TEN YEARS AGO…
Logan Marsh, although basically a grown-up at almost seventeen, missed his friends like crazy. Which seemed embarrassing. Like something that only a much younger kid might cop to feeling. But since Logan’s best friends were all missing in a March snowstorm in the Italian Alps and possibly dead, he figured it was okay to give in and admit how badly he missed them.
No. Logan jammed his gloved hands into his pockets and kept hiking forward. He couldn’t give in to worry. Logan had to save them. Because everyone else seemed to have given up on this whole rescue.
Coach Robertson, who’d brought them along with the rest of their team to Italy for the international soccer tournament; the president of La Sfida Internazionale; the representative from the American consulate—they all fell into the camp of assuming the worst. Insisting that because it was the third day since his friends and their bus driver had disappeared someplace between San Moritz and Verona, they couldn’t have survived the elements and/or their probable injuries.
Bunch of freaking quitters.
No way were the guys dead. Mad at him for scoring a night between the sheets with the bellissima Francesca, sure. Super mad that he’d overslept and missed the bus to take them back to the dorms after their free day of skiing. But no way were they mad enough to give up and die. Huh-uh.
Griffin and Riley were on track to be Eagle Scouts. They knew all sorts of survival junk. Knox was a certified genius. He was probably working on a way to tune in Wi-Fi with his glasses and a twig. And the constant stream of dirty jokes from Josh had to be giving them motivation to keep walking.
They were still alive. Period.
“Arresto,” barked the guy at the front of their formation. Well, the formation of the Sesto Reggimento Alpini. Logan just trailed along at the back. His coming along wasn’t exactly official. Since when he insisted on helping rescue his friends, everyone said no. So he’d left a note for the coach and sneaked onto one of the regiment’s trucks.
Turned out the Italians were way cooler than expected when they found him a few hours later. Unlike the Americans, they thought it was not only brave but right that he help to look for his friends. They didn’t treat him like a kid once they saw he could keep up.
Most of them, however, spoke only basic English, so after three days, Logan was desperate to talk to someone. Which brought him right back around to missing the guys. How much he couldn’t imagine life back home in D.C. without them. And even that flash of a thought twisted his stomach into a solid knot of fear.
He jogged forward to the tenente, which he figured equaled an American lieutenant. “Why’d we stop?”
The tall man pushed up his aviator shades. “Here is Chete. Almost to Svizzera.”
He recognized a name from the jersey of one of the other teams in the tournament. “You mean the border? To Switzerland?”
“Si.”
Logan still didn’t get it. And this was the man with the best command of English. “So what?”
The tenente’s helmet, parka, and snow pants were all white. The only thing that broke color were his boots. He used one to draw a line in the snow. Tapped on one side of it, then the other. “We look on our side. They look on their side.”
No. Nonononono. Logan shook his head, not believing this bureaucratic bullshit. “You mean you want to stop searching because of a fucking line on a map?”
“Rules.” Then a super Italian shrug. “They will come tomorrow.”
Fuck that. Logan looked up at the sky. The sun was already hovering way too close to all those snow-covered peaks. It’d set soon. Then his friends would spend another night shivering God knows where. Probably without any food.
Logan grabbed a satellite radio off the belt hook of the tenente. “I’m an American. We make our own rules.”
As he stalked off, he realized that what sounded cocky and heroic in his head probably came out as douchey. And that he had no supplies without the Regimenti. Or transportation. But he sure as hell wasn’t stopping before the sun set.
“Signore Marsh, wait.”
Logan cut down the hill, each step squishing through about four inches of fresh powder. They’d done this so many times his thighs were screaming. Leave the main road, hike down a couple hundred feet, look for signs of a crash that were probably obscured by the fresh snow, hike back up, and do it all again. “No,” he said over his shoulder. “We’re not actually at the border yet, right?”
“Si.”
“Then let’s keep going. If your GPS tells you we’re about to hit it and start an international incident, then I’ll keep going alone.” It gave him equal parts satisfaction and relief to hear several sets of boots crunching through the snow behind him down the ridge.
“No alone,” the tenente insisted.
Logan kept slip-sliding down the hillside. Because they were running out of daylight, he’d be able to push this only so far. So he let out all of his frustration and fear as he yelled, “One person can make a difference between life and death. That’s all it takes. One goddamn person. One person not giving up. One person giving his all.”
