Chapter 10
Callum Kelly broketwo of my ribs when I was nineteen. I thought my brother was going to kill him after it happened even though it wasn’t exactly his fault. We’d been sparring, and I specifically told him not to go easy.
Even at that age, I was an excellent fighter.
I didn’t start juijitsu training until the following year, but I could box as well as any of my cousins. I made sure of that. In the process, I endured any number of injuries, but I’d never broken a rib until that day. The pain was excruciating. I couldn’t do anything without searing pain lancing me from the inside out. Simply breathing hurt. The misery was relentless and took forever to heal.
I wouldn’t wish that pain on anyone, yet I’m suddenly glad for those broken ribs. While I feel like my chest has caved in, I know it’s probably only bruised because the pain is nothing like I felt when my ribs were actually broken. It may seem like a silly thing to be grateful for, but it’s one less thing to worry about, and right now, my worry list is growing by the second.
I take in a slow, shaky breath and open my eyes.
I’m on my back, not quite upside down but at an angle. It’s still light out, though dim inside the mangled plane. I look over for Renzo and realize a thick branch has impaled the plane between us.
A flash flood of fear threatens to drown me.
“Renzo? Oh God, Renzo, please be alive.” My trembling fingers jab at the harness release, trying to free myself to see to the other side of the cockpit, though I’m terrified of what I might find. When I get both buckles unclasped, I spin around on my back and hold the steering yoke to peer over the branch. Renzo is unconscious but breathing, and best of all, he isn’t impaled by anything.
A shuddering exhale wracks my body.
I’ve seen men beaten to a bloody pulp. I even saw my father’s blood-soaked body not long after he’d been killed. I’m no stranger to death, but I can feel in my aching bones that seeing Renzo’s eyes wide and lifeless would have wrecked me. It would be a test of strength I would have failed.
“Hey, big guy. Wake up.” I lean over and pat his scruffy cheek. “Come on, Ren. I’m gonna need you to wake up now.”
I pat him again, this time with more oomph. His brows draw together, creasing his forehead.
“That’s it, big guy. Wake up. We need to get out of here.”
When his eyes open, I’m struck at how blue they are. We have loads of blue-eyed people in my family, including myself, but I’d swear that somehow Renzo’s eyes are more pure blue than any I’ve ever seen.
His hand lifts to his head, causing him to wince. “Jesus, we’re alive.”
“For the moment. The sun’s going down, though, and it’s not going to get any warmer. We need to figure out a plan.”
He nods, still a bit dazed, then unbuckles his harness. When he shifts upright, the entire plane creaks and groans. We both go inhumanly still.
“The fuck was that?” he breathes.
“I’m not sure.” I look out the windshield at the thick wall of pine branches. Pinpricks of light are all that can be seen. Leaning to the side, I try to peer out the side window. The crack of a breaking branch pierces the quiet a second before one side of the plane lurches downward several inches. The movement gives me the view I need to see that our situation is worse than I imagined, though how that’s possible is beyond me.
“Fuck.” I hiss. “Okay, so we’re not on the ground quite yet.”
“What do you mean not on the ground?”
“You remember Jurassic Park—the original one with the car in the tree?”
“Are you fucking kidding me?”
“We need to get out of here, fast.”
“How?” he barks back at me quietly as if the sound might disturb gravity. “If we move, the whole thing might fall.”
“What do you propose we do instead? Sit here and die?”
“Maybe. We might be better off,” he grumbles. “Jesus Christ you are pure chaos, you know that? Never in my goddamn life have I been around someone who attracts trouble like you.”
“You wait one fucking minute,” I spit back at him, my eyes narrowing to furious slits. “I could say the same thing about you. None of this shit ever happened to me until you stomped into my life. Conner was supposed to be the one dealing with those damn guns but noooo. You threw a hissy fit and demanded me. Tell me how that’s my fault.”
“Take us with you—that’s how. If it wasn’t for you, they’d probably have left us in that warehouse, and at least we’d be a hell of a lot warmer.”
“No, we wouldn’t. You know why? Because we’d be dead. Those guys were gonna kill us.” I’m so spitting mad I could lean over that branch and strangle the man. How dare he blame this all on me?
“You don’t know what they were gonna do because you never even gave them a chance. You practically begged them to take us.”
“And what was your great plan, oh Perfect One? Because I can’t recall you contributing a goddamn thing to the situation.”
Renzo’s jaw muscles clench so tight, I half expect to hear a tooth crack. “Sometimes the best thing to do is nothing.” He swipes his arm to the side to accentuate his point. The entire plane groans before dropping another few inches.
