3. Sage
THREE
SAGE
I’m not a person—I am a nerve-ending. A raw and twitching wire, the kind that zaps the first idiot who tries to touch it.
At some point, my hearing starts working again—the relentless roar of surf, the pounding in my skull, and someone muttering “fuck” over and over.
My skin comes to life and I can feel everything: the arms around me, the hard chest at my back, sand grinding into my knees. I’m wet. God, the wet—warm, thick, clinging. It reeks of copper and rot, filling my nose until I gag.
Every sensation overwhelms me. I want to peel out of my own skin, toss it aside and run. Instead, I claw at the arms holding me, nails scrabbling for purchase, until a low, calm voice breaks through my panic.
“Come back to us, baby girl. We’ve got you, okay? You’re safe now.”
The arms loosen, but don’t let go. It’s not Brock. This man is warmth and muscle, the rough scratch of stubble brushing my cheek when I risk a glance back. His face is more beautiful than handsome, his blue-gray eyes worried.
Did I die and this is my angel?
The smell of rot hits me again and I gag, and the man—this angel—leans me forward, palm braced between my shoulder blades so I don’t faceplant into the sand. As I puke up beer and bile, I realize I’m not dead. I’m very much alive, and the man who’s holding me is real.
No!
“You’re okay. I’ve got you. Breathe.”
I spit the last of it out, trembling. The guy’s hand hovers just above my head, not touching but there if I fall. My chest heaves. Saliva and snot run everywhere. I am made of leaks and pain.
Another man crouches in front of us, face stripped of his mask. His eyes are like autumn—angry, wet, gold and brown at the same time.
He doesn’t say anything for a long moment. It should feel intimidating, but it’s not. It’s more like he’s waiting for proof I’m not about to black out or start biting people again.
For some reason, I want to apologize. But my throat is shredded and all that comes out is a cough. I’m shaking so hard my teeth hurt.
Autumn eyes leans in, hands on his knees.
“We’re not here to hurt you.” His voice cracks a little. “You don’t have to be afraid. Not of us, anyway.”
Someone is pulling on Brock’s legs. I glance up and catch one of the men steadying the body while another saws at the rope with a bowie knife. They work him down fast, controlled, until he lands in the sand with a soft thump. The guy in front of me is still talking.
“Hey, look at me, please. Can you tell me your name?”
My throat closes. Color drains out of the world and comes back wrong. I want to pass out, want the blackout nothing to smother everything, but the stubborn thing in my chest keeps running even when all I want is to disappear.
The guy in front of me is still talking.
“Can you breathe okay? Are you hurt?” His hand hovers at my elbow, not touching, but I feel the weight of it like a steel bar.
Behind him, two of the men move around Brock’s body, working fast, methodical, like they’re cleaning up after a house party that got out of control.
They’re not upset. Not freaked out. It’s like this is .
. . routine. Normal. A regular Friday night.
Nothing is normal. Nothing will ever be normal again.
I want to go home.
The one holding me releases his grip by a millimeter and I seize the moment, adrenaline detonating in my blood.
I drive my heel into his shin and twist sideways, slamming my shoulder into the guy with autumn eyes.
I don’t have a plan. My body makes the decision and my mind has to keep up, half a second behind.
I’m on my feet, sprinting. Amy’s dress is soaked and sticky and rides up my thighs. I barely register it.
The guys behind me shout, then curse, but I already have a lead—I am pure survival, moving in a scramble, knees high, teeth gritted, sucking oxygen through a straw-sized windpipe.
I lunge for the moonlight, heart slamming against my ribs.
My lungs are fire. Every step slams through my bones, every breath knives hot in my throat.
I clear the shadow of the jetty to sprint up the slippery slope.
I slip once, catching myself bloody palmed, digging my toes into the sand and frantically pushing.
I’m almost to the open beach when something heavy slams into me from behind, a freight train of bone and heat.
We hit the packed sand shoulder-first, and I taste blood, salt, and panic in one dizzy mouthful.
His arms are around my middle like iron bands, my heels scraping, all leverage lost as we tumble over and over.
The breath flies out of me. I turn into a rabid animal, fighting, scratching, and clawing, desperate to escape.
“Stop,” he grunts in my ear, and for a second, I think it’s Brock again—but no, this voice is rougher, deeper. His weight pins me to the ground, his chest to my back.