Because if this ended badly? Logan gritted his teeth together so hard that every step made his jaws ache. If they couldn’t find the guys in time? It sure as hell wouldn’t be because he gave up. It wouldn’t be because he got tired and wanted to take a load off.
Bad enough that he’d missed getting on the bus with all of them. Maybe, just maybe, if he’d been where he belonged—with them, like always—he could’ve prevented whatever happened. That guilt snaked under his skin like a live wire, stinging at him constantly. What if this was all his fault? For ignoring his friends, not to mention the rules, and following his dick instead?
So, no, Logan wouldn’t stop. Not today. Not tomorrow. Not until he found Griffin and Riley and Knox and Josh.
“Signore, no go there.”
At the warning from the tenente, Logan looked down. Yeah, there was another small cliff edge about one step in front of him. But not a chasm or anything epic like that. Just an overhang of about five feet. He could belly over it and drop to the next ledge. Instead of wasting time arguing, Logan just hit the ground.
What he hadn’t figured on was the snow. Cold. Wet. More slippery than Tina Flaherty wielding a sponge in a bikini at the cheerleaders’ last car wash. Logan clawed his gloved fingers at the edge. But he might as well have been trying to hang on to air…which was all he was doing a second later.
Logan felt pretty good about swallowing the startled yelp that almost escaped from his throat. Then he hit the ground. And that damned yelp escaped as something snapped when he landed on his wrist. He wasn’t sure which sound was worse—the unnatural crack of his own bone breaking in half, or the high near-squeal he let out.
Didn’t matter. He didn’t need his arm to keep walking. To keep looking. To not give up. They all probably had injuries from exposure by now. Hell, Knox was a skeleton of a nerd—no muscle to absorb the hit of any injury. No doubt he was a walking scab, if he could walk at all.
So Logan took off his scarf, wrapped it around his neck, and tied a knot with one hand and his teeth. Then he slid his arm into the half-assed sling. Getting up took a couple of tries. Hearing the shouts from the Regimenti above just hustled him along. And it gave him an idea. The fall put him on a level they hadn’t gotten to before. A different path, too. He’d stopped yelling at the end of day one of the search. But now? Nearing the end of day three? He’d damn well start again.
“Griff!”
Nothing but the crunch of snow underfoot. Oh, and the harsh whistle of his breath as each step jostled the pieces of his wrist. If he thought about it—which he refused to do—he’d probably hear the Italians gaining on him. If they saw he was injured, it’d be game over.
Logan picked up the pace. Started a careful jog, making sure to hug the icy wall of the mountain. If he went over this ledge, nothing would break his fall for at least two hundred feet.
“Knox!”
Nothing.
“Josh!”
The sound didn’t seem to go far. Maybe all the snow sucked it up? If Knox were here, he’d know the long and boring scientific explanation. Logan wasn’t good at science. He was good at doing things, not thinking about them. That was why the five of them worked so well as friends. Everyone was good at something. Everyone sucked at something. It all balanced—stuff to celebrate, stuff to talk trash about.
Maybe it was the single-syllable names. There had to be something he could do that was louder, longer….
They’d all been forced to do a dance with the cheerleaders at the pep rally that sent the team off to Italy. It was the only thing that sprang to mind. He gulped in some frigid air. Coughed at the stab of it to his lungs. And kept moving forward as he started singing as loud as he could in halting phrases:“I’m bringing sexy back.”
Logan paused to spit out a string of curses. Fuck a cocksucking duck sideways. Breaking a bone hurt. On the plus side, maybe the cast would get him extra sympathy of the topless variety when he got back home. When they got back home.
Faintly, barely more than a whisper, another voice came through the mountain pass.
“Them other boys don’t know how to act.”
Holy shit. What were the chances some random Italian Justin Timberlake fan was wandering through the dregs of a snowstorm and could pick up the lyrics in the right place? About a kajillionty to one. Logan stopped. Squinted down, left. Saw a smudge of something against all the bright whiteness of the snow. Dark hair? Knox or Riley?
He whipped into a full-out run. Remembered that he had only one good hand. So he stopped, braced the radio in the crook of his arm, and dialed up the regimenti. When someone answered, Logan ignored the fast stream of mixed Italian and English that called him a reckless idiot.
“Tenente. I found them. Get men, get helicopters. Come down to the ridge I fell onto, then turn left and go…maybe five hundred feet? I dunno. Go left until you see me. Hurry!” Then he broke into a run again.
