Quest III (The Banks Empire #6)

Quest

Water was everywhere and my Peach wasn’t waking up.

I hollered her name but the sound wasn’t making it past the roar of the ocean flooding the cockpit.

The windshield had cracked on impact, one long ugly line from corner to corner, and the Caribbean was pushing through it like the glass was invisible and not a barrier.

The instrument panel was dead. Every gauge, every light, every screen, all of it gone dark at the same time, and the only thing illuminated in this cabin was the blood running down Mehar’s forehead from a gash near her hairline.

She was slumped forward in her seatbelt with her arms crossed over her belly.

I’d told her to do that. Brace position.

Cross your arms over the baby and tuck your chin.

She’d done exactly what I said. Now she was unconscious and bleeding.

The water was at my knees, climbing fast, and I could feel the nose of the plane dragging us down, tilting us forward degree by degree.

I had less than a minute before this cabin became a coffin.

“Mehar!”

Nothing. Her eyes were closed. Her body limp against the harness.

The only thing that told me she was alive was the faint rise and fall of her chest. Even that was hard to see because my hands were shaking, my vision blurred from the salt water that splashed me when the windshield cracked.

I was trying to focus, trying to make my body move when every instinct was telling me this was it.

This was how we died. In the ocean, in a plane that somebody sabotaged, six months pregnant with a baby that would never take her first breath.

Nah.

Fuck that.

I didn’t survive Vivica. I didn’t survive Mega, Rios, the casino shooting, the warehouse, finding out my whole life was built on a lie about who my father was, just to drown in the Caribbean on the way to a babymoon.

That wasn’t how this ended. I refused. I refused with every part of me that had ever fought for anything, starting with the sixteen-year-old kid running transport for people who would’ve killed him if he looked at them wrong, all the way to the man who built an empire out of the dirt they tried to bury him in.

I unbuckled my harness. The pain in my body was everywhere but I couldn’t catalog it right now. Didn’t matter what was bruised or torn or bleeding. The only thing that mattered was getting to her.

I grabbed the back of her headrest to steady myself and reached across with my other hand and pressed two fingers against her neck.

Pulse. Strong and steady. Thank God. Thank God, thank God, thank God.

I said it three times because once wasn’t enough for what I was feeling.

I unbuckled her seatbelt and caught her as she fell toward me.

She made a sound. A murmur. Something from deep inside her that wasn’t a word but was enough to tell me she was still in there somewhere, fighting her way back to the surface.

This woman survived a father who made her kneel on rice until her knees bled and a husband who used his fists to keep her in line.

She put a man in a cage and kept him there for months because the world taught her that control was the only thing standing between her and destruction.

And when Janelle chained her to a ceiling in that warehouse, she didn’t wait for me to come save her.

She freed herself, killed the man hanging next to her, knocked Janelle unconscious, and walked to a rest stop on bloody feet with chains still on her wrists.

She was one of the strongest people I’d ever known.

She was not dying in this plane. I refused to allow it.

I would drag her out of the ocean with my teeth if I had to.

“Stay with me, Peach. I got you. I’m getting us out.”

The water was at my thighs now. I could feel the cold of it soaking through my Merino wool pants and the pull of the current as the nose went under.

The cockpit was filling fast. The angle was steep enough that I had to brace my feet against the floor to keep from sliding forward.

I pulled her out of her seat and started moving us toward the rear of the cabin.

The back of the plane was still above water.

The tail was tilted up, the rear seats still dry.

That’s where the emergency raft was. I’d checked it before takeoff because that’s what I do.

I verify. I prepare. I don’t leave details to chance because details are where people die.

I’d been living by that rule since before I could legally drink.

I set Mehar in a rear seat and she slumped sideways, her hands still on her belly even though she wasn’t conscious enough to know she was doing it.

She was protecting our baby on instinct.

On autopilot. The way her body had learned to protect itself through years of surviving men who tried to destroy her.

