Fucking hang on, Freya. Please.
The sirens grow louder, echoing down into the quarry, and she hears them. Hope lights in those big chestnut eyes.
Tires grind to a halt behind me. I glance back. Callum. Gabriel. Already out of their vehicles. Gabriel throws a harness to the ground.
“Rescue equipment is here,” I reassure her.
I need her to hang on for just a little longer.
“You’re fighting like hell down there. Strongest thing I’ve ever seen.”
“I don’t feel strong,” she whispers.
The admission knocks the air out of me.
“Well, you are.” The words are pulled from my goddamn soul. “And when I get you up here, I’ll spend the rest of my life making damn sure you know what you’re made of.”
Gabriel’s boots grind to a stop beside me. His head snaps toward a thick juniper trunk set several yards back from the cliff’s edge—deep-rooted, solid, exactly what we need.
“Anton.” He glances at my leg and tosses me the end of the rope with the belay attached.
“You take the anchor point,” he commands.
Every instinct in me screams to be the one going down that cliff, to put my body between her and free-fall. But with a bullet in my leg, I might kill us both.
Gabriel is one hundred percent composed as only an ex-Navy SEAL can be. I have to trust him because, with my leg damaged like it is, much as I want to gather her up into my arms, this is the right way around.
My thigh is on fire as I run thirty feet from the cliff’s edgeto where I find an anchor point. I loop the rope low around the trunk of a pine and yank. It holds.
In the distance, at the edge, Callum pries Mike Ingram out from under Rio’s boot and starts to cuff him. Rio sees me and stands, but before he comes to me, he thunders his boot into Mike’s rib cage with one last vengeful whack.
Then he runs over. “Tell me what to do.”
I explain how to secure the rope as a double safety, and I call out to Gabriel, harnessed up at the edge. “Secure!”
He drops over.
Now, I can’t see Gabriel.
I can’t see my future.
All I see is the slow unwinding rope as I hope and pray my friend is the heroic beast he’s always been.
Wind whips through the trees around us. Sirens throw a kaleidoscope of lights across the gray expanse, and the whole scene feels one second from breaking apart.
All I can do is hold this line and wait.
Then the line tightens and shakes with tension. Does he have her on now?
I tighten my grip until my knuckles go white. Rio shifts beside me, adding weight. The tree groans but stays rooted.
An eternity stretches. It’s a challenge to keep the terror from settling in my chest—the thought of her losing purchase, of the flexi cuffs giving out unexpectedly… Every breath is a fight.
Finally, there’s a faint shout, and Callum, who stands at the edge watching the rescue, calls over to me.
“He’s bringing her up!” He gives a thumbs-up.
Relief washes through me. My future, my woman, my baby…all secure at the end of that rope.
