Not if I Save You First

by Ally Carter

  His hands were still cuffed, and he slammed them into the man’s gut, pounding like a hammer with both fists. The man was dazed, but he wasn’t stopped, and when Logan pulled back again, the Russian moved like a blur, reversing their positions and leaping to crouch over Logan, pressing his chest against the rocky ground.

  Logan never even saw the knife.

  Not until he felt it, cutting into the soft flesh between his pinkie finger and its neighbor. At first, his hands were too cold, too numb, and Logan was too high on adrenaline and anger to feel any pain. But then he saw the bright red drop of blood that bubbled up from his too-white skin.

  He felt the kidnapper’s warm breath on his cold cheek, heard the accented warning: “This is not the part of you I need,” the man whispered near Logan’s ear. “Now you must ask yourself: Do you want to lose more than just your girlfriend and your pride today?”

  The man seemed to think he’d asked an excellent question, made an undeniable point. He didn’t know that Logan had already lost everything that meant anything to him. A pinkie finger was the least of his problems.

  No. The only thing Logan cared about was vengeance. And he wasn’t going to get that—not right then; not right there. He wasn’t going to get Maddie back with his bare fists. He had to …

  I am never going to get Maddie back, Logan realized.

  It was suddenly harder than it should have been to keep breathing.

  The man dragged him to his feet, pushed him in the back.

  “Now walk.”

  Maddie knew her way across the river. Even cold and hungry and still a little too unsteady on her feet, she’d crossed the old fallen tree enough times to know that it could hold her.

  The man hadn’t known about it, though. Or maybe he hadn’t wanted to risk climbing down the steep cliff face to reach it. In any case, by Maddie’s estimation she’d gained at least an hour on them. But she’d probably been unconscious at least that long, so she didn’t know how much good it did her. Besides, her head hurt too badly to think too much. So she just kept walking.

  When she reached the place where riverbank gave way to trees, Maddie saw the broken branches. Even with the rain, someone had dug so deeply into the soft earth while searching for footing that it was almost impossible to miss the ruts. Now.

  Maddie looked up at the sky, at the clouds that were growing thicker, darker. Maybe it was the drizzle that clung to her hair or the shock from her long, hard fall, but it was definitely getting colder. And it was going to get a whole lot worse before it got better. In a lot of ways.

  Someone might miss Logan’s tracks if they didn’t know where to look for them—if the weather kept getting worse. So Maddie walked to the river and gathered the biggest rocks she could, then placed them like an arrow, pointing the way. She piled a few smaller stones on top, just high enough to be noticed in a few inches of snow and ice, but not so high that they might topple.

  Then Maddie lowered her hood. She brought her hand to the side of her face and pressed her palm against the largest of the rocks until her bloody handprint shone like an eerie beacon, announcing to the world: Trouble came this way.

  But trouble was Maddie’s family’s business, so she did the only thing that made sense: She followed it.

  The footprints were easy to track for a while, but then the ground got rockier and the rain got harder. Luckily there were a lot of trampled bushes and broken branches. It looked like a bulldozer had passed that way, and a part of her wondered if Logan was doing it on purpose. She didn’t know him well enough to say anymore, and that hurt almost as much as her head.

  She could feel the swelling beneath her hair, but that was good, wasn’t it? Better for it to swell out than in? Maybe her brain would be okay even if her hair would look terrible. Maddie consoled herself with the fact that there wouldn’t be anyone around to see it. That and the whole life-and-death thing.

  That’s what made her bend at the waist and leverage herself higher. And higher. The rain was still falling, but she was making good time.

  Her shoulder hurt, though, probably from the fall. And sometimes she’d find herself stopping, wincing, because it felt like a sword was going between her ribs, but she was pretty sure they weren’t broken—just bruised.

  It could be worse, she told herself.

  She could have left home without a raincoat like a moron.

  Was Logan wearing a raincoat? Maddie couldn’t remember. She just knew he was a moron, and the thought should have worried her, but she just smiled a little. Logan was gone without a trace and she was calling him a moron in her mind.

  Things were almost back to normal.

  But then Maddie saw something on the hill—an overturned rock, like someone had struggled to make a step.

  Not quite a moron, she told herself, and went to the rock, stacked a half dozen others around and on top of it with a small limb sticking straight up for good measure, and then she started up the hill again, certain that she was on the right path.

  She wanted to run. She wanted to find him and make sure he was okay and just have the worrying part behind her.

  But she also had to be careful, be quiet. If the man thought she was dead, then that could be her best weapon. She’d left her second-favorite hatchet stuck blade-deep in a tree at the top of the cliff, after all. So she stayed quiet, even though that came with its own set of problems.

  As Maddie pushed through a piece of heavy brush, she heard a sound that sometimes haunted her nightmares.

  Part grunt. Part growl.

  Maddie froze on the path as the bear pivoted and saw her. It must have smelled her or heard her messing with the rocks and cursing Logan under her breath. Because, thankfully, it wasn’t scared. It had known she was there, even if Maddie couldn’t say the same.

