Rio and I pull. Hand over hand. Rope burns against mypalms. My leg is shaking so violently, I’m amazed it holds. But I haul anyway. I will not be the weakness in this line.
A shadow rises at the edge ahead.
Gabriel first.
Then Freya.
Tears cut glossy lines through dirt on her cheeks, and she’s trembling.
I drop the rope and move as fast as my leg allows. She’s barely standing when I reach her, and I take her instantly into my arms, crushing her against my chest. She grips me with a force I didn’t know she’d still have.
My fucking warrior.
“Anton…” Her voice breaks against my chest.
“I’ve got you,” I say, kissing her hair, her temple, anything I can touch. “God, Freya, I’ve got you. Nothing’s getting near you again.”
Her hand slips down to my thigh, and her eyes fly up to mine, dread flooding them. “You’re hurt?”
I glance down, only now finally taking a look at where the bullet hit. Metal glints through the tears in my jeans. My compass. I reach inside my pocket and suck air through my teeth. My old keepsake must’ve taken part of the hit, too.
The casing is crushed inward, the glass blown out, the needle is gone, maybe buried in my skin.
I look at the ruined thing in my hand. This compass has lived in my pocket for years, a reminder to never lose trust in myself, even when so many times I did.
“Oh no.” Another tear rolls down her cheek. “Your compass.”
But when I look at her—my woman, the mother of my child, the future I didn’t think I’d ever have—everything inside me lines up. My intuition led me exactly where I needed to be once again.
“I don’t need it anymore.” I cup her face in my hands. “You’re my true north now.”
38
When Freyaand I arrived at the hospital, they separated us. I tried to follow and insisted I could wait because I could, goddamn it; these people have no clue what a SEAL can walk through. If the bullet was going to kill me, it would have by the time I arrived.
They didn’t see things that way.
There isn’t a man alive who could watch his partner and unborn baby wheeled away after something like that and stay calm. But I forced myself to remember she was in the right hands. Safer here than she’d been in hours.
Because it’s a small hospital, I get an X-ray within minutes, and an ER doctor removes the bullet. Thankfully, itwas a clean and superficial entry, but I knew that by how I was able to move through it.
Now, I have a blood pressure cuff around my arm, my pants off, a sterile drape over my thigh, and a nurse telling me to hold still unless I want to be stitched up twice.
My pulse won’t settle. Every part of this place reminds me how fast a life can turn—beeping monitors, white walls, the sting of disinfectant that clings to the back of my throat. This is the room people wait in when the world is about to tilt, and all I can think is that she’s in one just like it.
Alone.
Trying to be calm for our baby without anyone taking care of her.
Freya reassured me the whole way in the ambulance that she thought she was okay. But she would say that. Even on that cliff edge, hanging on by the tips of her boots and a piece of plastic, she kept telling me things would be okay.
I can still feel the ambulance sway under us, still hear the hiss of oxygen and the low murmur of paramedics radioing updates. And she held my hand with so much strength in her palm.
She is already the fiercest mom in the world.
But I’m going to spend a lot of time helping her see my shoulders are broad enough for both of us.
I stare at the pale blue pattern on the curtained wall in the ER and have to laugh to myself. She might be over there thinking the same thing about me. For how different we are, we share some things, too, and showing ourselves as a fortress is one of them.
