Chapter Sixteen
The rotors bit into the storm like they were chewing on broken glass.
Crew kept his hands locked on the controls anyway.
Every instinct in him screamed that he shouldn’t be here. That he didn’t belong behind a set of sticks again. That the sky didn’t want him. That the sky took what it wanted and left men standing in the wreckage, watching flames eat through everything they’d trusted.
But Fern was out there, somewhere ahead, swallowed by the mountain and rain and whatever sick game Reed had decided to play. And he couldn’t afford to listen to the doubts.
Crew’s jaw tightened until his teeth ached.
His shoulders were rigid, as if tension alone could keep the helicopter together.
The instrument panel glowed and blinked, steady little lights that should have been comforting, but all he saw was fire.
A jet’s cockpit. Alarms screaming. The impossible quiet after.
His ejection handle yanked. The violent punch of the seat. The open air ripping him apart.
And Conner—
No parachute.
No second silhouette drifting down beside him. Just empty sky where his copilot should’ve been.
His throat closed as the memory tried to fill him up, to take over.
Not now.
He forced his focus outward to the wind and the constant fight to keep the bird stable as the gusts shoved at them like the hand of a furious giant. Rain slapped the windshield in sheets, the wipers struggling to keep up. The world beyond the glass turning into a smear of gray.
Beside him, Upchurch—Church—sat braced, harness straps taut across his chest, eyes moving between the sky and Crew’s hands.
“You’re good,” Church said, voice low and steady in Crew’s headset. “You’ll find her.”
Crew didn’t answer. He couldn’t. If he opened his mouth, something broken might fall out.
This was a short flight—that was the cruelest part. It wasn’t long enough to settle into it. It wasn’t long enough for him to find a rhythm.
It was just long enough for his brain to do what it always did when he got close to the thing that had shattered him. It began listing all the ways this could go wrong.
A sudden drop in visibility.
A gust that snapped them sideways into the trees.
A mechanical failure.
Another man dead, only this time it wouldn’t be a system failure, it would be because Crew couldn’t keep it together.
His heart hammered against his ribs, too fast, too loud. His palms were sweating on the controls, making them slick. He swallowed hard, staring at the narrowing gap in the clouds where the mountain rose ahead like a dark spine.
Fern.
That name was the tether for his mind. His heart and soul.
Fern was the only thing keeping him from slipping.
The helicopter lurched in a hard gust.
Crew corrected automatically—hands steady but mind straining, his body doing what it had been trained to do even while the rest of him tried to flee.
Then his phone rang.
The sound was wrong in here—too normal, too civilian, too out of place in the roar of the blades and the howl of wind.
Crew’s eyes flicked down instinctively, a brief pulse of panic at the idea of taking a hand off the controls.
Church leaned across him without hesitation. “Stay steady. Let me answer.”
Crew didn’t argue. He couldn’t afford to.
Church yanked the phone from Crew’s pocket, thumbed the screen and slapped it on speaker so Crew wouldn’t have to turn his head.
“This is Upchurch.”
There was a pause. Static. Wind.
Then a voice filtered through, unfamiliar and too calm.
“Put Crew Diaz on.”
Something in Crew’s chest turned to ice.
Church’s eyes sharpened. “Who is this?”
A soft laugh came through the speaker. “Doesn’t matter. He’s going to hear me.”
Crew’s grip tightened until his knuckles ached. His pulse spiked so hard he tasted metal.
“Crew,” the voice purred. “You there?”
His mind performed a sick, sinking roll.
The cadence of the voice, something about the tone…it reminded him of Conner.
Church’s gaze snapped to Crew’s profile. “You know him.”
Crew stared at the horizon, fighting the tremor that wanted to crawl into his hands. “It’s Reed.”
The static crackled, then Reed’s voice morphed into something ugly.
“I’ve got her,” Reed said in a sing-song, almost delighted. “Come and get her. Come and get her if you can. Come and get her, Wolf.”
The nickname hit like a punch.
Crew’s vision narrowed. His ears rang around the sound of his own breathing.
“Where is she?” His voice came out rough, scraping, like it had to claw its way free.
Reed laughed again. “Oh, now you want to talk. Now you want to be a hero.”
Crew forced the helicopter through another gust, correcting with controlled movements that didn’t match the violence inside him.
“Tell…me…where…she…is.” Each word cut like a blade.
“She’s right where she needs to be. Waiting. Just like my brother waited to become a pilot. Shame he can’t be one anymore.”
Crew’s throat tightened.
Conner’s face flashed behind his eyes—grinning, cocky, young in a way that made the loss even worse.
“This isn’t about her.” Crew’s jaw flexed. “You want me? Fine. But you leave her out of it.”
