Chapter Text
The weight of her body dragged against him, limp and unyielding. Cold hammered every inch of his skin at once, pressing into his chest until every breath felt like knives. Salt stung his throat and filled his nose, the ocean trying to pour itself inside him.
He curled an arm beneath her shoulders and clutched her tight, kicking hard against the black-green drag that wanted them both. The rope at her wrists scraped across his knuckles, a cruel reminder of how close he had come to losing her. The hood twisted in the current, plastered against her face, turning her into a shadowed figure sinking further into the dark.
His lungs screamed, ears rang and sparks bloomed at the edges of his vision. Every kick felt slower than the last. The ache under his ribs flared sharp, then sharper until it felt like the ocean had its fist inside him, squeezing. Chris refused to let go. His chest slammed against Margo’s with each desperate drive upward, as if his own heartbeat could will hers back into rhythm.
The surface broke over them in a gasp of night and noise. The sky felt too far away, the lights along the dock a smear. Chris sucked air fast enough to choke, shoved water from his eyes with a jerk of his head, then hooked his arm under Margo’s and turned her so that her face was up, the hood sodden and plastered. He tore the hood away in a single wrench and flung it aside. Her hair spilled out like a drowned halo, chestnut curls dark and heavy, a few strands catching a sickly glint from the pier light as they clung to her cheek.
“Margo,” he rasped. The word came out like it had knives on it.
Her eyes were closed. Her lips were blue. He kept her head tipped back and kicked for the pilings, leg muscles burning so hard he saw sparks at the edges of his vision. A line thumped down from above. Hands leaned far over the edge. He heard a voice that might have been Rourke’s cut through the rush.
“Rope on your right. Take it. We have you.”
Chris shifted Margo’s weight to one arm and slapped at the water until his fingers struck the rope. He looped it hard around his wrist, then around her waist, and braced as the pull from above bit deep into his skin. Kicking with everything left in him, he shoved upward against the drag of the cold, refusing to lose even an inch.
The dock edge surged closer. Chris levered his hip against the slick boards, forced Margo ahead with the last of his strength, and felt strong hands seize her under the arms.
“Take her,” he choked, voice raw from salt and strain.
They did, the rope going slack in his grip. Chris clawed for the edge, elbows screaming as splinters and salt bit into torn skin. His lungs burned with every ragged cough as he heaved himself up, slid once, then got a knee under him and rolled onto the boards in a shaking heap.
The night crashed back at once: water slapping pilings, boots hammering wood, a shouted order cracking across the pier, the high metallic click of a safety being drawn back into place.
None of it mattered. He crawled the last foot across wet wood and gathered Margo onto her back himself.
Her chest did not move.
“No,” he said, and his voice broke.
He tilted her head back, swept her mouth with trembling fingers, and sealed his lips over hers. Breath in. He pulled back, eyes fixed on her chest. Nothing.
He set the heel of his hand between her ribs and pressed, counting aloud to keep from unraveling. Thirty compressions, two breaths. Again. His arms trembled, muscles screaming, but he drove through the ache. He had practiced for this in neat classrooms where emergencies were theory. Now every push carried the weight of losing her.
“Come on, Sweetheart,” he whispered, voice raw. “Breathe.”
Her body shifted beneath his palms, limp and heavy, water pooling at the corner of her mouth. He gave her breath, pulled back, pressed again. Behind him, Rourke barked orders, and the pier answered with pounding boots, a grunt cut short, the scrape of metal across wood.
Chris didn’t turn. He couldn’t. His world narrowed to the rhythm of his hands, the tilt of her head, the shallow give of her ribs beneath his palms.
Then, Margo’s chest jerked. A ragged cough rattled low in her throat before breaking upward, ugly and wet. Water spilled from her mouth and ran down her jaw. Chris rolled her onto her side, steadying her as her body convulsed. She coughed harder and expelled a lungful of seawater that steamed in the cold, before her body dragged in a series of shallow, rabbit-fast breaths, instinct more than consciousness.
