do that to Presley?” I ask, changing out of my soaked sweatshirt and into the one Avie hands me from behind his desk. “You knew how she felt about you.”
Crossing his arms over his chest, his expression shifts from big brother to one that’s guarded and indifferent. “That’s exactly why I did. I knew what it was like to be in her position. To want someone who didn’t want you.”
“Mal?”
His lips press into a flat line, and he nods. “So I gave Presley what I thought she wanted without regard to the consequences.”
“You always do,” I mumble, hating that he hurt my best friend, and me, and Mal. “You really fucked things up, Avie.”
He nods. “I know.”
I hate that I’m in the middle of all of this, a place I never wanted to be. I never wanted him to find me and see… what? A girl barely on her feet, living with the guilt that I’m living and she’s not?
And here I am, stuck in the past and now bound by lies.
Bailling - A fishing technique similar to chunking or chumming but practiced while adrift, tossing bait chunks into the water along with a baited hook to trigger a feeding frenzy.
“I swear to God, if my crew risked their lives for some kind of insurance fraud, I will see to it that you never fish again!”
He’s lying. The coast guard doesn’t have that kind of pull, but I can see why he’s threatening me. He doesn’t know that my idiot crew turned off the radio that should have notified us we were heading directly into a storm. How can he? He went from an air rescue to another, and then damn near ran himself out of gas just to save eight crew members. Four on my boat, four on another.
And while I can’t blame the captain of the crew for being pissed, I do let my temper get the better of my response. “Listen, you cocky son of a bitch—” I spin around on my heel, the sound of the roaring wind and the helicopter propellers drowning out the sharpness of my voice. Slapping my hand to his chest, I take hold of his uniform. “I’m 100 percent thankful you rescued me and my crew, but I lost my boat and maybe my fucking brother. We had a radio malfunction and didn’t hear the storm warnings!’
His face hardens. “We’ll see about that.”
I want to fucking kill him. I probably would if wasn’t for Nivio who grabs me by the hood on my jacket and yanks me back. “Whoa, I think we’ve pissed off enough people lately.”
There’s probably some truth to that.
They transport Bear to Anchorage, and though I need to be seen by a doctor, I don’t need the attention he does. I know he’s suffering from hypothermia, like the rest of us, but it’s more. His right pupil is blown completely, and he’s been unconscious for going on four hours.
Once I’m near a phone in Dutch Harbor, my first phone call is to my dad. “They’re airlifting Bear to Anchorage. He took a hard hit to his head and more than likely some broken ribs. He was at least awake, for a moment, and breathing on his own.” After the relief that we’re alive, he assures me that Atlas is okay.
“She knows.”
She knows? That I’m alive? Okay, that’s great. But then I think, no, that can’t be what he means. I hold the phone closer to my ear, covering my other with my cupped hand. “What?”
“About Athena.”
My heart drops. Fuck. Goddamn it. I can’t breathe for a minute. It literally feels like the air is ripped from my lungs. I hear my heartbeat in my ears, thumping wildly, but nothing else around me. It’s as if everything has been silenced. Eventually, I suck in air and gasp. I run my hands through my hair and pull tightly. I blame my dad. It’s not fair, but I do because he’s on the line, and if he hadn’t told me where she was, I wouldn’t have walked into that bar. Yeah, it’s on me, but I don’t want to believe that. Not when the one person beside Atlas who kept me alive in forty-degree water was seeing Journey. Thoughts of leaving her on the dock that day flash in my head. I should have told her then. “Why’d you have to push it? Why couldn’t you just let us go on without knowing?”
“I didn’t do it to hurt you, or her,”