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.