Reed’s voice snapped. “Don’t you dare say that! Don’t you dare act like you get to decide what this is about!”
Church shifted in his seat, tension rolling off him, but he kept his mouth shut. Letting Crew handle it.
Crew swallowed down the burn in his throat. “I didn’t decide any of it. I didn’t decide the malfunction. I didn’t decide who lived and who didn’t.”
Reed hissed out a breath. “Must’ve been nice. You got to eject. You got to float down. You got to go on living. Sure, you wouldn’t have decided that.”
The words dug deep, right into the dark, ugly place Crew kept his guilt.
He felt it like a physical thing, a hand closing around his ribs.
“I didn’t go on.” His voice pitched low, controlled. “I’ve been stuck in that cockpit every damn day since it happened.”
For a second, the line went quiet except for the underlying hiss of static and wind.
Then Reed’s voice came back with a wicked lash. “Liar.”
Crew’s teeth ground. “Conner was my brother too, goddammit.”
Another pause—longer this time.
Crew’s mind went to Conner’s laugh and the way he’d slapped Crew’s shoulder after training runs and countless beers to celebrate between trainings.
Reed’s breathing came through the speaker, uneven, as if he hated that what Crew said hit home.
Then his voice turned harsh again, as if he had to shove the softness away before it infected him.
“You don’t get to claim him,” Reed bit out. “You don’t get to mourn him like you’ve earned that right. You walked away.”
Crew’s chest burned. “I watched him die.” His statement was flat, brutal truth. “I watched the sky stay empty where his chute should’ve been.”
Church’s eyes flicked to him, a hint of something like respect and sorrow.
Reed made a sound between a laugh and a choke.
“You come up here.” Reed’s voice trembled with rage. “You come get her. If you’re really the man everyone thinks you are. If you’re really—” His voice broke, then snapped back into that sick sing-song. “Come and get her, Wolf.”
The line went dead.
Crew’s stomach dropped as if the helicopter had fallen out of the sky.
“Fuck,” he breathed.
Church leaned forward, scanning the landscape below as they reached the break in the trees they were looking for. “That’s it, Crew.”
Crew didn’t answer. His brain was working too fast, too alert, mapping what Reed was doing and what he wasn’t. Reed didn’t want Fern dead. Reed wanted Crew broken. Reed wanted control.
The helicopter bucked violently as they crested the tree line. Wind slapped them sideways.
Crew corrected hard, sweat slick under his hands. His heartbeat thundered, PTSD snapping at his heels like a rabid dog, trying to drag him backward into the past.
Not now.
His eyes locked on to the clearing below—trees swaying wildly, rain turning the ground into a muddy blur. The cabin was half hidden, its roof slick and dark, a fragile thing clinging to earth that no longer wanted to hold it.
A rumble rolled through the air—deep and ominous.
Crew’s gaze snapped to the slope beyond.
Mud was moving.
Not a trickle. Not even a slide.
A wall.
Church’s head whipped around. “You see that?”
Crew’s mind went cold and clear. “The cabin’s about to go.”
He pulled the helicopter into a tight circle, fighting the wind, the rotors biting the air as the gusts tried to shove them off course. His pulse spiked, but his hands stayed steady.
They had seconds.
Church unlatched his harness. “Let me go in,” he said. “Lower me in the basket. I’ll get Fern.”
“No.” The word came out like a growl. “I’ll get her.”
Church grabbed his shoulder, hard enough to cut through everything. “Listen to me. If you land, we might not get off this mountain alive. You need to keep this bird steady. You need to keep us in the air.”
Crew’s throat tightened. He stared down at the clearing, at the cabin, at the slope beginning to give.
Fern. The precious love of his life.
A thousand thoughts tried to stampede through him—Conner’s death, Reed’s voice, the storm, the fear of failing again. He couldn’t—
He couldn’t lose another person.
He couldn’t lose her.
He forced a breath into his lungs and forced himself to think like a pilot, like a man who kept others alive. And he knew.
Church was right.
“Fine,” Crew bit out. The word tasted like blood. “Go.”
Church’s mouth tightened, but he nodded. Professional. Calm. The kind of man Crew used to trust with his life without thinking.
And could trust again.
Church clipped into the basket harness with fast, practiced movements while Crew held them in a hover that felt like balancing on the edge of a knife. The wind clawed at the helicopter, pushing, shoving, demanding failure.
Crew refused.
He adjusted, compensating, muscles locked, sweat on his spine. “Hurry!” he snapped.
Church crouched at the open door, rain slamming into him. He looked back once. “You keep it steady.”
Crew’s jaw popped. “Just bring her back.”