TEN YEARS AGO…

Fire.

Scorching, licking flames.

Gusting balls of it shooting toward him…

Riley Ness jerked awake from the nightmare. Gasping. Then he realized two things. It wasn’t a nightmare—it was the fucked-up reality of his situation. And he was gasping because breathing was so goddamned hard.

The fire had been real. Just yesterday morning. When their school bus crashed, exploded into flames, and slid down a cliff somewhere in the Alps. The fire had driven him and his friends out of the bus in a hurry. Riley could still feel it licking at the back of his legs, superheating his jeans as he tried to squeeze through the broken window.

It was the last time he’d been warm. That’s what happened when your coats burned up inside a bus and Fate kicked you in the ass with a March snowstorm. Or maybe those things happened all the time here in Switzerland. Italy. Whatever side of the border they’d landed on. Riley didn’t know. He hated not knowing. Hated it worse than the smell the drill made when he got fillings. Which had always been his high bar of gross-smelling things.

Until the bus.

Until, along with the acrid stench of burning rubber and the chemical smell of gasoline, he’d noticed another smell, even worse, that had to be the gaggingly noxious scent of their driver burning up.

“Dude.” Josh Hardwick’s face hovered about an inch in front of him. Which wasn’t a pretty sight to wake up to at fucking all. Blood had dried in streaks down Josh’s forehead and cheeks from the gash on his head. The one they all figured might be a head injury, since Josh kept passing out. “You okay?”

Day two of no food. No phones, since they’d burned up along with the coats. No chance of rescue. “Um, yeah. Better than if Samantha Boyd just finished giving me a blow job right after I got an A on my physics midterm.”

“No need to be a douche-nozzle.” Josh stayed put, staring at him hard. “It’s just that you sound like my grandma’s cat when it tries to hack up a hairball.”

“Oh.” Guess that gasping-for-air thing sounded as painful as it felt. Riley put a hand on his broken ribs. Compression made it a little less painful to breathe. Like he was being stabbed with steak knives instead of with a chain saw. “Sorry. Didn’t mean to wake you up.”

“Pretty sure my headache did that. Or Griff’s snoring.” Finally, Josh rolled off to the side. Not too far, though. The two of them were tighter than a hot dog in a bun. And Griffin Montgomery and Knox Davies were tight in line behind them. It was the only way to keep warm in the cave overnight. But it’d damn well be filed under Things we never talk about again if they did get rescued.

“I’m not snoring,” Griff protested. He yawned and fisted his eyes. “You have to be asleep to snore. You can thank Ry for all the loud noises during the night. Sure you’re getting enough air with those two broken ribs?”

Not even close to sure. “Dunno. Do I look blue?”

Josh laughed. But not his dirty-joke laugh. The bitter one he used when he didn’t have time to finish a test because of what the teachers at Roosevelt Prep had just labeled as dyslexia. “Dude. We all look blue. Frostbite’s turning us into Smurfs.”

Riley laughed. Instantly regretted it. Pain stabbed through him. And when he grabbed for his ribs, the pain in his shoulder added a nice level of queasiness to the roiling agony. “I’m now sure that it’s three broken ribs. For all the difference it makes.”

“Yeah, but how great does your shoulder feel?” Griff asked with a smug smirk in his voice.

“The dislocated shoulder you shoved back into place against a rock wall like you were trying to knock ketchup out of a bottle?” Actually, it’d felt way better after Griffin popped it back into the socket. Not that he’d admit it. Tossing and turning on the ground all night didn’t do it any good, though. “It fucking hurts. If Logan had been here, he wouldn’t have let you do it.”

Logan Marsh. The five of them were as tight as could be. Blood brothers who did everything together. Including coming to Italy for the La Sfida Internazionale soccer tournament. After a week of nonstop semifinals and quarter-finals—all of which their Roosevelt Prep team won—the five of them had used their free day to take a bus across the Alps to ski. The ultimate European road trip for a bunch of high schoolers.

It’d been a day and night they’d always remember. But then Logan had scored with the hot signorina and not shown up when they were ready to leave the next morning. They’d joked about how much trouble he’d be in when Coach found out he missed the bus.

Guess the joke was on them.

Being injured, starved, frozen, and stranded was way worse than having to run ten extra laps during warm-ups.

Griffin pushed himself into a seated position. Sucked in a sharp breath that probably meant the movement jarred his knee injury, concussion, or both. “If Logan had been here, he would’ve knocked you out so you didn’t feel it. Then he’d have helped me fix you.”

“I wish he was here,” Knox said as he awkwardly wormed his way upright, one bloody bandage tied around his calf. “This almost-dying thing doesn’t feel right with just the four of us.”

There was enough predawn light coming into the cave for the others to see Griff thwack the back of his hand against Knox’s skinny chest. “Stop saying that.”

“What?”

“Almost dying.”

Knox held up one hand and ticked off points on his fingers. “Our bus flipped. We checked on the driver to discover he’d been impaled by a tree and his head was floppier than a Gummi Worm. Then the bus burst into flames. Even though we escaped—barely—we’ve got zero chance of rescue. And your plan of dragging our sorry, grievously wounded asses to safety has about a one-in-a-sextillion chance of working.”

“Sextillion. Ha!” Josh rubbed his hands together. “A math word with sex in it. I can get behind that.”

“There’s no sex in it, Hardwick. Just a one with twenty-one zeros after it. Geez. If you paid attention in math class instead of doodling triple-D boobs, you might know that.”

“I think I killed Santos.” The words rushed out before Riley could stop them. Not because he wanted to cut off the fun of watching Knox tease Josh. But because he’d been holding them—and his overwhelming guilt—in for almost twenty-four hours and couldn’t keep the words contained another second.

