Chapter 21 #2
“I know. Help is coming.” He was already assessing the rock pile, looking for any way to reach her, his SAR training kicking in even as his emotions threatened to swamp everything he knew about trying to do this on his own. “Hang on.”
Hang on. Such a simple phrase, and yet it carried every desperate plea he’d ever made—to her, to himself, to God. Hang on. Don’t give up. I’m coming for you. I’m here.
The radio crackled again, and he updated command on her status. The response was swift—search-and-rescue teams, paramedics, equipment for extraction—all en route. But minutes mattered in cave-ins. With the temperature, the air supply, the risk of further collapse, every second counted.
He couldn’t wait.
Noah studied the pile, his mind working through the geology. The earthquake had triggered the slide, but the rocks looked stable enough now. The opening Ripley had used was too small for a person, but if he could carefully remove some of the smaller rocks above it…
“Sabrina, I’m going to try to widen this opening. Stay back from this wall.” He kept his voice calm, professional. “Talk to me so I know you’re okay.”
“I’m here.” A pause. Then, so softly he barely registered it, she whispered, “I can’t believe you came.”
She hadn’t thought he would. She’d been trapped alone in this cave wondering if he would come to save her, if he cared enough. What was left of his heart shattered.
But he couldn’t think about that now.
“Of course I came.” He began carefully removing rocks, stacking them to the side. “Did you think I wouldn’t?”
Her answering laugh held no humor. “After how I left things? I wouldn’t have blamed you.”
“That’s not how this works.” He grunted as he shifted a particularly heavy stone. “That’s not how I work.”
Silence stretched from the darkness behind the rocks until she finally said, “I know that now.”
The quietness in her voice made something catch in his throat. But he couldn’t dwell on it, not when she was still trapped and in danger. He worked methodically, muscles straining as he cleared away enough debris to create an opening just large enough for her to crawl through—if she could reach it.
“Sabrina, I’ve got an opening here, about two feet wide. Can you see any light?”
“A little.” Her voice sounded closer. “Everything is spinning.”
Oh, man. Hypoxia already? That was so, so not good. Panic clawed at his gut.
Another tremor hit, a small one, but enough to send fresh panic through Noah’s veins. Loose rock skittered down, threatening to undo his progress.
“Sabrina!” Answer, answer, answer.
“I’m okay.” Her voice was shaky, like a radio signal just on the edge of range. “But I think that made things worse in here.”
The sound of sirens wailed in the distance, a cavalry that felt an eternity away.
Help was coming, but they might not have that much time.
Every instinct in his body screamed at him to get her out now while she was still conscious and coherent—the same instinct that had once sent him charging into a collapsing building in Syria to pull out a family trapped by crossfire, the same instinct that made him who he was, for better or worse.
The man who never waited when he could jump feet first into the fire.
There was no choice here. There never had been.
“I’m coming in.” The decision crystallized in his mind with perfect clarity, like a diamond formed under impossible pressure.
“What? You can’t. It’s not…stable.” Her voice drifted in and out.
He was already shimmying through the opening he’d created, flashlight clenched between his teeth, his body figuring out on the fly how to make itself small, how to become fluid against unyielding stone.
The passage was tight—painfully so—but he pushed through, ignoring the sharp edges tearing at his clothes and skin.
Pain was temporary. Regret lasted forever.
And then he was through, on the other side, the beam of his flashlight cutting through the darkness like a blade to reveal Sabrina’s wide eyes, reflecting back all the fear and relief and something else that made his chest constrict.
She looked smaller somehow, huddled against the far wall, arms wrapped around herself like she might fall apart otherwise. Her uniform was covered in dust, her face smudged with dirt.
But she was alive. Breathing. Whole.
The sight of her hit him like a physical force, a tsunami of emotion that threatened to sweep away all the careful distance he’d tried to maintain.
“Noah.” His name on her lips carried a weight he couldn’t quite define—part prayer, part disbelief, part something that might have been longing if he let himself believe it.
“Hey.” He moved toward her carefully, mindful of unstable ground, completely unconcerned about the metaphorical ground between them that could be just as treacherous, if he cared.
Which he did not.
When he reached her, his hand rose of its own accord to brush dirt from her cheek, needing to touch her, to confirm that she was real and not some desperate hallucination his mind had conjured. “You scared me.”
She caught his hand, her fingers ice-cold against his skin, like she’d absorbed the chill of the stone around her. “Did Ripley…did she find you?”
“She did.” He smiled despite everything, despite the part of him that was still bleeding from her rejection, still raw from watching her walk away. “That dog was not about to let you go without a fight.”
Something shifted in her expression, too complicated to read in the dim light, layers of emotion that would require time and better illumination to fully decode. “I didn’t know if you’d know…or if she’d be able to lead you.”
“I will always find you.” The words held more force than he intended, raw with the emotions he’d been trying to contain, spilling out now like water through a cracked dam. He couldn’t stop them any more than he could stop breathing. “Always.”
