“Just keep moving,” I muttered, my voice raw and cracked, scraped hollow by salt air and dehydration and hours of breathing through my mouth because my nose had clogged with dried blood and snot somewhere around mile ten.
The kayak rocked beneath me, cutting through the water in slow, steady strokes that barely seemed to make progress against the current. Now and then, a swell would rise from the darkness and slap the side hard enough to send a sheet of cold spray across my face and chest. Each time, the shock of it jolted through my nervous system like a defibrillator—three seconds of sharp, electric awareness before the numbness rolled back in and swallowed everything again.
I didn’t stop.
Didn’t think about stopping.
Because if I stopped—if I let the paddle rest across my lap for even thirty seconds, if I allowed my arms to go still and my muscles to cool and the exhaustion to settle into my bones the way it kept threatening to—
I wouldn’t start again. I knew that with absolute certainty. If I stopped, I would stay stopped, and the ocean would do the rest.
So I kept pulling—left, right, left, right. The most basic rhythm in the world, stripped down to its simplest components. I fed myself into it one stroke at a time, refusing to think beyond the next one.
Doc Fluffbutt had fallen silent in the carrier wedged between my knees, either asleep or in a state of feline zen. He accepted his circumstances with the stoic resignation of a creature who had already survived hell today and couldn’t be bothered to panic about anything else.
Then, a break in the darkness: the island.
A dark shape rising against the darker water, barely distinguishable from the sky except for the faint suggestion of light it blocked along the horizon. A solid, fixed mass in a world that had been nothing but liquid and darkness for hours.
I almost laughed. The sound that escaped was somewhere between a breath and a groan, too exhausted to qualify as anything else. But the relief behind it ran so deep and so sudden it nearly broke me right there in the kayak.
I let out a breath. “Yeah… alright…” My arms found one more stroke, then another, then another.
Closer.
I could make that distance.
Just keep moving. Just keep pulling. Don’t think. Don’t calculate.
The dock materialized out of the darkness ahead—faint, a slightly lighter shade of gray against the black water. The posts rose like fingers, the planking stretching out from shore in a shape I knew by heart because I’d built half of it myself.
Home.
I could smell the island now—earth and pine and salt grass and something green and alive that cut through the ocean brine and made my throat tighten in a way I hadn’t expected and couldn’t quite explain.
And then I saw a shape.
Standing on the dock.
Still.
Watching.
Gun raised.
“Fuck,” I whispered.
Of course. Of course someone stood on that dock with a weapon. Of course, the one time I needed the universe to hand me something simple—pull up to the dock, tie off, collapse, done—it threw one more obstacle in my path just to see if I’d crack.
My heart kicked hard against my ribs, and the adrenaline hit my exhaustion like an unearned second wind, just enough to sharpen the world at the edges again. My vision focused. My knuckles went white on the paddle.
Who the hell is on my island?
Where are the girls?
Where is Libby?
I shifted slightly in the kayak, letting my right hand drift toward the gun still holstered at my side—still there, still loaded, still an option. Twenty rounds. Dead arms that might not be able to hold steady enough to hit anything. No food in my system. No sleep. A shoulder that had stopped working properly somewhere around mile eight.