Relief hit him like another wave, but it carried no softness. It left him shaking, his breath breaking against the night as he bent over her.
“Good…good girl,” he stammered, voice breaking. “That’s it. That’s it, Sweetheart.”
“She needs a bag valve,” a voice said at his shoulder. “We have one in the kit.”
“On me,” another voice answered, and boots pounded away.
Chris smoothed wet hair from her face with shaking fingers. Her skin, beneath the cold, was the exact texture he knew. He pressed his hand over her chest, counting the rises. Too slow. He swallowed a sob that was trying to force its way up and set his jaw.
“I’ve got you,” he whispered. “I’m here.”
A snap of movement burst near the end of the pier. Chris’s head jerked up. Rowan had not fled. He was at the edge of the boards, shoulders coiled, eyes bright like something that had never learned mercy. Two men flanked him, one with a knife that flashed once before Rourke’s team shoved him hard into the deck, the other with a pistol he lifted too late.
“Drop it,” Rourke called, voice even and close.
Rowan’s gaze flicked once toward the cluster around Margo. In that split moment Chris saw him see them, and worse, saw him see the way Chris’s body was between her and the rest of the world. Recognition sharpened into something venomous.
“Back up,” Rourke said. “Hands visible.”
Rowan smiled without warmth. He didn’t back up. He moved forward, a glide that looked casual if you didn’t know him. Chris had known men like this only in stories and headlines. Now he saw the thing a headline never shows: the way a man like that enjoyed the second before he cut.
Evan hit him from the side like a fired bolt.
The impact knocked both of them off balance in a blur of limbs and rage. Rowan’s gun hand slammed into the deck and skittered wide. Evan drove a shoulder under Rowan’s ribs and tackled through him, fueled by a mix of terror and apology that had been grinding his bones for years. The sound was raw. It came from the place where you stop being careful and start being a brother.
They hit hard. Evan’s arm took the brunt of the fall and something in it cracked. He swore, the word punched out of him, and clamped both arms anyway around Rowan’s torso. The pain tried to pry his fingers open. He refused to let them move.
“Don’t you touch her,” he gasped, and the words had teeth.
Rowan twisted like a trained animal and got a hand into Evan’s hair. He slammed Evan’s head toward the boards. Rourke’s team surged, the scene stuttering between restraint and explosion. Someone shouted “gun” and sent a weapon sliding into the dark with a kick. Someone else snapped a cuff at a wrist and got an elbow to the mouth for the trouble.
“Evan,” Chris shouted, useless and helpless in equal measure.
Evan didn’t look back. All his attention locked on the man who had tried to erase his sister. Rowan bucked and brought his knee up hard into Evan’s thigh, then into his ribs. Evan saw white, saw stars, saw the cheap ceiling tiles over the sofa in their grandmother’s house twenty years ago. He clung harder. His broken arm screamed. He thought of the phone on the stairs, the cracked screen with Chris’s name, the way Margo had always stepped between him and worse. He snarled and used his good arm to wrench Rowan’s shoulder toward the deck.
Rourke slid in, quick and clean, and took Rowan’s wrist in a move that felt like one efficient sentence. He twisted. A pop answered. Rowan hissed and went still for precisely one half-second, then spat and fought, snapping like a striking fish. Rourke didn’t care about the spit or the insult that followed. He careened anger into position, drove a knee to pin Rowan’s hip, and spoke in a voice that was almost conversational.
Rourke leaned in, voice even but meant for his team. “He’s finished fighting. Keep him pinned.”
Rowan heard the line for the trap that it was and thrashed anyway. He got nowhere. Two more team members folded his legs and shackled his ankles. Another cuff clamped his other wrist. He drew a breath that sounded a lot like a promise of revenge and Rourke ghosted the muzzle of a sidearm to the center of Rowan’s back, a reminder of what was and wasn’t smart.