“Bullshit,” Griffin said flatly. “That tree killed Santos. The one that kebabed him. Or the broken neck from the whole flipping-down-a-mountainside thing.”

“Is this because we left him behind, in the bus? ’Cause we all agreed he was already dead. I’ll never forget the way he looked. All crooked and wrong and bloody.” Josh shuddered as his voice cracked. “Dude, he was sooo dead before the fire got him. I promise.”

They weren’t listening. “But it was my fault.” Riley tried to gulp in air. The more upset he got, the harder it got to breathe. “The whole crash. I killed Santos, and I’m the reason we’re gonna die here. I’m so sorry.”

He would not cry. Pussies cried. Bad enough he’d passed out yesterday when Griff popped his shoulder back into place. So Riley swallowed down the thickness stinging at his throat. And blinked super-fast. Aaand hoped the sun took its own sweet time coming up so nobody could see him too clearly.

Griff stood, wincing and cursing. Then he ducked, because the top of the cave was probably not even six feet, and they were all pushing that. Hunched over and looking pissed as fuck, he said, “First of all, we’re not going to die here. We’re going to find a way up to a road or a village or ride out on the back of the goddamned Abominable Snowman. Somehow, someway, we will make it back home.”

“If for no other reason than to give Logan shit about missing out on this adventure,” Josh added with a weak attempt at a grin. With the dried blood all over Josh’s face, Riley thought it made him look like a hungry zombie about to attack.

“Secondly, Ry, this is stupid,” Griff continued. “You’ve got to know you didn’t cause the crash. Sorry—the accident. Because that’s all it was. Santos wasn’t paying attention. He saw that animal in the road too late and swerved too hard. End of story.”

“He wasn’t paying attention because of me.” Riley’s empty stomach churned and knotted. “Because I asked him to tell that dirty joke about the goat and the soccer team. I knew better than to talk to him. My parents have told me over and over again never to distract someone who’s driving.”

Josh rolled his eyes. “Their whole no-talking-in-the-car thing is a pain in the ass. Makes for the most boring car pools ever.”

“Look, your parents have so many rules and regs that nobody could possibly remember them all.” Knox did a one-legged crab-walk thing to scoot over right next to Riley. “But that rule? It’s way over the top. Santos is used to having a full bus of screaming kids behind him, not just the four of us. He could handle telling a joke and driving at the same time.”

Carefully, Josh bumped elbows with him. “Besides, I was talking to Santos right before you were. It could’ve happened then.”

“You can’t let this eat at you.” Griffin fell back to the dirt and stuck his bad knee out to the side. Then he leaned forward on both hands. “We all feel like shit that he died. It sucks. But it was an accident. Period.”

Their words beat back a little bit of Riley’s roiling gut, though not anywhere close to all of it. But they were trying hard to lift his guilt, and he wouldn’t argue with them. Not now. “Even if you don’t believe I caused it, I was reckless. That can’t happen again.”

Josh hooted with laughter. “You’re the least reckless person I know, Ness. You still look left, right, and left again before crossing the street, like you’re five. Your nut-job parents put more pressure on you than a shaken-up bottle of soda. Hell, we had to force that pint of beer on you last night, you were so scared they’d find out. And kids in Europe start drinking beer as soon as they ditch their pacifiers.”

“Right. ’Cause you’re the great child-rearing expert.” Mocking Josh settled Riley with its normalcy. “Tell us more about the developmental stages of toddlers in European society.”

Last night they’d learned how to flip the bird Italian style. Josh did it now, putting his fist in his bent elbow. “I will. Right after I pull that giant stick out of your ass.”

“That’s another thing.” Riley pointed at the pile of twigs they’d heaped in the corner for their unsuccessful attempts at building a fire. “I’m of no use keeping us alive. Yeah, I learned in the Boy Scouts how to start a fire…with a flint. Which is useless out here.”

“Those twigs have been soaking in snow since October. An arsonist couldn’t get those things to light with gasoline and a flamethrower,” Griff protested.

Whatever. Because the list was way longer than the lack of a fire. They’d seen tracks in the snow, and didn’t know if they were from a wild animal that wanted them for dinner. Not that Riley even knew what sort of scary mountain cats there might be in the Alps.

Or which berries were safe to eat. Or whether you were supposed to drink your own pee or that was only in the desert. Or how long an animal could be dead before it was dangerous to eat—since they’d passed the carcass of a bird and were almost desperate enough to grab for the tiny drumsticks. Was a case of the Hershey squirts it might give them worth getting the energy to maybe help them hike another day?

Which was his whole point.

“I should’ve planned.” He banged his fist against the dirt in frustration, sending shock waves of pain through his chest. “I should’ve studied maps before we left so we’d know which direction would lead us to the road. I should’ve learned at least basic phrases in Italian, Swiss, German, and French to prepare for this trip.”

“We all learned how to ask where the bathroom is.” Josh shrugged. Maybe he thought it camouflaged his wince and the way he gingerly touched the giant bump on his head. Didn’t fool Riley one bit, though. The guy was in pain. Bad, if he was showing it. They all were. “That’s all you need.”

“I won’t be unprepared again,” Riley said. No, he vowed. He promised himself with a mental oath as solemn as the one that had bound him to Griff, Knox, Logan, and Josh that crazy night they’d slashed their palms and became blood brothers. “I won’t be reckless. If we get home—”

Griff cut him off. “When we get home.”

He squinted at Griff but kept going. “—I won’t take chances. I’ll study and plan and be ready for anything.”

Josh groaned. “Dude, if you’re already planning to get in another jam like this, for the love of all that is holy, count me out.”

Riley wasn’t listening. He was concentrating on his mission. Well, the one after they managed to survive. He’d be careful. He’d plan ahead. He’d learn everything he could about survival.

And he’d never be caught unprepared again.