E L A R A

The words hammer through my skull as I wedge my body into the crack of stone. Fuel fumes sting my throat, salt burns my lips, and the cave presses tighter with every inch I force myself forward. Phosphorescent specks cling to wet rock like a broken constellation, flickering each time Adrian’s headlamp beam cuts past me.

“Stay clipped,” he says, voice steady, commanding, close enough that I feel it in my spine. His palm rides the small of my back, not tender, not possessive, just there. A tether.

The crack is razor-thin, edges sharp as broken glass. I exhale until my ribs shrink and angle sideways. My stethoscope knocks against the wall; I catch it, shove it tight against my chest. Every breath is rationed: in, slide, out, slide. The stone scrapes my jacket, smearing streaks of ghost-light across my arm.

The tunnel dips without warning. My boot skids on algae-slick rock. One instant of weightlessness, my stomach drops, my spine pitches and then the harness snaps tight.

I slam backward into a wall of heat and muscle.

Adrian’s fist is wrapped in my webbing; his other arm bands around my waist, yanking me flush to him. My knees hit stone, the breath knocked out of me, his chest a drum at my spine.

“Got you,” he grits in my ear. The headlamp beam jerks wildly across the jagged ceiling as another surge of water hisses over our shins.

For one breathless heartbeat, the cave disappears. It’s only him, braced solid behind me, holding me like he’s the only thing standing between me and the dark. His heat seeps through soaked layers, his breath rasps against my temple.

“Don’t move,” he orders, low, absolute.

It shouldn’t soothe me. It does. I hate that it does.

“I’m fine,” I lie, palms braced on stone to hide the tremor. He doesn’t believe me. I feel it in the way he tightens the tether another notch, surgeon-steady, as if he’s tying off a tourniquet.

“You’re shaking,” he murmurs.

“Adrenaline,” I snap back, forcing air into my lungs. “And common sense. Now let go so I can do my job.”

A pause. His arm loosens, but his fist stays in my harness, promising and warning both. “Proceed.”

The crawlspace widens, enough to drop onto my knees. My gloves slap cold rock slick with algae, and the deckhand’s moan threads through the dark, thin, wet, fading.

“There,” I whisper, angling Adrian’s light with a jab of my chin. The beam cuts forward and lands on a boot, then a shin slick with blood. Crimson ribbons unspool into the black water like dye.

I’m moving before I can think. My bag thuds against my hip, hands already stripping it open. “Pressure bandage. Now.”

Adrian angles the lamp down without hesitation, his grip surgeon-steady. The glow steadies over the wound as if we’re back in an OR instead of a cave that wants us dead.

“Femoral nick,” I mutter, voice gone flat with clinic focus. “Still bleeding. We control it or he bleeds out here.”

The deckhand groans again, breath ragged. I slap a pad hard against his thigh, both hands locking over it. Warm blood soaks my gloves instantly, slick and hot against my palms. The copper tang rises through the diesel fumes, choking me, dragging me back to too many ER bays in New York, to the night Nathan ignored my warning signs and let a patient slip away.

Not this time. Not here.

“Talk to me,” I ordered him. “Pain scale, one to ten.”

His answer is a strangled noise, but noise means he’s conscious. I press harder. “Good. Stay awake. You hear me? Stay with me.”

“Quinn.” Adrian’s voice is low, pitched to cut through the roar of tide. He holds the lamp steady while his other hand braces the man’s shoulder, pinning him from thrashing. His focus is absolute, jaw tight, eyes like steel even in the flickering light.

“Scissors,” I bark.

“Here.” He passes them into my hand instantly, blade already open, as if he anticipated me. Not fumbling, not slow. Smooth, precise, like he’s scrubbed in beside me a hundred times. The steadiness shouldn’t move me, but it does.

I slice trouser fabric, peel it back, and wince. The gash is ugly, deep, jagged, flesh ripped open by rock or shrapnel from the skiff. Blood pulses around my pressure, insistent.

“Hold light right there.”

He does. No shake. No sway. Just a cone of clarity in the dark.

I layer a compression bandage, winding tight. My gloves slip in blood, but I force the wrap firmer. Nathan would have called me too soft handed, too emotional. Adrian doesn’t say a word, he just angles the light exactly where I need it, like he trusts I’ll get it done.

