The icy waters of the Mediterranean sea envelop me, a chilling embrace that sends shivers down my spine. I fight against the numbing cold, my body trembling uncontrollably.

A strange sense of lethargy washes over me.

An overwhelming urge to... sleep.

Liam's voice echoes in the darkness, his words muffled by the rushing water. "Alex, stay awake!" he shouts.

I try to resist the pull of slumber, but my eyelids feel heavy, as if weighed down by lead.

Liam grabs my arm, his grip firm and reassuring. "Alex, stay with me!" he yells at me.

I fight against the darkness, my mind racing. I can't sleep. Not now. Sofia is out there, waiting for me.

I force my eyes open, the world coming into focus once again. The icy water continues to chill me to the bone, but I refuse to give in.

"I know how much you want to sleep but that's the sleep of death. And, by God, if I have to beat you black and blue, I will do so. I will not allow you to die. The storm caught up with us, aye, but we'll outwit it. We already have. You just... stay awake, and breathe, and keep moving. Talk; keep talking, Alexandra; I don't give a damn what ye say, just let me hear your cantankerous voice so I'll know you're alive."

I am aware of the paralyzing cold again as Liam rubs life back into my flesh.

"Are we going to get out of this?" I ask without emotion. I try to move my legs.

"Of course we are."

"How?"

"The current is carrying us ashore; it's an incoming tide. It'll take us right where we wanna go."

I nod in the darkness. I remember all the fuss about leaving after the storm has passed and I can't help but wonder whether Patrick and Ri were right.

We should have waited.

"How long before we get there?" My legs feel like huge tree trunks. And Liam is rubbing my shoulders raw.

"I don't know," he answers. "It could easily be a quarter of an hour, or half an hour. You'll need all your courage, sweetheart."

He sounds as solemn as a sermon! Liam, who always makes fun of everything.

Oh, my God!

I will my lifeless legs to move.

"I don't need courage half as much as I need something to eat," I say. "Why the fuck didn't you grab that dirty old bag with rum and toast when we turned over?"

"It's stowed under the bow. Clever thinking, sweetheart. Yer gluttony may be the saving of us. I'd forgotten all about it. Pray it's still there."

Moments later, Liam is back. He hoists the bottle of rum he found and I grab it eagerly. Liam insists on rationing it, and I pout, but I know he is right. It would be too awful to run out of the warmth in the bottle before we are safe on land.

In the meantime I am even able to join in Liam's tribute to our prize.

The rum spreads life-restoring tentacles of warmth through my thighs, my legs, my feet, and I begin to push them back and forth. The pain of returning circulation is intense, but I welcome it. It means I am alive, all of me.

Why, rum just might be better than plum brandy they make in Albania, I think after a second drink.

It sure does warm a person up.

Too bad that Liam is being stingy.

" 'Yo, ho, ho, and a bottle of rum!' " I sing with him when he finishes each verse of the sea chanty and force terror away with iron determination.

And afterwards I think of: "Hotel California."

Our voices echo so loudly inside the hull that it is possible to pretend that we aren't growing weaker as the cold grips our bodies.

I put my arms around Liam and hold him close to my body to share its warmth. And we sing all the favorites we can remember, while the sips of rum come closer together with less and less effect.

"How about 'The Star of a County Down?" Liam suggests.

"We sang that twice already. Sing that Irish song I love so much."

'Green roses will grow, while green fields turn to red...' " He sings the first verse of "Green Roses," then admits he doesn't know the rest.

"Liar. It's practically an Irish national anthem. You must know every word of it, Liam. Sing it for me."

"Together." He winks."Only if ye help me out here, darling."

I try but I can't find the strength. "I've forgotten," I say, to cover my weakness.

I am so tired. If only I could rest my head against Liam's warmth and sleep. His arms feel so wonderful holding me. My head drops.

It is too heavy to hold up any longer.

Liam shakes me. "Alex, do you hear me? Alex! I feel a change in the current, I swear it, we're very near the shore. You can't give up now. Come on, my darling, let me see some more of that gumption of yours. Hold up your head, my pet, it's almost over."

"... so cold..."

"Damn you for a quitter, Alexandra Martinaj! I should have let dem human traffickers get ye in Dublin and ship ye and Siobhan away in that container. You weren't worth saving."

The provoking, harsh words register slowly in my fading consciousness, and produce only a feeble stirring of anger. But it is enough.

Liam knew what he was doing.

My eyes open and my head lifts to meet the dimly sensed challenge.

"Take a deep breath," Liam commands. "We're going in." He puts his big hand over my nose and mouth and dives under the water with my feebly struggling body held close. We surface outside the hull, near a line of tall, cresting combers. "Almost there, my love," Liam gasps. He bends one arm around my neck and holds my heavy head in his hand while he swims expertly through a breaking wave and uses its power to carry us into the shallows in front of the Grotta del Turco.

A thin rain is falling, blown almost horizontal by the gusting wind.

Liam cradles my limp form to his chest and huddles over it, kneeling in the white frothing edge of the water.

A comber rises far behind him and races toward the beach. It begins to curl over on itself, then the foam-streaked gray water crashes, surges toward land, and the rolling, roiling forces in it strike Liam's back and roar across his sheltering body.

When the wave passed over and spent itself, Liam rises unsteadily to his feet and stumbles forward onto the beach, clasping me to him.

His bare feet and legs are cut in a hundred places by the fragments of shell that the breaker had thrown against him, but he seems uncaring. He runs clumsily through the deep clinging sand to an opening in the line of immense sand dunes and climbs a short way into a bowl-like area sheltered from the winds.

There I sense him gently place my body on the soft sand.

His voice breaks as he calls my name over and over again while he tries to bring life into my chilled whiteness by rubbing every part of me with his two hands.

