She opened her mouth and took a gasping breath just as they broke the surface, air rushing in and filling her screaming lungs.
Then back under, the current pulling them as they tumbled, their arms stretching.
Hold on. Hold on.
The deadly rapids were ahead. Harper tried desperately to grab at something. Anything that would hold them steady, keep them from entering that rocky portion of water that would drag them under, keep them there.
“Grab this!” a deep voice yelled. Harper gasped, not able to see who had said it with the spray of water, but spotting the large, heavy branch just in front of them.
She tried to swim toward it but the current pulled her away. Jak’s grip increased and with a yell, he pulled them both closer, swimming against the current, both of them working together to make it close enough to the branch to grab hold.
Jak let out a mighty yell, moving them closer, and Harper reached out and grabbed the end of it, barely. She slipped, grabbed again, held on until Jak could come from behind her and grab hold of it too, both of them gasping for breath, anchored to that small piece of wood in a roaring, cauldron of bubbling, circling water.
“Keep holding on. Don’t let go.” Agent Gallagher? It was Agent Gallagher, somehow impossibly, there. He pulled the branch, towing them in against the tide, grunting with the effort, slipping—oh, God—but regaining balance, pulling, pulling. They met the shore, and he reached out his hand pulling her up the bank, Jak behind her. They both collapsed on the muddy riverbank, gasping for air, soaking wet, shaking.
Their hands still clasped.
Together.
CHAPTER FIFTY
Jak pulled Harper closer, though there really wasn’t any way to get much closer than they currently were. Unless he took her to bed, which he wanted to—desperately. He wanted to roll around with her, sniffing her everywhere, taking, grunting, and howling with the thankfulness of life—
No. Those are wolf thoughts, he reminded himself. But she liked the wolf in him, he knew that too. He nuzzled her neck, pulling the hospital blanket more tightly around her to make sure she was warm. Now, if they would let them out of this hospital with all the intense, unknown smells that were tickling his nose and fogging his brain.
Although he knew he’d come back the next day. His grandfather was on another floor, in what they called a coma. Jak’s heart tightened. He was surprised at the sadness that filled him when he thought about his grandfather not getting better.
But he had Harper, and he had his own life, and that’s what he focused on.
Agent Gallagher—Mark, though he still had a hard time thinking of him that way—had pulled Jak and Harper, soaking wet, freezing cold, and half-drowned out of the water just a few . . . feet, yes, he knew that measurement now . . . just a few feet from the start of the swirling, rocky rapids.
Mrs. Gallagher—Laurie—had found the note in Harper’s apartment and sent Mark to find them, but there had been a downed tree across the road that led to the top of the falls, so he’d ended up at the bottom instead. Thank God. If Dr. Swift had arranged the road being blocked, it had worked out perfectly for Jak and Harper. Turned out, Mark was right where they’d needed him to be.
Dr. Swift had disappeared. There was a hunt to capture him.
Harper turned her head, kissing his fingers where they lay at her shoulder, then lacing her hand with his. She looked back at him. “During the fall . . . I heard my mother.” She looked down, her lashes making shadows on her cheeks. “She was with us both, Jak. I think . . . all this time.” She looked up at him again, those big brown eyes that had stared at him at the edge of a snowy cliff in the long ago—no, fifteen years ago—and then today at the top of a waterfall and trusted him with her life. His chest expanded. He thought it might burst.
He let out a breath, thinking about the way her mother’s notes had given him the will to live, to go on, when he’d given up on life, when the loneliness had taken and taken and taken until he had nothing left to give. She’d filled him again, with her voice, with the hopefulness of her thoughts, with questions to fill his head and his heart, and with words to remind him he was human. “Yes,” he said. “She was.”
“My father too,” Harper said. “I believe it. I cherish all of it. It was for something, and it led us here. Jak, do you think you can find a way to believe that too?”
He looked away for a second. He knew what she was asking. She was asking if he could let go of the hurt and the anger and the . . . bitterness over what had been done to him. If he could believe that greater forces . . . operated, and that those forces had guided him and loved him. He remembered how he’d felt her mother there with him—heard her whispers—when he’d found Driscoll dying in his cabin. Let it go, he’d heard deep inside, and he had, for that moment anyway, handing the man his phone when he’d asked for it. He knew now that Driscoll had called for help . . . bringing the deputy . . . who then brought Jak to the sheriff’s office . . . to . . . Harper. If he had followed his need for vengeance instead, ignored those whispers, leaving Driscoll to rot as he walked away, returned to his lonely life . . . but he didn’t want to think about that. He exhaled a slow breath. “I think so,” he said. And he meant it.
He had seen what bitterness did to his grandfather. Vengeance. He would not become him.
Let it go.
Although now was the time for anger too. Not for himself, maybe, but for the other survivors out there who were living the same way he had, maybe worse. Killing, freezing, starving, loneliness shriveling their souls.
What would happen to those people when they were found? Nobodies with nothing. Throwaways like he had been.
The door opened and Laurie Gallagher rushed in, looking . . . hmm, he didn’t yet know the word for how Laurie looked in that moment. Worried, but beyond that. Harper stood, and so did he. Laurie made a crying sound in the back of her throat and rushed to Harper first, hugging her and then letting go, running her hands down her hair, touching her bandages and making clucking sounds, and looking at her face like she was trying to make sure she was really alive. Then she moved to Jak making the same clucking sound as she hugged him tightly and then stepped back, looking at them both.
“I was so distraught when I heard. Oh my goodness, well, sit down. You must be traumatized.”
Distraught. That was the word. Worried only in a way that made your hair fly around your head, your eyes get big and round, and your hands flap everywhere.
Harper sat and so did Jak, as Laurie pulled up a chair and they told her what had happened on the edge of the waterfall. Tears slipped down her cheeks as she listened, blotting at them with a tissue and shaking her head. “Thank God he was there. I knew, I just knew something was wrong.” She grabbed Jak’s hand, squeezing. “I’m just so thankful you’re okay.” She shook her head again. “Oh dear, and your grandfather. How is he, Jak?”