Chapter 9 - THE RESURRECTION ON THE MUD
His pulse was gone.
Under my trembling fingers on the side of his neck, the carotid artery was completely, terrifyingly silent.
“No,” I whispered.
The word was small.
A breath in the dark.
“No, you don't get to die now, Graham Calloway.”
I tore the rest of my navy dress open at the bodice.
I ripped my hands through the soaked silk until his broad, scarred chest was completely bare in the cold river air.
The bullet hole in his tricep was still leaking dark maroon.
A secondary wound near his sixth rib was bubbling with clear foam—a collapsed lung from the blunt trauma of the explosion.
I placed the heel of my right hand on the center of his sternum.
I interlaced my left fingers over it.
I locked my elbows.
One. Two. Three. Four.
I drove my entire body weight down into his ribs with rhythmic, bone-jarring force.
Five. Six. Seven. Eight.
The sound of his chest compressing in the empty aluminum boat sounded like wet leather being hammered on an anvil.
“Breathe, you stubborn bastard!” I screamed into the rain.
Nine. Ten. Eleven. Twelve.
My muscles burned.
My knees, scraped raw from the oyster shells in the marsh, slipped on the bloody floorboards.
I leaned down.
I pinched his nostrils shut with two fingers.
I sealed my mouth over his cold, blood-stained lips.
I forced two deep, agonizing breaths of air straight into his lungs.
His chest rose.
It fell with a hollow wheeze.
Nothing.
No heartbeat.
No reflex.
Just the rain drumming on the aluminum bow and the wind howling through the cypress moss.
I didn't stop.
One. Two. Three. Four.
Ten years of marriage flashed behind my closed eyelids with every compression.
The night he brought me warm beignets in the middle of a January thunderstorm because I couldn't sleep.
The afternoon he stood in the rain outside the hospital when my mother died, holding an umbrella over my head for four hours without saying a single word.
The way he looked at me across crowded rooms of politicians and killers, his eyes signaling that none of them mattered—only us.
He had built a fortress of lies to protect me.
And I had let him walk into the slaughterhouse because my pride was bruised by five drunken sentences in a private lounge.
Twenty-five. Twenty-six. Twenty-seven.
I leaned down again.
I pressed my mouth to his.
“I forgive you,” I breathed into his throat.
“Do you hear me, Graham?”
“I forgive you!”
“Now come back to me!”
I struck his sternum with the heel of my closed fist—a precordial thump, the desperate maneuver my father had used on drowning dockworkers thirty years ago.
THUD.
Graham’s body arched violently off the floorboards.
His mouth opened in a wide, silent gasp.
A thick, dark spray of river water and blood erupted from his lungs, splashing across my face and chest.
Air tore into his throat with the sound of tearing canvas.
HEEEEE-AH.
His eyes flew open.
They were wild.
Completely black with dilated pupils.
His right hand shot upward, his bloody fingers locking around the back of my neck with terrifying, reflexive strength.
He hauled me down against his chest, his heart slamming against his ribs beneath my hands like an engine restarting on high octane:
THUMP. THUMP. THUMP.
“Eleanor!” he choked out, coughing violently, his whole body trembling in the freezing air.
“I’m here,” I wept, collapsing across his chest, burying my face into the curve of his neck.
“I’m right here, Graham.”
His hand tangled into my wet, tangled hair, holding my head against his skin as if he were drowning and I was the only piece of timber in the ocean.
“I thought... I lost you,” he rasped, his voice thick with tears and blood.
“You almost did,” I said, lifting my head to look down at him.
I reached into my bodice.
I pulled out the heavy platinum wedding band.
I took his limp, bloody left hand in mine.
I slid the ring back over his knuckle.
It clicked into place, cold and permanent against his skin.
“You wear this for me, Graham,” I told him, my voice shaking with an authority that brooked no argument.
“Not for business.”
“Not for the Commission.”
“For me.”
A faint, broken smile touched his pale, blood-flecked lips.
“Only for you, Eleanor,” he whispered.
“From the first day... to the last.”
Across the marsh, the low, mechanical drone of twin marine engines broke through the storm.
Two hundred yards down the river cut, high-intensity infrared searchlights swept through the cypress trees.
Julian Vance’s harbor patrol boats.
They had found our fuel slick.
Graham’s eyes hardened, the lethal mafia boss returning from the dead in an instant.
He looked at the floor of the skiff.
Beside my knee lay the heavy iron push-pole and his empty Kimber pistol.
“They have three boats on the main river, Eleanor,” he murmured, his voice gaining strength with every breath.
“They will sweep this cut within five minutes.”
I reached under the bow deck.
Behind the anchor rope sat a rectangular wooden crate stamped with yellow stenciled letters:
DANGER: COMMERCIAL BLASTING GELATIN — CHARLESTON HARBOR DREDGING CO.
Six sticks of high-velocity dynamite left over from his father’s dock construction ten years ago.
And a box of water-resistant marine fuses.
I looked at Graham.
A slow, terrifying smile curved my lips—the smile of a woman who had spent ten years learning how the Calloway family settled debts.
May you like
“Let them sweep it, Graham,” I said softly.
“We’re going to give Julian Vance his anniversary toast.”