“Don’t test my patience,” Rourke said.
Rowan laughed once, a low sound full of hate, and went slack enough to breathe. He turned his head and found Chris through the press of legs and shapes. He smiled like a man who remembered a girl’s first kiss only so he could break it.
Chris looked away. He would not feed that smile. He turned back to Margo and pressed his fingers under her jaw.
“Come on, love,” he whispered without noticing what word he had chosen. “Stay with me.”
The team member with the bag valve mask dropped to his knees on the other side. “Good pulse. Slow. Let’s move air for her.”
Chris nodded and eased back enough to make space. The mask went over her nose and mouth. The bag compressed in careful rhythm. Her chest rose and fell, steady for the first time since the water had taken her. Rourke glanced over his shoulder, lines of focus between his brow, then back to the knot of men keeping Rowan honest.
“Evan,” Rourke said, “stay down.”
“I’m good,” Evan lied. He sat on the wet planks with his broken arm cradled tight against his body, a sick sheen at his hairline, and blood blooming inside his sleeve. He tried to push himself up with his other hand and swayed instead. To his surprise, a steady palm landed on his shoulder and kept him from toppling.
Minho would have said something sarcastic. Jisung would have made a joke and then quietly fixed you a drink. Hyunjin would have put a hand on your cheek and pointed the camera away so you could have a private second in public. Chris was grateful none of the boys were here to see the way his hands shook over the girl he couldn’t lose. He set his palm to the center of Margo’s chest, not to press, only to feel the rise, and counted it under his breath.
A siren wailed somewhere inland, then cut, then returned closer with its own pulse. Headlights swept across wet boards. Paramedics came in low and fast. Rourke stepped back half a pace to give them room, never taking his eyes off the man on the ground.
“Unresponsive, submerged,” the medic said, all quick competence. “Bagging. Pulse present.”
Chris’s teeth chattered, not from the water anymore but from the cold that had settled deep in his bones. “I don’t know if she has allergies,” he forced out. “She…she was kicked in the chest….” His throat burned. A ragged breath slipped past his control, and he whispered in Korean, words not meant for anyone but himself: “Jebal… sal-a isseo jwo.” Please… let her live.
The medic gave one sharp nod. “We’ve got it.”
There is a kind of mercy in professionals moving in. They fold the chaos into steps and give you smaller things to look at. One medic pressed a stethoscope bell to Margo’s clammy chest and listened. Another snapped an oxygen line into the mask and checked the seal. A third cut the rope at her wrists before easing a blanket over her, tucking the edges like a cocoon.
Chris sat back on his heels and breathed for the first time in what felt like hours. His jeans stuck to his legs like bricks. Water dripped off his sleeves and made little rivers toward the cracks between the boards. He tried to watch her face and not the way her lashes clumped or the way her lips stayed pale. He leaned down until his mouth was near her ear.
“It’s me,” he said softly, and hoped his voice found her inside the fog. “I’m here.”
She didn’t stir. Her breathing steadied under the bag, each rise a small miracle. The medic called for a stretcher. Rourke called for a transport for Rowan and his men. Someone collected the weapon from the dark and clicked it safe into a bag. Someone gathered the hood from the waterline and sealed it as evidence, water running off it like oil. The world started making lists again.
Evan tried to stand a second time. His legs obeyed, just barely. He stumbled the step it took to reach Chris and stopped there, wary of the distance grief sometimes imposes. He looked at Margo’s face and made a sound so quiet he might not have made it at all.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
Chris didn’t look up. His hand had drifted and now lay over the back of Margo’s fingers, warming them as if he could will warmth into her by friction alone. “You got him,” he said, and it was not exactly forgiveness, but it was a line thrown toward it.
Evan swallowed. “I wanted to break him.”
