Chapter 25 Nate
NATE
The Tacoma’s wipers were losing the fight.
Rain hammered the windshield in sheets, turning the fire road into a blur of gray and green, and the wind rocked the truck hard enough that I had to correct the steering twice on the last stretch.
I pulled in behind Fogarty’s and killed the engine, already reaching for the door handle.
The rain hit me like a punch. Cold, driving, soaking through in seconds. I ducked my head and rounded the corner of the hut, boots sliding on the mud, and looked up the track.
There she was. Thank fuck.
The quad’s headlight cut a weak yellow beam through the downpour, fifty feet out, maybe less. She was hunched forward over the handlebars, guiding the quad carefully over the rutted track. Even through the curtain of water between, her focus was clear. Steady. Controlled. Almost home.
Relief made my knees weak.
Then the sky cracked open.
A bolt of lightning struck the giant oak beside the track with a crack so violent it tore through everything. The sound came a fraction after the light, a deafening, percussive boom that slammed through me and rattled my teeth.
The oak went fast, the trunk splintering where the bolt had hit. The massive crown swung down across the track like a hammer.
Terror bloomed in my gut in the nanosecond it took for the tree to hit the quad.
Metal shrieked.
The bike flipped violently, the back end kicking up and over. Maya went with it. Her body launched off the seat, airborne for one sickening second, arms flung wide, before the heavy thud of her hitting the mud.
The world stopped.
Rain pounded the mud around her. The quad lay on its side ten feet away, one wheel still spinning, headlight pointing uselessly at the sky.
Maya lay completely still.
I froze in place, every muscle locked.
Every second of training I’d ever had, every drill, every combat scenario, every instinct that had kept me and the people around me alive for a decade, all of it, gone. Wiped clean. Like someone had reached inside me and ripped out the wiring.
Because this was Maya.
Another bolt of lightning cracked across the sky, close enough that the thunder was instantaneous, and the shock of it jolted through me like a defibrillator.
I ran.
The distance between us took forever and no time at all. I hit the mud beside her hard enough to jar my knees. My shaking hands hovered over her body, terrified to touch her and terrified not to.
“Maya.” Her name came out broken. “Maya, look at me.”
Rain streamed down her face. Mud streaked her cheek; her wet hair tangled across her forehead. She lay so impossibly, terrifyingly still.
I pressed two fingers to her neck. A pulse. Strong and steady under my fingertips. The sound that came out of me was something between a gasp and a sob.
“Maya. Open your eyes. Please.”
Nothing. One second. Two. The longest seconds of my entire life. Then her eyelids fluttered. Her brow creased. And those green eyes opened, unfocused and dazed, blinking against the rain.
Relief hit so hard my vision blurred.
“Nate?” Her voice was thin, confused. “What the hell are you doing here?”
A laugh punched out of me, raw and jagged and completely devoid of humor. “Losing ten years off my life. Don’t move.”
“Everything hurts.”
“I know. Just stay still for a second.” My hands were still shaking but they were working now, moving on muscle memory even though the rest of me was in ruins. I ran my fingers along her neck, her shoulders, down her arms. “Can you feel your legs?”
“Yes.”
“Your arms? Can you wriggle your fingers?”
“Yes. Nate, I’m okay.” She held up one hand, waggling her fingers at me.
“You don’t get to decide that right now.” My voice cracked on the last word.
I checked her collarbones, her ribs, her legs. When my hands reached her left ankle, she hissed through her teeth.
“That. That hurts.”
I probed gently, feeling the swelling already starting beneath her boot. Hopefully just sprained, maybe badly. She’d need imaging to be sure, but she could feel it and she could move it, and right now that was enough. Right now, that was everything.
“Okay.” I sat back on my heels, rain streaming down my face, and looked at her. Alive. Conscious. Hurting, but whole. The knot in my chest didn’t loosen so much as reshape itself into something I could breathe around.
She reached up, trailing her fingers down my cheek, her expression entirely too soft for someone lying in the mud in a thunderstorm. “You drove out here.”
“Yeah.”
“In this.”
“Yeah.”
The corner of her mouth pulled up. “My hero.”
I huffed out a breathless laugh, my attention shifting from Maya to the hut and back again.
Thirty feet. Mud, rain, and a woman with one working ankle.
“Put your arms around my neck.”
“Nate, I can probably—”
I scooped her up before she could finish the sentence. She came off the ground with a sharp intake of breath.
With her arms around my neck and her head on my shoulder, I carried her through the pounding rain to the hut.
My heart hammered so hard I could hear it over the storm.