Page 82 of In Too Deep
“Please wait for Liam.”
There was a desperation in her voice that hadn’t been there before.Something raw and painful.The sound of someone who’d lost people before, who knew what it felt like to have names added to the list of the dead because someone made the wrong call.
Something he couldn’t say no to.
“I’ll wait.But I might as well get the anchors set for the next descent.”Teague stared at the two shafts, his gut warring with logic and instinct battling caution.Rain was falling harder now and turning the limestone slick and treacherous.“Talk me through it, Eden.If you were standing here, which one would you pick?”
She’d done it.
Meg stared at Alex’s foot and watched the color slowly return to his toes—from that terrifying gray-blue back to a healthier pink.Life seeping back into the dying tissue, one capillary at a time.Her hands were shaking so badly she had to press them against her thighs to still them.The fabric of her pants was stiff with dried blood—Alex’s blood, mixed with cave grit and her own sweat.
Done.
She’d released the pressure and wrapped it as best she could with the limited supplies they had.White gauze was already seeping through with blood, but clean blood.Flowing blood.Living blood.
Alex hadn’t woken through any of it.Mercy.That type of burning pain, no one wanted to remember.
Meg sat back on her heels, her breath coming hard and adrenaline still coursing through her system.Blood stained her hands—not a lot, but enough to make everything feel viscerally real.Dark under her fingernails.Dried in the creases of her palms.The metallic smell mixed with the cave’s mineral scent.
A fasciotomy.In a cave.With improvised instruments and no backup.
And it had worked.
But underneath the adrenaline was something else—something that felt almost like pride, sharp and unexpected.Like finding a muscle she didn’t know she had and discovering it was strong.
She’d done it.When it mattered, she hadn’t frozen.
“Hey.”Noah’s voice was soft beside her.“You okay?”
She looked up at him, and a laugh bubbled out of her—slightly manic, edged with hysteria, but real.“I think so.Yeah.”
The laugh echoed off the limestone walls and came back distorted.
“You were amazing.”His brown eyes held something that made her chest warm.Something that had nothing to do with medicine and everything to do with the man sitting beside her in the dark.“Seriously, Meg.That was—I don’t even have words for what that was.”
She wiped her hands on a relatively clean section of her pants—which wasn’t saying much at this point—and tried to process what had just happened, tried to reconcile the shaking, terrified woman who’d held that scalpel with the doctor who’d made those incisions.“You kept me calm.Without you?—”
“You would have been fine.You are stronger than you know.”
Meg’s gaze dropped to his leg.He’d been favoring it since he came back from the shaft, and now that the immediate crisis with Alex was over—now that she could think past the next incision, the next breath—she could see the way he was holding himself with his weight shifted almost entirely to his left side.The careful, controlled way he’d lowered himself to the ground.
“Let me see your leg.”The edge to her voice caught her off guard.But she needed something to do with her hands.Needed to keep the momentum going or she’d start shaking apart.
Noah blinked.“What?”
“Your leg.You’ve been favoring it since you got back.Let me look at it.”
“It’s fine.Just a bruise from when I got stuck in the shaft.”His tone was casual and dismissive.
She knew that voice.He’d used it when he’d insisted his back was fine last month, right before she’d found the pulled muscles he’d been hiding.
“Noah.”She held his gaze.“Please.”
Something in her voice must have convinced him—maybe the tremor she couldn’t quite hide, or the desperation to focus on something other than the blood still staining her hands.
He shifted and extended his leg toward her with obvious reluctance.Each movement was careful and measured.
“It’s really not that bad.”