“You didn’t need to,” Rourke said, coming up beside them. He had a split along his cheekbone that would bloom purple tomorrow and a thin smear of someone else’s blood across his collar. “He’s going to spend a long time forgetting what it felt like to be the one who decides.”
A paramedic squeezed Chris’s shoulder. “We’re moving.”
They lifted the stretcher and started toward the waiting ambulance. Evan took a step as if to follow and then almost folded when his broken arm told him what it thought of the idea. Rourke caught him again and turned him gently toward a second ambulance that had pulled up two car lengths away.
“You’re getting that set,” Rourke said. “And you’re going to do what you’re told for a change.”
“I need to be there,” Evan gritted out.
“You will get there,” Rourke answered, not unkind. “You don’t show up for your sister with your own bones sticking wrong. Move.”
Evan let himself be steered, jaw clenched, eyes tracking the narrow rectangle of Margo’s blanket as it slid into the bright compartment. Chris climbed in without asking permission and took the jump seat beside her. He wrapped one hand around the rail at her head and put the other on her wrist again. The medic checked his face once, as if to say we do not need extra bodies in here, then saw the set of his mouth and looked away. Sometimes you let love make the rules and work around it.
The doors banged shut. The siren rose and the whole world leaned forward.
The ride blurred into a funnel of white light and rattling sound. Chris watched the curve of the mask against Margo’s cheek, the way condensation gathered and ran in a tiny river at the rim, and told himself that meant she was warming the air. He checked the pulse at her wrist, counted, checked again. The medic said numbers like islands. Blood pressure. Oximetry. Respiratory rate. Good. Holding. Better.
At the hospital the doors burst open and hospital light swallowed them. The air smelled like antiseptic and warm plastic. Nurses met the stretcher at a trot and were already asking questions as they rolled.
“Sir, we need her name and any information you have,” the nurse pressed, clipboard ready. “Surname, medical history…anything at all.”
“Her name is Margo,” Chris said, voice rough. “I don’t know her surname…she never told me. Please, just help her. She doesn’t look like she’s eaten in days.” His heart was still pounding with worry, but he kept moving with the wheels. “She was kicked in the chest and was submerged for…god, I don’t know…things were moving too fast. I jumped in as fast as I could…”
A curtain swished. Hands lifted her to a bed and reviewed her injuries with a skilled touch. The bright buzz of a fluorescent light flickered once and steadied. A monitor beeped to announce he had something new to watch. The mask stayed in place while a nurse started an IV and another drew blood with quick movements. They cut away the rope-burned sleeves of her cardigan and took blood pressure again. Someone murmured “core temp is low” in a voice that tried to stay calm and failed a little.
“Sir,” a nurse touched his elbow, “there’s a chair. We’ve got to examine her...”
He nodded but did not sit. He stood out of the way, but within eyesight, and considered the kind of bargain a person makes with any higher power. He would trade a year of sleep for one breath without a machine. He would trade a voice for the sound of hers saying his name. He would trade the last twenty minutes of every day forever for three seconds of her eyes opening.
The nurse adjusted the mask and the hum of warm air deepened. The doctor, a woman with graying hair and glasses perched halfway down her nose, stepped in at the end of the bed and took it all in with one sweep. She spoke while she touched, while she listened, while she looked at the rope burns and frowned in a way that said she would be reporting something later.
“She’s hypothermic with complications from a near-drowning,” the doctor said, voice steady and professional. “She has lacerations on the wrists, contusions along the neck, and significant bruising across the chest. I’m concerned she has at least two fractured ribs, possibly more. Your compressions kept circulation going…that likely made the difference. Right now, we’re actively rewarming her and supporting her breathing. The next hour will be critical. Keep speaking to her. Familiar voices have been known to help orient patients as they stabilize.”
Chris leaned so close his forehead almost touched hers, his voice low and steady, a tether meant only for her.
“Hi,” he whispered. “It’s me. I’m right here, you’re safe now. Rest if you need to. I’ve got you, Sweetheart…I’m not going anywhere.”
