ninety-degree
snap—
He tried to lift himself, but the rope now pinned him down, held taut by the woman’s hundred-and-some pounds swinging below.
A human counterweight. It crushed his ribs like a boa constrictor’s grip, and he couldn’t breathe.
He didn’t know where his pistol had landed, either.
She got me.
Now he understood the woman’s true ingenuity—facing a bullet to the head, she’d made a split-second calculation. She knew
they were entangled in the same rope, so she’d weaponized her own inertia against him. She’d gotten him, all right.
But . . .
I can still get her, too.
Down the cliff, the woman was suspended over a fatal drop, four stories above a floor of jagged bedrock. As in any survival
situation, every choice has a cost. The rope that snared Jacob was also the same rope that kept her alive.
With his unhurt hand, he slid his KA-BAR combat knife from its sheath. He rotated the blade in his fingers and began to saw.
“I felt a vibration down the rope, through my harness.” The elation fades from Tess’s voice. “I knew he was cutting it.”
Of course.
Of course it was too good to be true. This gutsy plan had saved her from a bullet and injured her attacker—but catapulted
her straight into another impossible dilemma. Now dangling over a deadly fall, she could only reach out to smooth, slippery
dripstone and hold on to it with her fingernails, kick her boots against vertical rock, searching for traction, grasping for
any grip to support herself, holding on tightly before—
“I felt the rope go limp,” she says, “and drop past me.”
No backups, no safeties.
She was now solo climbing.