Page 88 of Presumed Dead

And Sloane, who had been writing Doyle Pruitt into a notebook for four years, who had felt the whole marina prickling in one direction for two days, who had a man in her life right now who wouldn't tell her what was tightening but had promised her it was almost here, felt all of it arrive at once, in her body before her mind had it, the cold climbing her arms, the clipboard suddenly stupid in her hand.

She didn't look toward slip nine. That was the thing she would be proud of later, that even with her heart racing, she did not turn her head and give him the line of sight, did not hand this stranger the direction of the thing he was hunting. She kept her eyes on him and kept her face an inch from ordinary and said, “Doyle? Haven't seen him this morning. He keeps his own hours. You want me to leave word at the office?”

It was a good lie. It was four years of careful poured into eight words, and it was the right move, and it would have worked on almost anyone. But the man wasn't listening to her words. He was reading the same thing off her that she was trying to keep off her face, and she watched his eyes change, watched the pleasant nothing go out of them and leave just the deciding, and she understood in the half-second before he moved that she'd given herself away not in what she'd said but in the fact that she'd been careful saying it, that an ordinary marina hand would have just pointed.

“Huh,” he said softly. “You know him better than that.”

He came off the boat fast.

She got one step toward the land end of the fuel dock before he had her, and the speed of him was the thing that undid her plans, because she'd thought, in the quarter-second she'd had to think, that she could get up the dock and onto the boardwalk where there were buildings and a road and the ordinary world, and she was fast and she knew the dock and she got exactly one stride into the attempt before a hand closed on the back of her jacket and hauled her off her feet.

The clipboard went into the water. She heard it hit. She got an elbow back and felt it land on something and heard him grunt and felt the grip not loosen at all, and then he had an arm across her chest and her back against the front of him and he was walking her backward toward the boat with her heels dragging and skipping on the planking, and she fought it the whole way, she would remember that, she did not go quietly, she drove her heel down at his instep and threw her weight sideways to foul his footing and clawed at the arm across her, and none of it mattered, because he was bigger and trained and entirely calm in a way her panic couldn't get under, and the calm was the most frightening thing she had ever felt against her back.

“Stop,” he said in her ear, not even hard, just instructional. “You'll hurt yourself and it won't change anything. Step down into the boat.”

“Let go of me⁠—”

She got it out loud, most of it, before his hand came over her mouth, and the world narrowed down to the things her body could still do, which were few, and getting fewer as he walked her the last feet to the gunwale. She saw the marina from the fuel dock the way she'd seen it ten thousand times, the basin, the piers, the office, all of it gone strange and tilted and very far away, and she saw, at the far end of it, small with distance, a man running flat-out along the boardwalk toward her, and even at that distance, even upside down in her panic, she knew the run. She knew the shape of him. Ethan.

Something happened in her chest that had no business happening in the middle of being dragged onto a stranger's boat, which was that the sight of him running toward her steadied her. Not saved her. He was too far. She could see he was too far, the same way she could read a closing distance on the water and know a boat wouldn't make a mark before the tide turned. But the running told her something her panic had been about to lose, which was that this was the day, this was the thing that had been tightening, this was the shape it had taken, and Ethan was inside it, which meant it was not random, which meant there were people who knew, which meant if she could stay alive and stay in the world for the next few minutes she was not as alone on this dock as the man's calm arm wanted her to believe.

So she made herself do the hardest thing, which was to stop wasting her strength on the arm she couldn't move and start watching for the thing she could use. She let her body go a degree less rigid, not limp, just less, enough that he read it as the fight going out of her, and she felt his grip make the small adjustment a man's grip made when he believed the worst of it was over, and she filed that, the way she filed everything, and she kept her eyes on the running man at the end of the marina and she waited.

Ethan hit the head of Pier One at a sprint with his lungs tearing and the whole length of the fuel dock still ahead of him, and he saw her go down into the boat.

He saw the man put her over the gunwale and down into the cockpit with one arm still locked across her and the other reaching back for the throttle, and Ethan was close enough now to see her face, close enough to see that she was fighting smart instead of wild, close enough to see her find him with her eyes across the last hundred feet and hold on him, and he would carry the look she gave him for the rest of his life, because it was not the look of a woman being saved. It was the look of a woman telling him she was still in there, still working, still hers, and asking him with everything she had to come and get her.

“Hold on,” he said, and it came out of him toward her across a hundred feet of dock she couldn't have heard it over, and he meant it for her anyway. “Sloane. Hold on.”

