Total pages in book: 105
Estimated words: 99399 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 497(@200wpm)___ 398(@250wpm)___ 331(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 99399 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 497(@200wpm)___ 398(@250wpm)___ 331(@300wpm)
The headlamp beam caught nothing but rain and trees and the muddy ribbon of the trail ahead.
I made myself slow down when the terrain finally opened up ahead where the canopy broke.
The overlook.
I already knew what I’d find there.
Nothing.
What I hadn’t expected was the way the nothing would hit me. Standing at the edge of the rock shelf in the rain with my headlamp beam dissolving into the dark valley below, the blunt fact of it landed in my chest like something physical.
Wolfe wasn’t here.
He’d come this far—they both had; there were hints of boot prints left in the soft earth at the overlook edge, two sets—and then they’d turned back the other way.
I’d chosen wrong.
They’d come up the longer way like I’d thought, but then, for some reason, they’d gone back the same way instead of continuing the loop. Three miles back instead of two. Why? Surely it had been raining by then. Why take the longer route?
I crouched and looked at the prints more carefully, but any helpful details had been washed away by the rain.
I stood and turned the headlamp toward the trail that continued around the loop. My heart was beating against the walls of my chest in a desperate bid to escape, to find its way to Wolfe. But a SaR professional couldn’t operate from a place of panic. Panic made people stupid and sloppy.
So I shoved the panic aside and moved ahead.
The trail beyond the overlook was narrower, the decline more dramatic, with tree roots pushing up through the packed dirt alongside jagged rock making each step more dangerous in the shadows from my headlamp.
I called Wolfe’s name again and listened hard. Rain on leaves was a particular kind of background noise. Flat, constant, and directionless. Almost impossible to hear anything beneath it unless you knew what to filter for. I’d learned that in the Cascades a decade ago from a retired ranger named John Brisco, who’d told me to stop listening for sounds and start listening for shapes of sounds instead.
Voices curved. Animals moved rhythmically.
Rain didn’t. So anything with rhythm beneath the rain was suspect.
I stopped.
Nothing. Then…
Something rhythmic and slow. Not trees or rustling leaves. Not water falling on rock.
I killed my headlamp and stood in the dark rain, listening with everything I had.
There. Approximately forty yards down the trail and to the left. Something different. A person whispering to themselves.
“You can do this. Just fucking do it. Hands and knees. Make it happen.”
My eyes searched the trees, frantic to set eyes on him, but he was nowhere to be found. When I finally lowered my headlamp closer to the ground and spotted him, my heart nearly completed its escape.
He was fucking crawling.
“Wolfe!” I picked up my speed, heart thundering and feet slipping across the soggy ground. “Wolfe, baby, I’m here. Tell me you’re okay.”
A beat of silence. Then his voice, ragged at the edges but unmistakably his. “T-trace? Are you real? Are you… you?”
He was a cold, sodden lump at the side of the trail. Mud up his arms to the elbows and covering his clothes like he’d been using it as camouflage. Rain-soaked through every layer.
I slid to a stop next to him. “Yeah. I’m here, baby. I’m real. I’ve got you.”
“I’m—I rolled my ankle. I was—” A pause where he was clearly catching his breath. “I was getting back to the trailhead. Getting back to you.”
Wolfe’s expression in the diffuse light was exhausted and determined. And if I hadn’t already been wildly, impossibly in love with him, seeing him like that would have done it.
I tilted my headlamp beam away, clasped his face in my hands, and assessed.
Alive. Conscious. Eyes blinking away from my light.
The professional part of me catalogued all of it in about three seconds. Then I let the other part of me—the part I’d been pushing down since I’d stood at the empty overlook in the dark—rise to the fore.
I kissed him with all the longing and desperation that had been building in me all day, the panic that I wouldn’t find him or that he wouldn’t know how much I needed him. Then I squeezed him against me as tightly as I could.
“Fuck,” I choked as soon as the shaking warmth of him was solidly in my arms. “Fuck.”
His arms snaked around my neck, and he tucked his cold nose under my chin. “I knew you’d find me.” His voice was muffled against my wet skin, but it was enough for me to close my eyes in gratitude.
Those words were the greatest accomplishment of my life.
“Always,” I choked out, hoping it was true. “Always.”
“I fucked up, Trace.”
“No, you didn’t,” I said firmly. “This isn’t on you.”
“It is. I trusted Jake. I went with him today. And he…” His voice choked off.
“Did he hurt you?” I demanded, pulling back to assess him again. “Did he try to—?”