My snarled, glistening dark red hair spilled around my head and shoulders and I can see it fall in shocking streaks across my colorless wet face.

Liam slaps my cheeks softly and urgently with the backs of his fingers.

When I force myself to open my eyes I meet his — their color looks as strong as emeralds.

Liam shouts in primitive triumph.

My fingers half close around the shifting solidity of the rain-hardened sand. "Land," I say. "Sofia." And I begin to cry in gasping sobs.

Liam puts one arm under my shoulders and lifts me into the protection of his bent crouching body. With his free hand he touches my hair, my cheeks, mouth, chin. "My darling, my life. I thought I'd lost you. I thought I'd killed you. I thought—Oh, Alexandra, you're alive. Don't cry, my dearest, it's all over. You're safe. It's all right. Everything—" He kissed my forehead, my throat, my cheeks.

I sense my pale skin warm with color, and I turn my head to meet his kisses with my own.

And there is no cold, no rain, no weakness—only the burning of Liam Cavanaugh's full lips on my lips, on my body, the heat of his hands.

And the power I feel under my fingers when I grip his shoulders. And the pounding of my heart in my throat against his lips, the strong beat of his heart beneath my palms when I tangle my fingers in the thick curling hair on his chest.

Yes! I did remember it, it wasn't a dream. Yes, this is the dark swirling that draws me in and closes out the world and makes me alive, so alive, and free and spinning up to the heart of the sun.

"Yes!" I shout again and again, meeting Liam's passion with my own, my demands the same as his.

Until in the swirling, spiraling rapture there were no longer words or thoughts, only a union beyond mind, beyond time, beyond the world.

***

We made it! What a fool I was to doubt what I knew. There was no losing when you teamed up with Liam Cavanaugh.

My swollen lips curve in a lazy surfeited smile, and I slowly open my eyes.

Liam is sitting beside me. His arms are wrapped across his knees, his face hidden in the hollow we made not far from the cove.

I stretch luxuriantly. For the first time I feel the rasping sand against my skin, and notice my surroundings.

Why, it's still pouring down rain. We'll catch our death if we don't get out of the rain soon.

We'll have to find some shelter before we enter the grotto itself.

I sense my dimples flicker, and I stifle a giggle. Maybe not, we sure didn't pay any attention to the weather just now.

I reach out my hand and trace Liam's spine with my fingernails.

He leans into me as if I burned him, turning in a rush to face me, then helping me up to get on my feet.

"I didn't want to wake you," he says. "Try to get some more rest if you can. I'm going to look for some place to dry out and build a fire. There are shacks on all these islands, and a lot of people are vacationing in them. Best be in our best shape before we enter the grotto. It sucks that we lost our phone signal for now so we can't text Patrick and Ri but... It is what it is. At least we haven't lost our lives."

"I'll go with you." I struggle to get up. My phone is totally useless, drenched in water, but his could still react after some time. 

Liam's sweater is across my legs, and I am still wearing mine. I feel burdened by their doubled water-laden weight.

"No. You stay here." He is walking away, up the steep dunes. I gape angrily, not believing my eyes.

"Liam! You can't leave me. I won't let you."

But he keeps climbing. I can see only his broad back with his wet shirt clinging to it.

At the top of the dune he halts. His head turns slowly from side to side. Than his hunched shoulders square. He turns and slides recklessly down the steep slope, and I see him waving and gesticulating at someone.

When he returns, true to his word, it seems like our problem is solved.

"There's a cottage. I told this nice couple what happened to us. We can dry off in there for an hour or so, they said it was no problem at all. Get up." Liam holds his hand out to help me rise. I clasp it eagerly.

Once we are inside, a plump kind woman and her burly red-bearded husband lend us some clothes, and give us some privacy. Liam's worried gaze then fully focuses on me. His hands abruptly catch my head and he kisses me with bruising possessive strength. My arms close behind his neck as his hands move down my throat and my shoulders, and I give myself up to abandonment.

"Ye survived. Ye're alive, sweetheart. I don't know what I would do if something had happened to you. I want ye. I want ye so much, and sicken for you. You're a poison in my blood, Alexandra, a sickness of my soul. I've known men with a hunger for drugs, that was like my hunger for you. I know what happens to an addict. He becomes enslaved, then destroyed. But I'll gladly be destroyed if it's by yer hand, sweetheart. Ye don't know how hard these past four years were on me." He falls on his knees, kissing my hands.

I caress his dark tresses, not knowing what to say, what to do and how to react to this sudden outburst of his emotions.

"I thought I'd lost ye forever, Alexandra. Then fate brought ye back to me. I wasn't going to let it take ye away from me the second time." He sighs.

The wind howls through the open door, icy against my bare skin.

My lips still feel warm from Liam's kiss. But the rest of me is shivering.

I curl up in front of the living room fire with the quilt wrapped securely around me.

I'm tired, so very tired. But I know I can't nap. Can't even have the littlest of the naps.

Just a brief respite, one hour, or even less, and then the two of us will enter the grotto. Time is not on our side.

Through the window of the shack, I can see Grotta del Turco. The cave's imposing silhouette looms large against the stormy sky.

The entrance, a dark, gaping maw, seems to swallow the morning light, casting the surrounding waters in an eerie gloom.

"We will have to be careful," Liam whispers, his voice echoing in the confined space. "Who knows what's inside."

I nod, my heart galloping in my chest.

At the very least, Enzo and Kieran are inside, guarding my child.

But they might not be alone – definitely, some of their cronies are in there as well.

This was the belly of the beast, a place of danger and uncertainty. But we have to press on, for Sofia's sake.

I would find my daughter, no matter the cost.