She supposed she should be grateful having survived everything up to this point, but grateful was about the furthest emotion from her mind.

She was scared. She was exhausted. She was hungry. And she was pissed.

Surviving in a remote cabin woods for days on end with a lumberjack she just met a few days ago who still refused to tell her his name and may or may not have been planning to dispose of a body the first time she saw him was not something Mackenzie felt she should be grateful for.

But without him she would have probably been dead or caught a long time ago. He taught her some basic defensive maneuvers, how to make a weapon in a pinch if she couldn’t find one, which plants were poisonous, how to start a fire, how to catch a fish without any fishing gear.

So maybe she was a little grateful. But she was all those other things too.

Right now though, she was mainly just pissed. They had been talking through game plans and strategies for the past hour, not that it had done them any good. She really should have seen this coming.

She hadn’t meant to. They were both on edge and she knew it. She couldn’t help it anymore. It had been nothing but up before the sun, train until your exhausted, work for your own dinner, and work through every different ‘what if’ scenario that all began with people wanting to kill her and she just snapped.

“I can’t take this anymore! I wish I’d never found the damn thing.” Mackenzie weaved her hands through locks of her hair. Maybe if she held on tightly enough she could hang on to the small bits of sanity she had left.

“Found what?” The lumberjack looked at her in confusion. His jaw was clenched and although he wasn’t yelling and he sounded calm, she could hear the anger in his voice. She could tell he was just as frustrated as she was. He took a breath and tried again. “What are you talking about?”

She let out a long sigh and closed her eyes. Maybe this was for the best. Maybe she could tell him and it would be the final piece of the puzzle they both needed to get the men that had been looking for them—looking for her—dealt with once and for all. Maybe she could trust him. “This thing I found at the lighthouse.”

She opened her eyes and he was watching her, waiting for her to continue.

“When I filled the vacant position at the lighthouse, the person who was walking me through everything told me that I had access to everything except this room at the bottom of the stairs.

“They said the door was welded shut, something about the room it went to being under the island and the roof had become unstable, or something. I didn’t think anything of it. I didn’t really care, to be honest.” She huffed.

Tears started welling up in her eyes. She forced the lump in her throat down so she could continue. “But then this one night, the door was just open, just a sliver. And there was this blue light coming out of it. And I was curious.” She shrugged one shoulder.

“So I opened it the rest of the way and it was this cave, this underwater grotto that just stopped right at the doorway. There was just a wall of water, almost like when you’re looking into a really big aquarium at the zoom except there was no glass separating me from the water.

“Then I figured I must’ve been dreaming, that I must’ve passed out and that’s all this was. So I put my hand through the water.”

The lumberjack was looking at her and she couldn’t tell what he was thinking. She tried, but his face wouldn’t give away any of his thoughts. “And?” He prompted.

“And the water was comfortable, not too hot and not too cold. And I could remember really wanting to go for a swim all of a sudden. All I’d have to do was step through. So I took a breath and I did.

“And there was what looked like a shell sitting on a rock in the middle of the grotto and I swam over to it and picked it up. I could feel myself starting to run out of air and I thought it was kinda weird, because I figured if I were dreaming that would’ve woken me up. But it didn’t.

“So I swam back to the doorway and when I went through all the water came gushing out, like a damn had broke. And I was sitting there in shallow water, on the floor of the lighthouse.

“When I turned to look back at the room the light was gone and it was just this dark closet full of supplies for the lighthouse and fishing gear.

“And the thing that I thought was a seashell actually looked more like some kind of weird glowing rock when I finally really inspected it but I don’t know. I don’t know what it was, I never found out. Before I could I met you and then those guys started chasing us and I just wanted to get rid of the damn thing. So I buried it.”

She waited, waited for him to say something, for him to laugh, call her crazy, explain some deep history of the island only the locals knew about and tell her what she really saw that night. She waited for him to say anything really.

When he finally did speak, she didn’t know what to make of it. “It’s getting late and it’s been a while since either one of us have eaten. I’ll go out and see if I can get us some fish for dinner.”

He left the cabin without another word.