“Bleeding’s slowing,” I breathe, knotting the wrap.

“Tell me what you need, Doctor,” Adrian says, voice even but carrying a weight that cuts through the cave.

The words throw me for half a second. A Valcrosse heir, giving me control? My chest tightens, but I don’t falter.

“Check the radial pulse.”

He obeys without pause, two fingers pressed to the man’s wrist. “Faint. Present.”

Good. Alive. For now.

I lean close to the deckhand’s face, watching his pupils with my own lamp. “You’re going to make it. Listen to my voice. Count breaths with me. In through your nose, out through your mouth.” I guide him, firm and relentless. His eyelids flutter, then track. A weak inhale. A slower exhale. It’s enough to keep him tethered.

When I sit back on my heels, I realize my thighs are trembling with effort. Adrian shifts the lamp a fraction, giving me better light without a word. My gloves drip red into black water, but my patient is still breathing. My vow holds. Not another life lost to arrogance. Not while I’m here.

“Flawless,” Adrian murmurs.

The word is quiet, almost lost under the hiss of tide, but it lands hotter than it should. My head jerks toward him. His lamp beam catches the sharp line of his jaw, the focus in his eyes.

“Perfect under hell conditions,” he adds, steady, unblinking. “You saved him.”

The words lodge low in my chest. They shouldn’t matter, I’ve had praise before, from mentors, from patients’ families. This is different. This is him, the man who infuriates me, who sneers at compassion, who weaponizes control. And hearing him say I saved someone burns hotter than the phosphorescent glow bleeding across the walls.

Nathan had never once said those words. He’d called me weak for caring, soft for crying with families, foolish for refusing to accept the “inevitable.” His arrogance killed a man. Adrian’s steadiness just kept one alive.

And that contrast sears me worse than salt in an open cut.

I force my voice flat. “I did my job.”

His mouth tilts, not quite a smile, but close enough that it’s dangerous. “You did more.”

Heat floods my cheeks, treacherous, and I look away fast, focusing on the deckhand’s pulse, on the crawlspace ahead, on anything but the way my skin hums under his words.

“Don’t,” I snap, harsher than I mean. “Don’t make this about me.”

“Not about you,” he counters softly. “About him. And the fact he’s still breathing because of you.”

I grit my teeth, hating the way it coils inside me, validation, warmth, want. I am not weak for needing it. I am not.

The deckhand moans again, dragging me back to protocol. I hitch my bag higher and lean forward into the narrow crawl ahead. “Help me drag him. We need to move before the tide decides to come back.”

Behind me, Adrian shifts into position, lamp still steady, his presence radiating like a second pulse at my back. The words he spoke won’t leave me, even as I force my body into motion.

You saved him.

God help me, it feels like fire.

We brace the deckhand between us, Adrian lifting most of the weight, me guiding the crawl. The chamber funnels into a tighter passage, rock scraping our shoulders, water swirling black at our knees. Every drag forward is a battle against stone and tide.

“Head down,” Adrian warns, ducking with the man’s bulk slung under his arm. I mirror him, dragging my kit with one hand, keeping the patient’s airway clear with the other. My back screams, but stopping isn’t an option.

“Almost there,” I pant. The crawlspace curves toward a faint gleam of phosphorescence ahead. An exit, relief sparks in my chest.

Then the tide roars.

The sound hits first, a freight train in the dark, building fast. I whip my head around, lamp beam cutting across Adrian’s face. His jaw is granite, eyes narrowed against the echoing surge.

“Move,” he snaps.

We lunge forward, dragging the deckhand with every ounce of strength left, knees shredding against stone, water slapping higher and higher. A spray of salt blasts over my cheek, bitter and cold.

The roar peaks, then slams into us.

A wall of black water floods the tunnel, knocking me sideways. My grip slips on the bandage, the kit, the man, but Adrian’s fist clamps my harness again, iron-strong, anchoring me even as the tide claws at us.

I twist back just in time to see it.

The fissure we crawled through, the crack that led us here, vanishes under the surge. Water pounds it shut, a living wall of fury.

Our only way out is gone.