Saylor gave her a tight smile. “But you did. Every minute for those three days.” She closed her eyes, took a breath, then straightened. “It’s about theVigilant.”
Zain shook his head. “You don’t have to tell us.”
“Yeah, I do.”
He blew out a rough breath. “Did it resemble that ship we boarded today? Because you’ve been off ever since we found you.”
“TheVigilantwas larger, broader, but close.”
Chase groaned. “Shit. We never considered you might have known some of the people who died. Which, of course, you did.”
“We both did, but…” She grunted, then stood, pacing to the other side of the room, thankful she didn’t face plant on the floor the second her feet hit the old hardwood planks. “It’s more than that.”
Zain followed her halfway across. Close but still far enough away she had space. “How so?”
She toed at the floor, trying to find the right words when Mac sighed.
Her friend joined her, taking one hand. “The stories aren’t completely correct. Not everyone died. There was one survivor.”
Saylor fought the rush of panic through her core, praying the flickering dots across her vision were from the boat chase and not the thought of everyone knowing the truth.
Zain closed the distance, stopping intimately close. “You. You were the only survivor.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
Zain stared at Saylor, all the pieces from today clicking into place. Why she’d been edgy on the ship. The voices and gunfire she’d thought she’d heard. How she’d paled when she’d looked at the guy’s face. Though, based on Mac’s account, there shouldn’t have been any gunfire.
He inched closer, wanting to tug her into his arms but aware she was too raw for that level of contact. “Do you want to tell us about it?”
She paled, not that her skin could get much whiter, but he noticed. “I would, but… I don’t remember anything. At least, nothing important.”
“In this kind of situation, any detail’s important.” He focused on Mackenzie. “It sounds like you found her.”
Mac glanced at Saylor, waiting until she nodded before sighing. “As soon as I got the call that they’d lost contact with the ship, I cashed in a bunch of markers and got myself assigned to the rescue team. I found her in a battered Zodiac three days later — bleeding withextreme hypothermia.”
Saylor closed her eyes as she wrapped her arms around her middle, looking as if she might fly apart at any moment. She sucked in a few shallow breaths, the harsh rasp like a knife against his skin. “I’d be dead if Mac hadn’t braved the weather to look for me.”
“All I did was fly the chopper. You survived in near impossible conditions.” Mac gave Saylor’s hand a squeeze. “I don’t know how you did it. How you held on that long. Kept that boat upright through storm after storm. I’ve never been so proud of you.”
Saylor retched a bit. “Yeah, well, not everyone saw it that way.”
“And they’re wrong.”
Chase cleared his throat. “You mentioned Saylor was bleeding. Was it a head injury?”
Mac pursed her lips. “She had a laceration on her temple from a fall, and a gunshot wound to her right shoulder blade.”
“What?” Zain glanced at his buddies then back at Mac. “How the hell does the Coast Guard chalk the incident up to a system failure if Saylor was shot?”
Mac held up one hand. “I know. I questioned it, too, but the whole ordeal skirted some controversial lines, and I think they did whatever was necessary to bury any hint that something sinister happened out there. Wrote it off as her having a bad encounteraftershe’d abandoned ship.”
Jordan shook her head. “Which translates into a top-secret research mission gone wrong, and them covering their asses.”
“Something like that. And honestly, I was just sodamn happy to have my best friend back alive that it wasn’t worth the fight.”
Chase shuffled over beside Zain. “You know that retrograde amnesia is common with that kind of trauma, right? That you could still regain your memory.”
Saylor huffed. “It’s been a year, and all I get are snippets. And nothing that gives any answers to what really happened on that ship.”