“Shit. We need to get out of here,” he mumbles.
“Sure you don’t want to do nothing?” I mutter back while slinking my way past the branch and carefully moving toward the exit. With the plane almost upside down, I have to scale the walls to keep from falling toward the tail end, which would be nasty for so many reasons, including the heap of mangled bodies piled at the bottom. I try to ignore them. No matter how tough you are, dismembered corpses are still unsettling.
The door is to my left and above me. I’m not sure getting it open is possible, even if I could get to it. Down to my right, I see an opening in the middle of the cabin. The plane bent at some point, cracking open the body on one side.
“We can slip out there. I think that will be better than trying to get the door open.” I shift my body to start in that direction, then remember something. “Wait!”
Renzo freezes midway through exiting the cockpit.
“There was a first-aid kit somewhere up there. I saw it when I was moving the pilot. Look around. We might need it.”
He stares at me for a second as if weighing his options, then retreats backward. “Got it.”
He stashes the canvas bag down his jacket and continues to follow me. Cargo ties along the walls give me the purchase I need to lower myself gently to the gaping hole on one side. I look back to see how Renzo is managing, concerned that he has nearly one hundred pounds on me and might struggle with the maneuver, but he surprises me with his agility.
I poke my head outside. “There’s enough branches within reach that I can scale my way over to the tree across from us. Follow me.”
I step outside, a gust of frigid air penetrating my jeans as if I wasn’t wearing anything. If I thought it was cold in the plane, that was nothing. We both have jackets, mine more insulated than Renzo’s, but nothing suited to this weather. I have no idea how we’re going to keep from getting hypothermic.
“One disaster at a time, Shae,” I whisper to myself.
“What?”
“Nothing,” I mutter. The last thing I want to do is give him more things to blame on me.
Once I’ve made my way to the trunk of the tree, Renzo squeezes himself through the jagged metal opening and onto the branch. It bends with his weight, and we both still. Slowly, my hulking companion eases himself toward me with his hands firmly gripping the branch above him for balance. After I know he’s made it out, I take a slow, cleansing breath, then squat down to lower myself to the next set of branches.
We’re approximately twenty feet in the air. With a bank of snow beneath us, dropping might not be terrible, but I’d rather not risk a broken leg. I’m standing one level down from Renzo when a distant whooshing fills my ears like a raging river. I peer up at him, unease filling me.
“What the hell is that?”
“I think it’s … the wind.”
A wall of arctic air sweeps through the trees as if in confirmation. Branches sway all around us, along with a dusting of snow swept up into the sky.
We both cling to the trunk of the tree. The gust isn’t strong enough to knock us down, but it’s plenty strong to shake lose the dangling plane. A cacophony of cracks and moans announces its sudden descent toward the ground. Like a ball on a Plinko board bouncing off prongs on its way to the bottom, the plane plummets in a jerking motion as it hits branches on its way down. The cockpit touches first with the back of the plane bending in half at the seam, crumpling over itself in a mangled heap of metal.
I watch awestruck as the puff of snow around it settles, then peer up wide-eyed at Renzo. “You think it’ll explode?”
“If it hasn’t already, I’d say probably not.”
I nod, praying he’s right.
Wordlessly, we both resume our descent. Once we’re both safely on the ground, we walk an arcing circle around the plane.
“We could use it as shelter if we could get inside,” I suggest, though I can’t see a way in, and I’m still worried the thing could burst into flames at any moment.
“I’m not sure there is an inside left,” Renzo adds.
A weary sigh slips past my lips. “Okay, the plane isn’t an option. We need to find someplace to escape the cold for the night.”
“I suggest we go south toward the border and warmer temps. There’s bound to be more towns that way, too.” He points to his left.
“How do you know that’s south?” The sun sets in the west, but we’re far enough north that the sun is behind the horizon and makes shadows hard to read.
“Trees tend to grow thicker and longer branches where they get the most light. That’s south up here.”
I look around at the trees above me, and I’ll be damned if there isn’t a subtle pattern of more growth on one side. “How the hell did you know that?”
“My grandmother.” His answer surprises me enough to draw my gaze back to him. “She loved plants. Had a greenhouse in the backyard that I loved to play in as a kid.”
“She teach you any arctic survival techniques?” I ask with a touch of humor, needing to lighten the mood.
He shakes his head somberly.
“Pity.” I shove my hands in my pockets and start our trek through the knee-deep snow.