  It was covered in thick fur, fat and ready for winter as it rubbed up against a tree like it had an itch it couldn’t quite scratch. But it didn’t charge at her. If anything, it seemed annoyed that she’d intruded on its solitude. So Maddie did the only thing she could do—she put her hand on the hilt of her knife, then eased back, slowly slipping away.

  When her heart returned to its chest, she veered off the beaten path but kept climbing.

  She didn’t stop to think about the truth of her situation: There were two predators in these woods, and Maddie wasn’t sure which one scared her most.

  Dear Logan,

  Alaska’s really big.

  And really pretty.

  It’s also really lonely.

  Sometimes I ask Dad why we’re here, and he says it’s for our health. Or because I’m almost old enough that he was going to have to “beat the boys off with sticks” if we’d stayed in DC. I don’t think that’s it, though. But if it is, he’s found the place where the stick-to-boy ratio is probably the highest on earth.

  Maddie

  Logan didn’t know what time it was. Usually he was good about stuff like that: finding north, knowing how much daylight must be left. Maybe it was from spending so much of his life surrounded by the Secret Service. Logan had received more than a few lessons from well-meaning agents on knowing when someone looks out of place in a crowd or when a vehicle just doesn’t quite fit in.

  Someone had even told him once that if his father hadn’t been president, he might have been a good candidate for the Blackthorne Institute (whatever that was—it didn’t even have a website), so it felt weird not knowing where he was or where he was going.

  When Logan remembered how far north they were and how close they were to the shortest day of the year, he had to wonder how much daylight even remained. He knew there were parts of Alaska that didn’t get any sun at all in the middle of winter and some that got a few hours. Some got more. But Logan didn’t know that much about this part of the state. Alaska was more than twice the size of Texas, after all. And then Logan had to hand it to the man at his back: There was no better place to get lost.

  Maybe that was why it took him a moment to realize that someone wa
s talking.

  It took a moment more to realize that no one was talking to him.

  Logan turned slowly. The storm had broken for a moment, and a rare bit of sunlight broke through the heavy canopy of the trees.

  Some rainwater puddled on the ground, and Logan realized that it had started to freeze. Now that they weren’t moving he could feel it: The air wasn’t just chilly anymore; it was downright cold. He stomped his feet and wanted to put his hands in his pockets, but they were still cuffed in front of him and growing numb. Logan had no idea if it was from the tight cuffs or the cold air. It didn’t matter. It was the same person’s fault either way.

  “Nyet,” the man said, and something about it made Logan want to laugh.

  Then Logan saw the telephone.

  And he actually wanted to laugh harder.

  “There’s no signal, dude!” he yelled. The words seemed to echo in the vast wilderness.

  “Shut up!” the man spat in English, then turned his back to Logan.

  He put the satellite phone to his ear and started talking fast and in Russian, and something in the sound of those guttural vowels and consonants made Logan shiver in a way that had nothing to do with the cold.

  He remembered the feel of his shoulder hitting the wall as the men rushed down the center of the corridor. The flutter of a red dress. The piercing pain of the bullet slicing across his arm. The blood.

  And the sounds of Maddie’s screams.

  Maddie.

  Maddie was gone. She’d been gone for what felt like ages, it was true. But now she was the kind of gone he couldn’t pretend away. He’d just gotten her back, and this man had taken her from him.

  “I just got her back!”

  Logan didn’t even realize he was yelling until the man spun and stared at him. The phone was to his ear, and now that he was facing Logan, Logan could hear every word.

  Logan’s Russian wasn’t perfect, but he recognized “Yes, I have the boy” when he heard it.

  Logan wanted to smile at the words—not at what they were but that he’d understood them.

  The morning after That Night, Logan’s dad had pushed Logan’s wheelchair down the hall to see Maddie’s dad. Afterward, on the ride back, Logan had turned to his father and said, “I’m going to learn Russian.”

  His dad was still running a hand over the resignation letter that Mr. Manchester had given him, handwritten on hospital stationery. He must have understood what was happening—how much everything was going to change, even if Logan didn’t yet realize that the president losing the head of his Secret Service detail meant the first son was also going to lose his best friend.

  “Did you hear me?” Logan had said. “I’m going to learn Russian.”

  “Okay,” his father had told him. “Go ahead.”

  So he had. It was perhaps the one good decision Logan had ever made in his life. At least it was the only one that seemed worthwhile in that moment.

  “Yes. I am certain we will not be followed,” the kidnapper said. He looked directly into Logan’s eyes, and Logan tried to keep the same look of enraged indifference that he’d had before. He couldn’t let on that he understood. It might be the only weapon he had, and he wasn’t going to lose it too soon.

  “Is the plane ready?” the kidnapper asked. “We will be there. You just make sure we have a doctor.”

  Only the last part surprised Logan, and he made a conscious effort to school his features, hide his reaction. Once he thought about it, it made a kind of sense. Logan wasn’t really hurt yet, after all. But if he kept annoying this guy, he would be. And whoever this man was working for—whatever their motivation might be—no one drags the president’s son through the wilderness in a storm if they don’t need him alive.

