Saturday, 2:04 p.m.
Dominic’s lower leg twisted unnaturally, pinned in the steel jaws of a bear trap. He groaned, nearly a growl.
“Fuuuuck.”
The trap was large, the pan that had triggered it nearly the size of a dinner plate, the steel thick and obviously heavy. The teeth looked sharper than they should’ve. Had the trap been modified? Was it a relic from a time when trappers meant to kill, not capture?
Leyna fell to her knees beside Dominic. She touched his forehead. He was pale, clammy, but conscious. “You okay?”
His attempt at a reassuring smile became a grimace. “Pretty fucking far from it, actually.” His chest heaved with his effort to talk. “We need to find Ellie.”
He shifted and his face contorted with fresh pain.
“We’ll find her, Dom.” Leyna hoped he missed the edge of panic in her voice. She leaned toward the trap. Springs jutted from either side of the circular pan. She struggled to compress them, but the springs wouldn’t give. Too stiff. She couldn’t manage alone.
“Are you able to help with this?”
“Yeah, I think I can just—” Dominic twisted to reach and instantly fell back to the ground with a new stream of curses.
Desperate to free him, Leyna followed the chain to where the trap was staked into the ground. She tugged until it jerked loose. A gesture that solved nothing.
Leyna knelt beside him again. His leg bulged above the ankle, crooked and bent. Obviously broken.
Dominic’s eyes swam in and out of focus. “How bad?”
Pretty fucking bad. “Not great.” Her hand fell gently to his sneaker, his foot already swelling around it. Should she remove it? Or were there bones and ligaments being held in place by the rubber and mesh? Was pressure being applied to an unseen wound, stanching the bleeding?
Or would Dominic lose his foot because she’d failed to remove a shoe that restricted blood flow?
Forcing her hand to stop shaking, Leyna touched the exposed skin near his ankle. “Can you feel that?”
Dominic shook his head. His brow beaded with sweat. The way the blood flowed from his leg, she wasn’t sure how much longer he would be alert.
The wound needed to be irrigated, right? The broken bone splinted. He needed pills for the pain. A transfusion of blood. He was losing so much of it.
Mouth drier than the summer wind, she noted that the metal was rusted. She flaked off bits of it. He might need a tetanus shot too.
But the threat of tetanus was nothing compared to the more certain danger of the approaching wildfire. How was she supposed to get him out of there?
Hands trembling, Leyna was afraid to touch Dominic. Afraid not to.
As someone who’d once spent a lot of time alone in the woods, she’d taken first aid classes, but it had been years, and she was far from that Red Cross training room. Of course she’d practiced making splints. It was why she’d taken the class. To make a splint, she needed something to keep the leg immobile.
Like a tree branch. Leyna desperately scanned the forest floor.
But even if she found the perfect stick, she had nothing to wrap his leg with. Could she use his shirt? Tear it into strips? Would using a tree branch and dirty T-shirt lead to infection? A warning from her instructor echoed in memory: Be careful not to introduce bacteria.
That was about all Leyna remembered. She hadn’t done particularly well in the class. If she’d missed two more questions on the written test, she would’ve had to retake the course.
On the ground, Dominic gasped as blood continued to seep into his pants.
“Hurts like a motherfucker.” He seemed dangerously close to passing out.
Please don’t pass out on me.
Leyna steadied her breathing and studied the damage more closely. Blood still flowed, but not as heavily as she’d thought. No major vessels had been damaged, apparently, so Dominic stood a chance, especially if she could get him to a hospital.
Dominic’s eyes opened to slits; his breathing grew labored.
“I’ll get you out of here.” She whispered the promise, afraid if she said it louder, it would sound like a lie.
“You need to go, Ley.” He struggled to speak each word. “Find her.”
“I’m not leaving you.”
She studied the trees, trying to find the main trail, but they’d stepped off it at some point. She didn’t know how close they were to the cabin—she’d been counting on Dominic to show her the way, and he wasn’t walking out of these woods. If she had a cart or a tarp to drag him… which was a ridiculous thought, because she didn’t have a cart or a tarp, just like she didn’t have bandages or a pocketful of painkillers.
Just like I can’t open the damn trap, she thought. Any splint will be useless if I can’t get him free.
Dominic grabbed her arm, but his grip was even weaker than his voice. “The fire—not safe. You can… come back… for me. After.”
“Not. Leaving. You.”
Leyna’s gaze darted around as she considered trying to move him, trap and all, out of sight of predators—animal or human. But unseen wasn’t the same as safe. Even had Leyna been able to drag him a few feet, the most she could manage, there was nowhere a predator couldn’t track him or the fire couldn’t reach him.
His eyes fluttered, and she thought she heard him whisper, Please. Or maybe it was his wheezing as he struggled to breathe. At least he was still conscious, but he was fading quickly.
Desperate, she checked her phone. No bars, and at least two minutes wasted while she’d always had only a single option. Help wasn’t in that forest. It was at Ridgepoint Ranch.
Leyna scanned his body, trying to pretend he was a felled tree and not a man. Not Dominic. Her Dominic. She watched his chest to make sure he still breathed, then quickly looked away.
Leyna stood up and ran, adrenaline coursing, grateful when the forest started to look familiar again.
Grace would’ve been proud of how she sprinted, clumsy but somehow remaining upright. When they’d come into the woods as kids, her sister would fly across the uneven forest floor, hopping over felled trees or inconvenient bushes, not once scuffing her Nikes. Leyna would labor behind her, sweating in her old track pants and sneakers and breathing like her lungs held water. Grace would laugh—Oh, Leyna—as if her younger sister’s lack of agility was a trick performed just for her. On these treks, Grace never slowed when Leyna fell behind, expecting she would catch up. Leyna had loved her for that, for thinking that she could. Until they’d grown apart, no one had believed in her as much as Grace had.
The belief weighed on Leyna, even as she fought to keep moving. As she ran toward home, she pretended Grace was with her, yelling over her shoulder for Leyna to catch up. She pictured Dominic, who for some reason believed in her too and had been caught in a trap because of it. His only hope was that she would get help fast enough.
Saving Dominic was her only hope too. Leyna wouldn’t lose him again.