Page 71

DELANEY

The freezing ocean hits me like a wall of ice. Saltwater floods my nose as gravity drags me down, and my arms claw and flail uselessly through the black.

I fight back to the surface and cry for help, but the ocean pours in, and my voice comes out choked. I spit water, sputter, and drag my head up again.

Above me the music and the laughter roll on without once falling into a lull, and not one person hears me.

I look up at Yelena on the deck. Her blue eyes shine down at me with cold malice beneath a curtain of pin-straight hair, and her mouth curves cryptically before she swings herself smoothly over the rail.

A wave rams into me and shoves me under, and I thrash my way back up, barely keeping my nose above the surface, coughing salt out of my throat while my heart hammers out a warning.

She jumped in after me, and I’m quaking with anger as much as with cold. I cannot understand why the crazy bitch would follow me into the sea, and the voice of reason in the back of my head doesn’t have the strength left to work it out.

I keep slapping the water and screaming for help until my throat is raw, my whole body running on nothing but the animal instinct to stay alive one more minute.

Yelena swims a few clean, composed strokes, then lets herself sink and comes up screaming, ready to put a spin on it for anyone watching. Her panic is a performance, a flawless one, and not real for one second.

I scream too, and Yelena gives me a run for my money, but the wind tears both our voices to pieces. The last red light dies on the horizon.

Once the sun is fully swallowed, the two of us will be dark spots no one can find.

I wave my trembling arm over my head, mouth agape, and call out one more time.

A woman finally spots us and shouts, her eyes saucer-wide with fear, and people crowd the rail, huddled shoulder to shoulder, and throw a life ring toward the water.

The ring drifts away from me on the swell, too far to reach, and my stomach turns to ice, my teeth chattering so hard that they ache in my skull.

Then the crowd parts, and Lev charges to the rail, his jaw set like granite and his steel-gray eyes raking the dark water.

“Over here, Lev!” I shout, relief flooding through me so hard it hurts. His gaze swings toward us so fast it looks like whiplash.

“Lena,” he shouts, all his composure gone, braced hard against the rail. Hope makes my nose sting and my knees tremble beneath the water.

He came for me. That euphoric thought alone keeps my arms moving. He vaults the rail and drops into the sea like a spear.

Just knowing he is swimming toward me, I find a pocket of air. I lift my arm as high as I can manage.

A wave pushes me under, and I claw back up. Lev is close now, his weathered face drawn tight, his eyes full of a fear I have never once seen on him.

I reach for him, rapt with relief. Our fingertips are barely a foot apart, and the knot in my chest begins to come loose.

Then he swims straight past me. The current off his stroke slaps my face, and my hand closes on nothing but cold water, and something inside me collapses in a soundless implosion.

“Lena,” he calls again, his voice cracking, without slowing, without once looking at me.

My ears ring as it finally lands on me. The two names, Delaney and Yelena, sit almost on top of each other. I have wondered it before, alone in the small hours, and talked myself out of it every time. Now it comes back in a torrent. I never let myself believe it until this exact moment in the freezing dark.

The hope holding me up, the last warm scrap of faith I have in him, turns into a blade under my ribs.

I try to tell myself that he could not see me clearly out here, that the confusion was a distraction, but he could. He was close enough for me to count the beads of water clinging to his eyelashes, close enough to reach, and he chose not to stop for me.

The air squeezes out of my lungs, but I refuse to let myself sink. Milo is at home right now, waiting for me to walk through the door and make his dinner and yell at him about his homework. He has already lost two parents. He is not losing me too, not out here, not at the hands of a spiteful madwoman. I kick, hard, for the surface, and my legs feel like they belong to someone else.

Lev reaches Yelena, and she goes limp the instant he touches her, the same woman, an aficionado of theatrics, who was slapping the water a moment ago. Her face falls against his shoulder.

He taps her cheek, panic in his voice, as the crew lower a platform to the waterline.

He pushes her up onto it and hauls himself up after her, farther and farther away from me.