“Everyone make it out alive?” he asked, managing to enquire about the first thing on his mind that didn’t directly involve Becca.
“Shut the fuck up, I’m trying to listen here.” The cold disk executed an evasive move from one spot to another.
“Just tell me, asshole.”
“Nobody died except you, fuck face. Lean forward.” With a helping hand, Jay bent at the waist. “Deep breath in.”
Whether or not his heart had stopped didn’t matter. He wanted to know about the rest of the team. “Injured?”
“Oh, for fuck’s sake, just breathe already.”
Jay inhaled a shit ton of oxygen in an effort to be a good patient and demanded, “Who?” on the exhale.
“Grant,” Jamie replied, shaking his head and slinging the stethoscope around his neck.
“How bad?”
“Bad enough.” He reached behind Jay’s head and grabbed the blood pressure cuff off the wall.
“How bad?” he repeated, studying Jamie’s face for a clue as he wrapped the bladder around the bicep of Jay’s uninjured arm.
“He’ll live.”
“Jesus fucking Christ, stop being an evasive dickhead and just tell me,” Jay growled, put out by the attempt to spare him the details.
“You want the truth, is that it?” Jamie spat, anger making his movements jerky as he squeezed the bulb until the cuff reached muscle-bruising pressure.
“I’ve been fucking asking for it, haven’t I?”
“Fine. After he jumped into the Bering Sea to save your sorry ass, he was rolled by an iceberg, knocked unconscious, and we lost him.”
“What do you mean you lost him?” His voice rising with his agitation, Jay’s frustration with his inability to go check on Grant for himself turned him into an even bigger asshole. “How do you lose someone attached to a rescue cable?”
“How do you think?” Jamie said, his angry tone matching Jay’s.
“Motherfucker!” Realization setting in, the weight of what had transpired crashed down on him. The magnitude of the risk Grant had taken to save Jay’s life sliced between his ribs and stabbed him straight in the heart. “Son of a bitch didn’t wait to be clipped in, did he?”
The words came out like venom, his voice shaking with a mixture of rage, fear, and disbelief. “I’m gonna fucking kill him!”
Jamie huffed. “Get in line.”
“So, how’d you get him back on board?”
“We didn’t.”
“What!”
“I told you. We lost him.”
“You left him there. By himself? What the fuck, Jamie!”
“We had to.”
“What do you mean, you had to?”
“Do the math,” Jamie growled. “We had two fucking choices, Jay. You—or him. No matter how much we wanted to, we couldn’t save you both. Hell, if we’d stayed to search, you’d probably both be dead. It was a shitty situation, and Chase made the right call.”
“So who? How?” Too affected to form complete sentences, Jay relied on Jamie to get his full meaning.