  They need me alive, Logan thought, but it didn’t bring him any comfort. They thought he might be a pawn, a useful tool. They thought he had value. Logan would have laughed if it hadn’t been so funny.

  Instead, he just said, “He hates me.”

  The man took off his pack, slipped the satellite phone into a side pocket, and quickly drew the zipper shut—but not before Logan noted which pocket the phone was in.

  It was like he hadn’t spoken at all—like maybe he was the one speaking in another language, so he said again, louder, “He hates me!”

  Finally the man looked up, and Logan couldn’t help but cock an eyebrow, careful not to tip his hand.

  “That was a ransom call, wasn’t it?” Logan lied, and Maddie’s killer seemed pleased to realize that the first son was as stupid as everyone said. It had always been in Logan’s best interest to keep it that way. Now more than ever.

  “If that was a ransom call, I hope you asked for a miracle, because the president of the United States hates me.”

  Maybe it sounded like fear, or anger, or moody teenage angst, but Logan wasn’t really ready for the sight of the Russian dropping to a log and asking, “So are you saying I should just kill you now?”

  “No.” Logan shook his head. “I’m saying you should let me go. You see, he doesn’t actually care what happens to me. But he would care a great deal if he were to be embarrassed. If someone took something that belongs to him, he’d need to make an example out of that somebody. So you’d be better off just letting me go.”

  The kidnapper studied Logan, as if maybe the intelligence he’d been given was off—like maybe the first son wasn’t just sloppy and stupid, like maybe he might also be a little bit insane.

  That was okay, Logan thought. There were times when insanity could be very beneficial.

  “If you’re right and there’s no one looking for me, then that means no one knows I’m missing. Yet. If you let me go, it might stay that way for a while. You could be long gone, back to wherever you came from, before anyone even starts to care.”

  The man leaned closer, his accent heavier. “I will care.”

  Logan shook his head, like this man with the knife and the gun—this man who had hit Maddie in the head and kicked her in the gut, then pushed her off the edge of a cliff like she was a pebble and he wanted to see how far she would fly … Logan looked at him like he was the weak one, the one destined for disappointment.

  When the words came, they were actually filled with pity. “You’re not going to get what you want.”

  But the Russian stood slowly and leaned closer. “I already have what I want.”

  For a second, Logan actually believed him. It took a moment for him to remember.

  “You don’t seem to understand how this hostage business works. See … you take me. Then you trade me for something infinitely more valuable.”

  “Get up,” the man said, as if Logan hadn’t spoken at all. “We have lost too much light already.”

  That was when Logan realized that the sun wasn’t where it should be. The days were so short; Logan had no idea what time it was. He only knew that when he started to stand, his head pounded. The earth tilted. And the meal he’d shared with Maddie and her father last night seemed forever ago.

  “Move!” the man shouted.

  Logan didn’t want to do anything, but he knew he couldn’t just sit there—he couldn’t just die there. Because then he wouldn’t be able to kill this man later.

  So he swallowed his pride and asked, “Do you have anything to eat?”

  “We eat when we rest. We rest when we lose the light.”

  “That’s a great plan,” Logan told him. “But I didn’t have breakfast and we’re not going to make any time until I get a little gas in the tank. I’m no good to you this way.”

  The thing that Logan hated the most was how much that was true. Maybe that’s why the man believed him, because a moment later he was swinging off his pack and digging through a compartment, then tossing Logan something that looked like an energy bar. The writing was in Russian, some brand name Logan didn’t know. But he ripped open the package and dug in, eating just the same.

  “You eat while we walk,” the man said, pushing Logan up the hill.
r />   “What? No beverage? I was hoping for a nice latte.”

  The Russian threw him a canteen so quickly that Logan was actually surprised he caught it.

  “Now walk,” the man said.

  Maddie was surprised when she finally heard the talking.

  It had been so long since she’d been used to any kind of voices. That was the weirdest thing about her new life: It wasn’t just the lack of people—it was the lack of sound. There was no radio in her world. No television. No YouTube or whatever Internet thing kids were into. A dozen different fads could have come and gone and Maddie wouldn’t have even known they existed.

  Sure, her dad brought her newspapers and magazines. Sometimes she watched movies that they had on DVD. She had her mom’s old CD collection, and sometimes when Maddie was all alone she’d blast the soundtracks from nineties movies just as loud as she could and dance around the cabin like no one was watching. Because no one was.

  But most days, Maddie’s world was silent except for the sound of birds and running water, chain saws and the crack a tree makes just before it falls.

  Voices didn’t belong in that forest, but when Maddie heard them, they sounded like music.

  Because the voices meant Logan was still alive.

  Of course, if he kept talking to the man that way he wouldn’t be for long. Maddie took some degree of comfort from the knowledge that she probably wasn’t the only person in those woods who really, really wanted to kill him.

  When Logan shouted, “I just got her back!” something inside of Maddie froze. She wondered for a moment if maybe she’d spent too long away from civilization. Maybe some words changed meaning while she was away because Logan sounded like someone who had just lost his very best friend.

  Maddie might have felt sorry for him if she hadn’t lost her own best friend years ago.

  She made herself stay in the shelter of the trees, listening. Watching.