The center-console's engine came up from an idle to a roar, and the man swung the wheel and put the throttle down, and the boat dug its stern into the green water of the basin and came around hard toward the channel mouth, and the bow lifted, and it was moving, really moving now, a fast hull under a man who knew exactly what he was doing with it, and the last clear thing Ethan saw before the spray came up was Sloane's hand on the gunwale, white-knuckled, the same grip she'd had on the pylon the night he'd first kissed her, holding onto a boat that was taking her away from him at thirty knots.

He reached the end of the fuel dock four seconds after the boat cleared it, and stood at the very lip of it with the wake still slapping the pilings and the gray hull already small and getting smaller against the brightening Gulf, and for one second, one only, the whole of him wanted to go in the water after a boat no swimmer would ever catch.

He didn't. The operator caught the man by the collar and hauled him back from the edge, because going in the water was the grief talking and the grief would drown her as surely as it drowned him, and the only version of the next ten minutes where Sloane Mercer came home was the version where Ethan Vale was the coldest, fastest, most useful he had ever been in his life.

“Caleb,” he said, and his voice came out flat and terrible and entirely level, the second man fully in the chair now, the only man who could get her back. “He's got her. Gray center-console, single outboard, making for the channel mouth, northbound the second he clears it. I need the Coast Guard asset off its hold, and I need it now, and I need my boat under me in the next sixty seconds.” He was already moving back down the dock, back toward the basin, back toward the only fast hull on the property that he had a key to. “And get me Ronan. Tell him it's gone to water. Tell him I'm going after her.”

Chapter Twenty-Two

Ethan had the Sundancer's lines off and the diesels turning before the man who took Sloane’s wake had finished slapping the pilings, and he knew, even as he did it, that the boat under him could not win a straight race against the thing taking Sloane away.

The center-console was lighter and faster and already up on plane and gone, a gray smear making for the channel mouth, and the Sea Ray was a forty-two-foot cruiser that wallowed before she gathered, a boat built for comfort and not for this, and any man who put her stern-to and tried to run the lighter boat down would watch it shrink to a dot and lose it past the markers. Sloane had read that herself from inside the man's arms. A boat wouldn't make a mark before the tide turned.

So Ethan didn't chase. He stood at the helm with the throttles in his hand and did the only thing his training had bought him that the cleaner didn't have, which was that he knew where the man had to go and what the bottom was going to do to him when he got there.

“Caleb. He can't run the main channel straight out.” Ethan brought the bow around, not toward the channel mouth where the cleaner was headed, but across the basin on a hard diagonal toward the north shore, away from the obvious line. “The channel doglegs east around the Spit Marsh shoal before it opens to the Gulf. Eleven hundred yards out, it necks down to forty feet wide between the markers and a sandbar, and it's a dead-low tide, and a stranger running it at speed in a strange boat either slows down hard or he puts that outboard into the bar and stops dead. He doesn't know that. I do.”

“You're cutting the dogleg,” Caleb said, getting it.

“There's a flat behind the Spit Marsh shoal the locals run at half tide if they draw under four feet. The Sea Ray draws three-eight. I can take her across the back of the shoal while he runs the long way around it, and I come out at the neck the same time he does, except I come out ahead and on his inside.” Ethan pushed the throttles to the stops, and the Sundancer dug in and came up heavy and determined, not fast but committed, pointed at a stretch of pale green water that any sane captain avoided. “If I read the bottom wrong, I put us both on the shoal and lose her for good. If I read it right, I'm waiting at the neck when he gets there.”

“Coast Guard's twelve minutes out now,” Caleb said. “They can't be the catch. You know that.”

“I know. They're the back door. I'm the catch.” The shoal water came up under the bow, paling from green to the milky tan that meant the bottom was close, and Ethan put one hand flat on the throttle and the other on the wheel and ran a forty-two-foot boat across a flat he had no business taking at speed, reading the water with the eyes that were trained on this coast had taught him, the subtle darkening that meant a foot more under the keel, the streak of turtle grass that meant a foot less, threading a boat between the bottom and the disaster on instinct sharpened to the edge a man only found when the only other option was watching a woman disappear.

The depth alarm started screaming. He turned it off without looking and kept reading the water with his eyes, because the alarm only knew numbers and he knew this flat, and he held the boat in the thread of slightly darker green that ran across the back of the shoal like a seam, and the Sundancer skated across water that should have stopped her, and on the far side the bottom dropped away into the channel neck, and Ethan brought her around hard into the forty-foot gap between the markers and the bar exactly as a gray center-console came around the long way at speed and found a forty-two-foot wall of fiberglass already sitting in the only road to the Gulf.

Sloane had spent the run learning the man the way she'd spent years learning her docks, because learning a thing was the only power she had left, and she was not going to waste it being afraid.