Page 1 of One Last Chance

CHAPTER1

He was tired of the river winning.

Axel Mulligan crouched on the bank, the cold seeping into his bones despite the dry suit, shivered, and tried to read the foamy, lethal water. His entire body shook, his hands scraped and a little bloody, and he shut out the sound of a man keening behind him.

Grief. Horror. Regret. Guilt, maybe.

Axel got it. His jaw tightened. “Where are you, Cally?”

“She’s not . . . it’s not worth risking your life, buddy. Don’t be stupid.”

“Stupid might be my middle name. Just set up the rope.”

Axel glanced at his fellow kayaker, Sullivan Bowie, and the man walked away to set up the belay system. But the guy was right.

This could be epically stupid.

Mist rose over the river from the Glacier Veil falls, but she was out there, he could feel it?—

Okay, he couldn’t feel it. But he wanted it to be true.

Neededit to be true.

This river owed him.

The falls dropped thirty feet—not a terrible fall, but with enough force along the forty-foot edge to create a churning hole at the base, a swirling upstream boil, and frothy backwash that could swallow a kayaker, or in this case seventeen-year-old Calista Roberts, whole.

“You about ready on that belay system?” Axel got up and glanced over at Sully, who had unwound the line from one of their rope bags and secured it to a nearby tree. Sully wore his golden brown hair back, square jaw tight as he worked.

Axel glanced at the spray over the falls, toward the fading sunlight. It wouldn’t get completely dark, not this far into June in Alaska, but the shadows and the fact that time worked against them put a fist in his gut.

“I’m going to say it one more time. You sure this is a good idea?” Sully walked up and hooked a carabiner to the clip on the back of Axel’s life jacket. He’d stopped shivering, despite being soaked. But he’d been busy setting up a tent, then helping Axel rescue fifteen-year-old Adrienne, tucking her into a sleeping bag while Jude Remington tried to keep the girls’ father from going into shock. Jude kept talking to him, asking Guy—a lawyer from Georgia—how he’d ended up on this arm of the Copper River, kayaking with—in Axel’s opinion—his severely undertrained daughters . . .

This was why Air One Rescue never ran out of callouts.

“Not even a little,” Axel said. “According to Guy, Cally passed an advanced kayaking course last year and worked with the Copper River Rafting company last summer. She’s a good swimmer.”

“Even good swimmers drown,” said Sully, his voice lowered. He gave Axel a pointed look.

“I won’t drown. Listen, if I go in and don’t come up for four minutes, then get me out of there.”

“Four minutes?”

“I’d say five, but I’m cold.” He pointed to where water splashed against a granite wall near one side of the falls. “The water is pillowing there, but I think that could be an undercut. When I was a kid, we shot the falls, and the water was really low. I remember it being a cauldron there—it could easily be an undercut in these high waters.”

“You think she’s trapped in there?”

He lifted a shoulder, glanced at Jude, who was barely holding the girls’ father back from diving into the water.

The father looked almost ferocious with grief.

“I don’t know. But . . . be ready for anything. Do you think Levi has reached cell signal yet?”

“Probably. It’s been forty-five minutes.”

“It’ll take Air One at least twenty minutes to fly here from Sky King Ranch, so . . .”

“So we need to keep her alive if . . .” Sully looked at him. “Don’t die on me, Axe.”

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