Chapter 36
The sea had come alive against her.
One instant Cara had been face down, drifting on the current, struggling to breathe as inconspicuously as possible through the rebreather, the next the whole watery world heaved like an ocean wave and a wall of cold muscle rose up beside her, vast and streaming.
The stink of it hit her like a slap, wet and rank and animal.
Every chained-down instinct in her body tore loose at once.
She thrashed. The mouthpiece tore from her teeth and the sea flooded in.
She clawed for the surface and found it and lost it, went under, came up, beat at the water with arms that barely answered.
Somewhere there was a man with a phone, and a plan every one of them had bled for, and she had just torn it to pieces, and she could not make herself care.
Everything in her screamed to get away from the beast beside her. The thing that had kept her alive her whole life, the stillness, the control, the lie held past all reason, was gone. There was only the most elemental part of her left, screaming at her bones to live.
She got a hand on the lip of the ice, but the bear's wake tore her off it.
She went down into the black again, the cold closing over her head like a fist, and clawed back up into air she couldn't hold, into a world gone all roar and dark and the white-yellow bulk of the thing turning, turning, coming around for her.
Lord, please. Not like this. Please—
She didn't finish it. There was no breath left, and no time, and nothing to finish it with.
Red light split the dark. Then a roar and a wash of heat and the cold mass beside her was gone.
Then hands.
Hard hands hauled her out of the water by the collar of Owen’s coat, dragging her over an edge of ice that scraped the last breath out of her and flipping her onto her back.
Air. Real air, raw and burning. A face loomed above her, a stranger's face, close, doing something to her mouth, to her chest. And then he disappeared. The ice was under her cheek. She shook so hard the whole world stuttered.
Then Wade was there.
She knew him by the size of him, the bulk of him dropping down beside her on the ice, his voice gone rough and wrecked, saying her name.
"I've got you. I've got you, Cara." And then another shape staggered up out of the dark on the far side of her and went down hard onto his knees, soaked, shaking, gray, his hands already reaching for her face even though they worked no better than her own.
Gabe.
He'd come straight to her. Of course he had.
He couldn't say anything, couldn't get his teeth to stop long enough to make a word, but he got his ruined hands on either side of her face and brought his forehead down against hers, and for one beat there was nothing else in the whole frozen world.
No bear. No stranger. No plan. Just the two of them, frigid and shaking hard, but alive.
Both of them. Alive.
“Yup. You two are frozen but good. Let’s get you off the ice,” Wade announced.
Then he hauled them into the cab of the snowcat, Cara, then Gabe. A blast of heat that hurt worse than the cold made her cry out.
She couldn’t make her hands close, couldn't do anything but shake. Gabe was a weight against her side, shuddering as hard as she was. She turned her face into him and let him hold the weight of them both.
The snowcat lurched and pulled away, Wade throwing it across the ice toward the cave, toward Reagan and Skye, gathering them all up before the enemy arrived.
And in the roaring heat, with Gabe's pulse against her cheek, Cara finally caught up to the thing her body had known before her mind could.
A stranger had pulled her out of the sea.
Not Wade. Not Gabe. A stranger, who had looked into her face and found a living woman where a dead man was supposed to be.
She didn't know who he was. She didn't need to. The whole plan had rested on one thing — that the world believe Owen Harney died in this water — and somewhere out on that ice, a man who was not on their side had just learned that he hadn't.
It was blown. All of it. The shot, the blood, the burning cipher. Owen and Skye would be hunted. And every name in Ray Harney's book was fair game again, because she'd lived.
Cara got her hand up, finally, and closed it in the soaked front of Gabe's dry suit. "We have to get off this island. Now."