His wet clothes clung ice-cold to his skin, dragging the heat from his bones until he couldn’t feel them anymore. A nurse appeared with a folded set of pale blue scrubs. She spoke quietly, gentle but firm. “You’ll make yourself sick if you stay like this. Change into these. I’ll give you some privacy.”
Chris hesitated, eyes locked on Margo. The thought of her waking, even for a second, and finding him gone clawed at him. “Here,” he said hoarsely. “I’ll change here.”
The nurse paused for a moment, then gave a small nod before pulling the curtain around the bed. Chris stripped quickly, peeling away clothes still heavy with seawater, and tugged the scrubs on with hands that shook from more than cold. The fabric was thin and rough, but dry. At least it didn’t pull him deeper into the chill.
When he sat back down, the nurse draped a blanket around his shoulders anyway. He blinked up at her in a fog of gratitude he would not remember later. She murmured something about resting while he could, and he nodded as if that were not the most impossible suggestion in the world.
Ten minutes crawled past before Rourke appeared, steady and silent, carrying Chris’s backpack. He set it down without a word. Chris unzipped it quickly, relief flashing through him when he found his laptop dry inside. His phone was ruined the moment he hit the water, but this would do.
He opened it with shaking hands, knuckles still raw. The glow of the screen felt like a tether to the world beyond these walls. He typed fast, blunt, no room for anything extra: Phone is gone. Need a replacement. Margo is safe but not out of the woods. I’ll fill you in when I can.
The cursor blinked after he hit send. No poetry. No comfort. Just the truth pared down to its bones. He rubbed a hand over his face and leaned back in the chair, the laptop warm against his knees.
Across the hall, Rourke stood at the edge of the curtain, a silhouette against hospital light. “Rowan is in custody,” he said quietly. “He will go nowhere but a holding cell after the ER. We’ll be charging him with assault, attempted murder, extortion, and a list of other things I’ll spare you. The DA already has people sitting up straight.”
Chris looked up with eyes that felt like sand. “Good.”
“Your friend Evan is down the hall getting set,” Rourke added. “He keeps asking for updates. I’ll tell him she’s breathing on her own within the hour if this trend holds.”
Chris swallowed hard. “Tell him… tell him to stop apologizing. Tell him to rest.”
Rourke nodded once and stepped out of sight. Machines clicked and hummed. The monitor shifted tone, the same pattern as before but somehow sounding less urgent. A doctor checked Margo’s pupils with a penlight, narrowed her eyes, and finally allowed herself to speak a sentence that didn’t carry a condition attached.
“She is stabilizing.”
The clock on the wall moved its minute hand with the arrogant little click all hospital clocks have. An hour stretched and then folded behind them. Somewhere down the corridor Evan shouted once at a nurse and then apologized fourteen times in a row. Somewhere outside rain tried to start and then changed its mind and went away. Chris stared at the tendons in Margo’s wrist shifting under her skin as the IV tape pulled and pretended that meant he had the control to keep her in the world. It killed him to see the sores along her wrists from the rope that had cut into them.
He closed his eyes for a second, only a second, and in that small dark he saw her as she had been before any of this, the way she had laughed with his crew at the fair, her face tipped to the sky and carefree. He saw her curled on her bed with her cheek pressed against his chest. He saw the way firelight had cast her eyes sparkling even in the darkest of nights. He saw her on the video screen at midnight in his hoodie that swallowed her to the knees, the corners of her mouth tugging up because she had learned how to make a small expression hold a lot of meaning. He saw all the places his hands had learned without asking and all the places he had not touched yet.
His throat tightened. “Come back,” he whispered, the words breaking more like a prayer than a command.
For a long moment, nothing changed. The monitor ticked on. The mask hissed softly. His chest threatened to cave in with the weight of silence.
Then, her fingers moved.