“Get off.” I flop, wriggle, buck. I don’t care that I’m making a spectacle on an empty goddamn beach.
I don’t care that my dress is up, my knees are scraped, or that every movement hurts.
All I can do is keep struggling, keep making it as hard as possible for him to hold on.
I’ll rip my own skin off if I have to. I will not go down like prey.
Not again.
Not again.
But this guy is a wall. Every angle I try to bite or kick, he’s already there, blocking, absorbing.
He rolls us fast and practiced, and then I’m on my back in the sand beneath him, gasping.
He’s got my wrists pinned—my own arms folded above my head, his hands covering mine, fingers splayed like he’s used to holding down things that fight.
“Stop,” autumn eyes says again, and this time it’s a plea. I snarl, arch my back, try to bridge off the ground, but he holds firm. His body is all heat and adrenaline and the scent of sweat and ocean and blood.
“Hey! Look at me.”
I do, because what the fuck else am I supposed to do with my face inches from his. He’s breathing hard, lips parted, eyes wide and clear even in the dark. His jaw is hard, stubble shadowing his cheeks, a muscle jumping in the hinge like he’s fighting himself as much as me.
“You’re not in danger. You’re not. I promise, okay? I’m not going to hurt you. Fuck—please, just . . . just breathe, all right?” His voice warbles near the end, and it’s the only thing that even registers—just that one syllable, please.
You don’t hear that from men like Brock. It’s not a thing people beg for unless they really fucking mean it.
I go still.
My breaths are ragged, wild, but I stop fighting.
For a second, we just stare at each other, both of us panting like we’ve run a marathon.
“Let me go.” My voice cracks, my tears blurring everything. “I won’t tell. Swear to God, I won’t. Please—just let me—”
“I know you won’t tell.”
The certainty in his tone slices through me.
“You know how I know?” He eases his grip on my wrists, just a fraction, his thumb brushing my pulse. “Because you killed him. We all did. You’re in this just as much as we are.”
That stops the world on its axis. My limbs go limp, pulse a ragged thread under his thumb, and I blink at him in the dark. He’s not bluffing. He’s not evil. He’s just . . . cold, and terribly, terribly certain.
I want to scream at him that he’s wrong, that I didn’t want this. But in my mind’s eye, it’s me with the knife, my hands driving again and again, my voice howling like nothing living. They might have started with the rope but it was me who ended Brock’s life.
I twist my wrists. He lets go and sits back, arms hanging like he’s afraid to touch me at all now. My hands shake so hard I have to fist them in the sand to keep from hitting him.
“What do you want from me?”
He shakes his head, slowly. “Nothing.”
And the fucked-up thing is, I believe him.
Not because I have any reason to trust a man who just tackled me into the sand after I watched his friends hang someone from a jetty.
But because his hands are open and his breathing is wrecked and there’s something in his face—in the space between his eyebrows, in the way his jaw keeps clenching and unclenching—that looks less like a man in control and more like a man trying very hard not to fall apart.
I sit up slowly. Every muscle screams. Amy’s dress is destroyed, soaked through, sand-crusted, clinging to me in ways that make my skin crawl. I can feel the blood drying on my arms, tightening like a second skin, cracking in the creases of my elbows when I move.
He watches me take stock of myself. Watches the moment I look down at my hands and see what’s under my fingernails and understand that no amount of sitting on this beach is going to undo what I did tonight.
“I can’t let you go home looking like that,” he says. “If someone sees you, it’s over. For you and for us.”
He shrugs off his jacket, dark and heavy, the lining warm from his body. He holds it out to me, arm extended, the jacket hanging between us like a question.
I stare at it.
“Take it,” he says. “It’ll cover the mess.”
My hands are shaking so badly it takes two tries to grab it.
I pull it on and it swallows me—sleeves past my fingertips, hem hitting mid-thigh, the collar brushing my jaw.
It smells like laundry detergent and cedar and something warm.
The bloody dress disappears. I’m just a girl in an oversized jacket now.
A girl who went for a walk on the beach and got cold.
The idea almost makes me laugh.
He stands and offers his hand. I ignore it, pushing myself up on my own, legs wobbling like a newborn deer. Autumn eyes doesn’t seem offended. Just drops his hand and nods toward the waterline.
“Come on. Let’s get the rest off.”