“Roosevelt Prep, Roosevelt Prep, we’re gonna beat those Tigers, you bet.” Fight songs were easier to spit out than full-on Timberlake lyrics. Especially when his throat was clogged with adrenaline and emotion. Sure enough, he got a response.
“We run and score, then score some more.” The voice was closer. Not stronger, but closer. Close enough that Logan would put money on it belonging to Griffin. He was alive. As Logan negotiated the switchback and his friends came into view, he realized they were all alive.
They were filthy. Lots of streaks of blood and something darker were on their clothes. Well, their shirts and pants. Not a single one of them had on a coat. Knox leaned on a thick branch and had a makeshift bandage tied around his leg. His glasses were missing, too, which had to be driving the nerd nuts. Josh looked like a Halloween monster, with blood caking his blond hair and down his neck. Ry was on the ground, back to the cliff, looking paler than the damn snow.
Griff braced himself on a matching branch to Knox’s. But he tossed it aside when he saw Logan. He managed to take only one limping step forward. It was enough.
Logan flew at him, throwing his arm around his shoulders the same way they did at the beginning and end of every soccer game. Knox glommed on, too. They fell to the ground, Josh throwing his arm around Logan’s other side and pulling Riley over to join the huddle of gasping, relieved laughter.
Finally, Logan asked the burning question. “What the hell happened to you guys?”
Josh shrugged. “Oh, we got mad that you scored with that girl in San Moritz. Decided to leave you behind and make you feel bad.”
Yeah, if that were true, they wouldn’t all look like victims from Shaun of the Dead. “How’d that work out for you?”
“Shitty,” Riley said.
That sounded more on point. “What really happened?”
Griffin gave him the weakest punch on the arm ever. “I’m guessing you overslept—or overfucked that signorina—and missed the bus.”
Why wouldn’t they answer the question? “Yeah. My dad’ll have a shitfit when he sees the taxi bill for getting my ass back to Verona.” Logan had to press again. He had to know. “But what really happened to all of you?”
There was a heavy moment of silence. None of them would look at him. God, how bad was it? They never held back secrets from one another. They didn’t go on endlessly about stuff the way girls did. But the bad parental situations of Griff and Logan, the pressure on Riley, Knox’s near-poverty, and Josh’s dyslexia—they all shared their shitty stuff.
“Our bus crashed, slid down the mountain, burst into flames.” Knox slapped his bare arms. “Burned up with all our coats in it. We barely made it out.”
“Santos…um…didn’t,” Josh added.
“Shit,” Logan swore softly. He’d liked their driver. Santos was the first person he actually knew who’d died. But he couldn’t think about that now. Logan pulled off his parka and handed it to Knox. “Sorry I don’t have extras to go around.”
“Some rescue.” Ry wheezed out the words, like he had some broken ribs. But then he squinched his eyes shut for a second, like he was trying not to cry. “I can’t believe you found us, Logan. I don’t even know how you did it, but thank you.”
“Please. I’d never abandon you guys.” They said that all the time. Tossed it off lightly when turning down one party invite to go to a different one with everyone else. To skip out on a date with a not-very-hot girl to hang at Griff’s house instead. These past three days, though, gave the statement about a zillion times more meaning.
“You did bring help, right? Maybe adults? With blankets and food and hopefully the good drugs?”
“A whole freaking regiment. They should be rounding that curve any second.” He plucked the radio from where he’d slid it into his sling and winced as he waved it.
“What’s going on there?” Knox pointed at the sling. “You trying to horn in on all the sympathy booty coming our way once we get home?”
“Oh, I think I broke it.” Of course, looking at his barely alive friends, a broken wrist didn’t seem worth talking about.
“You think?” Griffin’s eyes bugged out. “You mean it just happened?”
“Yeah. I came down a ledge the wrong way. Going too fast, trying to keep the Italians from making me quit searching for the night.”
“You broke your wrist rescuing us? And then kept going, anyway? Man, if I had a radio and a parka, I’d just sit my ass down and wait for a stretcher.”
“If it were just me, I would’ve. I kept going for you. For all of you. Because I couldn’t live with the thought of losing you guys without giving it my all.” And Logan vowed, right then and there, that he’d always remember this moment. That he’d never forget how a single person was all it took to save lives.
“We kept going ’cause we couldn’t live with the thought of you having an unobstructed shot at taking Melissa Jankowski to prom.” But Josh had Logan’s good arm in a death grip as he teased, and his eyes were wet. They were just kids. They didn’t know how to say all the important stuff about life and death to one another. It was enough that they were together.