At first it could have been air, or the tiny shift tape makes when it peels. He held his breath and waited. Her hand twitched again, slow, then tried to curl. He slid his palm under hers so there was something to hold, and she caught his finger with a strength that felt like more than reflex.
“Margo,” he said, and the way her name came out of his mouth made the nurse glance up and then look away again because it was something private, something people should say only when the world has kindly left the room.
Her lashes trembled. Her breath hitched under the mask. He bent close, close enough that his hair brushed the pillow, and watched as her eyes fought their way open. They were unfocused and dark with the shock of too much night, but they were alive. She blinked once, twice, the weight of it visible, then found him by following the heat of his hand to the shape of his face.
She made a small sound. It wasn’t a word, but it was his.
“Hey,” he whispered, and the sound he made was almost laughter because the other option would have broken something in him. “You’re safe, Sweetheart.”
Her throat worked under the mask. A tear slid out from under one eye and slid toward her ear. He caught it with his knuckle, the gentlest touch he had in him.
“You’re safe,” he said again because saying it made it more true even if only by a fraction.
She blinked. Her grip tightened on his finger, a stubborn little clamp she would apologize for later when the muscles in her hand ached and she realized she had tried to grind bone. He welcomed the ache in advance. He would take pain for a month if it bought him that squeeze.
The doctor leaned in and checked the numbers again with the kind of smile doctors allow themselves only when they think they might have gotten away with something. “Good,” she said. “Let’s keep the mask for a while. We’ll talk when you can manage a few words.”
Margo blinked again, slow, like a nod.
From the doorway a figure hovered, then stepped in with his arm in a sling and a look on his face like he was not sure he had permission to own any relief. Evan stood there a second, green around the edges, then focused like a compass needle on his sister. The nurse made to shoo him and then decided his presence would not add chaos, only quiet.
“Hey,” he said, and his voice was wrecked.
Margo’s eyes slid to him. For a second confusion took the place of everything else, then recognition clicked and her mouth moved under the plastic. No sound made it past the mask. She didn’t need sound. Evan’s shoulders dropped two inches. His good hand came up to his face and rubbed hard at his eyes.
“I’m here,” he said, same as Chris had, same as anyone says when there is nothing else worth saying.
Rourke stood behind Evan and offered a nod that was not exactly approval and not exactly apology, but was something close to both. He kept his voice low.
“Rowan won’t touch either of you again.”
Margo’s gaze flicked past her brother to the shadow in the doorway and then back to Chris, as if to confirm that she was allowed to stop thinking about the man with the cutting smile. Chris gave her the smallest possible nod. Her fingers tightened on his once more.
The room settled. The monitor kept its polite conversation with itself. The warm air in the mask fed her slow and steady. Chris sat at the edge of the bed and let his body remember it was made of more than panic. His clothes dried in patches that felt like paper. His hands felt like he had been holding a heavy thing for days and had finally set it down.
He leaned close one more time, careful not to bump the mask, and let himself say something he had carried like a stone at the bottom of his throat since the first time she had fallen asleep on the phone with him and left her breathing in his ear.
“Rest,” he whispered. “I’ve got you.”
Her eyes fluttered, then eased shut, not the shutting of a body surrendering, but the closing of someone who has permission to sleep. The small crease in her forehead softened. Her fingers never let go of his.
Outside the window the first honest stars of the night set themselves in a thin, salt-touched sky. Police radios murmured two floors down. In a chair by a vending machine, Evan fell asleep upright with his head tipped against plaster and his broken arm in a sling, his breath evening out in the knowledge that, for the first time in years, the worst thing in the room did not belong to him.
Chris stayed exactly where he was until the doctor told him to drink water or pass out. He drank and then returned his hand to its place. He did not look away from Margo’s face for a long time. When he finally did, it was only to let his eyes unfocus for a heartbeat and see the pair of them from very far away, two small shapes under too much light, tethered to each other at the hand.