Chapter Eighteen
Something tugged her awake.
Not loud. Not urgent.
Just sudden awareness.
But it was cold. So cold. Amara blinked.
Darkness.
Water lapped at her spine. Her hair stuck wet to her cheek, to her mouth. A rock dug into the meat of her shoulder. Her hands were underwater—numb things she couldn’t quite feel.
The creek had her.
She was half-submerged, half-slumped, and the weight of it all—mud, cold, the iron ringing in her skull—wanted to take her under again. Her lashes fluttered closed.
Sleep would be easy.
Just one breath, and she could let it.
Let the cold pull her down. Let the forest have her. Let it be done.
And maybe that would be fair.
Her horse was gone. Her body wouldn’t move. Her father was dead. And the whole damn world had taken too much and given too little.
Sleep, it whispered. Slip under.
But—
Somewhere in her chest, a voice. Gravel-thick and stubborn.
“Don’t you dare.”
Her father.
Not warm. Not gentle. Not some heaven-cloud version.
Just him—the way he used to bark at her to keep her seat, to tighten the cinch, to try again when she missed a nail with the hammer.
“Get up,” she mouthed, and coughed creek water.
Again. Louder, throat raw. “Get up.”
She rolled—pain like fire in her ribs—and forced her hands to move. One dragged, the other clawed. She gasped, and the sound scared the birds out of a nearby tree. Her knee caught on something sharp, but she didn’t care.
I’m not dying here.
Not in this cold. Not in this creek. Not in some goddamn holler halfway to nowhere, while Thetus Hollis turned her land into a criminal corridor.
I will not let him win.
She gritted her teeth and pushed.
Mud sucked at her jeans. Branches grabbed at her arms. But she got up.
Everything hurt. Her head spun. Her shoulder screamed.
But she was standing.
Alive.
And fuck, she was angry.
The forest loomed around her, thick with shadow. She couldn’t see the stars through the canopy. Couldn’t hear anything but the water dragging behind her, and her own pulse in her ears.
She turned.
No sense of direction. No trail. Just brush and dark and breath.
Still.
She picked one direction and moved.
Each step was a betrayal of her muscles. Each stumble a small scream in her bones. She kept one arm wrapped tight around her ribs and used the other to part the branches. At one point she fell, hard, and had to crawl uphill through wet moss and slick stone.
But she got back up. He didn’t kill himself. And I’m not going to either.
“I’m coming home,” she muttered to no one. “One fucking step at a time.”
And she walked. Into the dark. Into the trees. Into the pain.
Into survival.
She didn’t know how long she’d been walking.
Minutes. Hours. Centuries.
The forest blurred into itself—dark on dark, the air thick. Her legs kept going only because stopping meant the cold would win. Her breath came ragged, white against black. Somewhere in the distance, an owl cried out, and then nothing. Just the creek and the ache.
Her knees buckled once, caught a root, and she hit the ground. Hard. Mud spattered her arms. She tried to crawl, but her hands wouldn’t close right. They trembled like they’d forgotten how to belong to her.
Then—light.
Distant at first. Two beams cutting through the dark.
She blinked, half convinced it was a trick. Her mind had been doing that—throwing ghosts at her, testing what she’d chase. But these lights didn’t vanish. They moved, jerked, swept low over the brush.
Voices.
Rough ones. Urgent. Male.
“…this way—”
“…Jesus, over here—”
She wanted to call out but the sound caught in her throat. All that came was a gasp, wet and small. The lights shifted again—closer now. One beam caught her face and held.
Boots. The crunch of them pounding over stone.
“Amara!”
That voice. It hit her like heat after frost.
“Ethan…” she tried, the name breaking apart in her mouth.
Someone crashed through the brush. Heavy. Desperate. A hand cupped her shoulder. Warm. Solid. Then another voice—a lower one, cracked from shouting.
“Breathe, Red. Come on now, you gotta breathe.”
She tried to smile. Tried to make the sound that meant she was okay. It came out as a cough.
Ethan’s face appeared above hers—blurred at the edges, streaked with dirt and worry. His hands moved fast, checking her neck, her ribs, the cut above her eye. She caught the flash of his dog tags swinging forward, glinting in the flashlight’s beam.
“Stay with me,” he said, voice shaking. “You hear me? You’re okay now. We got you.”
Behind him, Brock’s shadow bent into view. “She’s freezing, man. We gotta get her up. Come on.”
They each took a side, lifting her out of the mud. She felt the pull of it, the suction giving way, the creek water running down her legs. She shivered so hard her teeth clattered.
Ethan’s arm came around her, hard and sure. “I got you.”
She blinked. The world tilted.
“I thought I was gonna—” she started, then lost it to a breath that hurt.
“You’re not,” he said, fierce now, close to her ear. “You’re not going anywhere, you understand me?”
The light from Brock’s flashlight caught Ethan’s face—the line of his jaw, the wet shine of his eyes—and it was too much. Too real. Too safe.
She let her head fall against his chest. The sound of his heart was a drum. Her pulse tried to match it and failed.
The cold was slipping again—dragging her down, heavy as the creek.
“Hey,” Ethan said, shaking her gently. “Damn, baby. Stay with me. Eyes open. Right here.”
She tried. God, she tried. But the forest kept dimming.
Her last sight was of his face leaning close, saying her name. Then everything went white.