It wasn’t just a promise. It was a declaration. A truth etched into his bones that no amount of hurt could erase.
Her breath hitched, and for a heartbeat, they just stared at each other, everything that remained unsaid hanging in the dusty air between them.
Then another tremor shook the cave, jolting them back to reality.
“We need to go.” Noah turned, scoping out their exit route. “They’ve got equipment coming, but I’d rather not stick around for the after-party if this place decides to come down.”
She nodded, allowing him to guide her toward the opening. Allowing him to help her. She was so weak. Outside, he could hear the sounds of emergency vehicles arriving, the organized chaos of a rescue operation forming.
“Can you make it through?” He eyed the tight passage dubiously.
“Watch me.”
It would have made him feel a lot better if her voice hadn’t come out so hoarsely, but he’d take the flash of her old spirit, even as she winced trying to squeeze through the narrow space.
He followed closely behind, ready to push her forward if she got stuck, hyperaware of every sound, every shift of rock above them. The opening seemed to have shrunk since he’d entered, making their exit even more perilous.
When Sabrina’s boots finally emerged into sunlight, a cheer went up from the gathered rescue workers. Noah crawled out after her, blinking in the sudden brightness.
Sabrina swayed, paramedics already rushing forward.
But her eyes stayed locked on Noah’s face, something fierce and determined warring with weariness and other trauma in her gaze—the same look she’d had when they’d climbed in Moab, that blend of fearlessness and fire that had first drawn him to her like a moth to flame.
“Noah, I need to tell you—”
“Let them check you out first.” He cut her off gently, unable to handle whatever she might say while adrenaline still coursed through his system, while his heart felt like it had been run through a meat grinder, tenderized to the point where the slightest touch might push it from its moorings completely. “We have time.”
They had time. But that didn’t mean he had the energy for anything else.
The relief of finding her alive warred with the memory of how she’d walked away, of how spilling his heart all over the place had sent her running for the exit like a building on fire. How she hadn’t believed in what they could be together, what he knew soul deep—they were meant to be.
He’d pulled her from the cave, but the emotional chasm between them felt just as vast as before. This was a different kind of darkness, a different kind of trap. One he wasn’t sure either of them knew how to escape.
She let the paramedics guide her to the ambulance, though her gaze kept finding his. He kept looking away, unable to let himself deconstruct what he saw in her depths.
When the medic insisted she ride with him to the hospital for observation, Noah stepped forward, his body moving on autopilot while everything beneath his skin remained caught in the undertow of emotion.
“I’ll follow in my truck,” he assured her and scrubbed at the back of his neck. “But I won’t stay. Just long enough to make sure they take care of you.”
Emotion flickered across her face—pain, understanding, resolve. “Noah, I was wrong. About everything. I need you to know—”
“Sabrina.”
He stopped her with a gentle hand on her arm, the first deliberate touch since he’d helped her from the cave, and it burned like frostbite, that peculiar pain that feels like fire but comes from ice.
His heart couldn’t take confessions born of adrenaline and near-death experiences, couldn’t weather the inevitable crash when reality returned and she remembered all the reasons she’d walked away.
“You’re safe,” he said. “That’s all that matters now. Let the medic check you out, make sure you don’t have anything we can’t see going on.”
She nodded. “And then we can talk later?”
His eyelids slammed closed, and he had to take a minute, aware that the ambulance was waiting. “I don’t know what we’d talk about.”
“Us, Noah.” The catch in her voice nearly undid him. “I need to tell you some things—”
“I’m not at a place where I can hear them.” It wasn’t meant to be harsh, but neither could he lie. “After everything, I’ve become something I never thought I’d be. Cautious.”
The irony was bitter on his tongue.
Here he was—the guy who jumped into everything at full speed, the one who never looked before he leaped—telling her he’d hit his own wall. That he needed space.
She didn’t have to know it was because he wanted to gather her up and tell her he’d thought he’d lost her forever. That they’d wasted so much time already. Of course he forgave her and they should get married immediately.
The words would be easy. The recovery after she then crushed him again, not so much.
“Okay.” She nodded, eyes bright with unshed tears that glittered in the sunlight. “But I’m not giving up on us. Just so you know.”
“Let’s get you to the hospital.” He stepped back, trying to rebuild the professional distance that had crumbled the moment he’d heard her voice behind that wall of rock.
But the wall between them now was his own construction—a hasty barricade of self-preservation built on his own shattered expectations. “I’ll be right behind you.”
She let the paramedics help her into the ambulance.
The doors closed, and the ambulance pulled away, leaving Noah standing alone in the canyon that had brought them together.
The same canyon that had claimed Annie Ross.
The same canyon where he’d first recognized the echo of his own intensity in Sabrina’s eyes.
He’d rescued Sabrina from the cave, but there was no one here to yank his heart from the labyrinth she’d left it in. He was stuck in the wilderness, with no clear path to follow. Just his own compass, spinning wildly, unable to find true north.