I looked at her for half a second longer than I should have because the sight of her like that, bloody and unconscious and still cradling our child, did something to my chest that had nothing to do with the crash.

I thought about Quindon.

My son who never got the chance to grow up.

I was not losing another child. Not today. Not in this ocean. Not in this life.

The emergency raft was in a red valise strapped under the rear storage compartment. I yanked it free and tucked it under my arm. First aid kit was clipped to the wall right next to me. It was a white box with a red cross. I grabbed that too.

The cabin door. Left side, rear of the fuselage.

I hit the release handle and pushed and nothing happened.

Water pressure on the other side was fighting me.

The ocean was at the lower edge of the door frame and every wave rocked more weight against it.

I braced my foot on the opposite wall and threw everything I had into the push.

The door cracked open, swung wide, and salt air hit my face. Sky and water. Nothing else.

No land. No boats. No helicopters. Nothing but blue in every direction like the rest of the world had been erased while we were falling out of the sky.

I tossed the valise through the door and it hit the water and I pulled the inflation cord. The raft exploded open on the surface, bright orange against all that blue. I threw the first aid kit onto it. Then I went back for her.

Her eyes were half open now. Confused and glassy and terrified. Her lips were moving, her hands on her belly. When I lifted her she gripped my shirt with both fists like I was the only solid thing left in the universe. Maybe I was.

“I got you,” I said. “I got you. Don’t let go.”

I carried her to the door. The water was at my waist inside the cabin.

Behind us the plane was groaning, metal twisting, bolts popping, the sound of something massive and expensive deciding it was done.

I got her through the door and onto the raft.

She grabbed the sides, looked at me, then past me at the plane.

I watched her understand what was happening.

Her face changed. Confusion to recognition to horror in about two seconds.

“Quest—”

“Don’t look at it. Look at me. Only at me.”

I climbed onto the raft. The shift in weight tipped us sideways.

I grabbed the edge, steadied it, and pulled myself on.

The second my body cleared the plane I heard it go.

The windshield collapsed. The ocean rushed in.

The nose dropped, the tail rose, and the whole aircraft slid under the surface in one long, slow swallow.

The tail was the last thing to disappear.

The registration number hung above the waterline for a few seconds, November-Seven-Two-Quebec-Bravo, and then it was gone.

Twenty million dollars of airplane. The flight plan. The nav equipment. The radio that may or may not have sent my mayday to someone who may or may not have been listening. All of it gone. Swallowed by warm blue water that didn’t give a damn about who I was or what I owned.

Out here my name meant nothing. The ocean didn’t care who I was. I was just a man on a raft with the woman he loved, a baby who wasn’t born yet, a pocket knife, a first aid kit, and absolutely nothing else.

· · ·

“The baby.” Mehar’s voice cracked when she said it. “Quest, is the baby okay? Is she—can you—”

I put my hands over hers on her belly. Pressed gently. Waited.

Three seconds. Five. The longest five seconds of my life, and I’d had some long ones.

Staring down the barrel of a gun long. Watching the casino doors burst open and the Vipers walk in with weapons long.

Sitting in a hospital waiting room while a doctor told me my son’s blood cells were killing him long.

Then I felt it. A kick. Small, definite, real. Our baby pressing against my palm like she was saying I’m here, I’m here, stop panicking, I’m right here.

“She’s good,” I said. I don’t know when I started calling the baby she. Somewhere between the crash and the raft it just came out and it felt true and I wasn’t going to question it. “Feel that? She’s moving. She’s strong. Like her mama.”

Mehar let out a sob that came from somewhere so deep it shook her whole body.

Not a cry. A release. I could tell her body had been holding terror inside it like a fist and the fist finally opened.

I pulled her against me and held her and let her shake because there was nothing to say.

We were alive. The baby was alive. And we were floating on a rubber raft in the middle of the Caribbean Sea with no idea if anyone on earth knew we were here.