Chapter 4
Four
Y’all remember when we sent boys to Jupiter to get more stupider? Well, they’re back, and it worked.
—Dru to Apollo
APOLLO
“Finnian.”
The way that her lips formed my name set off a chain reaction inside of me, causing my cock to swell and adrenaline to dump into my veins.
I liked the sound of my name on her lips.
I liked even more the way that she seemed so ruffled.
She’d gotten into the airport so late that I’d thought she might miss her flight.
As soon as she’d sped out of Eugene’s neighborhood, I’d been on my phone looking up everything that I could find about her.
Her name was Drusilla Noel Rossi.
She was thirty-two years old, from a five-member family—with tons of extended aunts and uncles—and had both a mother and a father who were well and truly the salt of the earth.
Her dad was a bus driver and a coach at the local high school. Her mom was a homemaker and volunteered as a substitute teacher at the same school district that her husband worked at.
Dru had two siblings.
Her sister was two years older than her and was engaged to be married to Eugene—at least was.
Romeo Rossi, Dru’s brother, however, was in prison for life for committing a crime that he was guilty of committing.
Romeo had walked in on his wife fucking another man.
Romeo had reacted accordingly and had beat the absolute shit out of the man. But the man had a weak constitution and had slid into a coma which he’d yet to come out of even five years later.
Romeo’s wife had lost her baby, and the judge that had been in control of the case had done what the public had wanted—sentenced him to prison after the jury had found him guilty.
The reason he hadn’t been able to get out of the charge was due to the premeditated way he’d gone about the beating.
There was no crime of passion on Romeo’s end.
He’d known about the affair for months and hadn’t cared until she’d stolen their entire life savings and put it into an offshore account.
She’d planned to take off with Romeo’s kid and Romeo’s life savings, and he hadn’t liked that very much.
Not that I could blame him or anything.
I wouldn’t have laughed in court, though, when the opposing counsel had pointed out that it was likely the affair partner would never wake up.
I wouldn’t want to spend the rest of my life in prison.
Dru, unlike her sister who had no prospects in life, and her life in prison brother—who had his act together before he’d been sentenced to life in prison—had gone to college right after she’d gotten out of high school.
She graduated with her bachelor’s in nursing and had been working at Dallas Memorial ever since.
The only real issue that I’d been able to find when it came to Dru was that she supported her brother and sister unfailingly.
She lent her sister money any time she needed it. She was at the prison in Huntsville every month like clockwork, and she never missed her scheduled time, even when she was sick.
She had no life outside of work, and that wasn’t a problem when she lived at a nice place since her sister had been the apartment manager at their place of residence.
However, her sister had quit when Eugene had asked her to marry him, and had left the apartment complex in the lurch. After that had happened, they’d been unwilling to allow Dru to continue living there and had her evicted.
Dru had moved into an apartment that she could afford while still paying her student loans and her car payment. She also put some money away each month, religiously, into her 401K.
She was so damn responsible that it was quite cute.
But that was how I’d spent the majority of my time waiting for her to show at the airport—after I’d confirmed that she was flying out tonight. I knew everything about her life that I could find on the internet.
I’d even hacked into the DMV and gotten her driving records and her car details.
Now all I had to do was get her to talk to me.
Which felt like pulling teeth.
Until the turbulence happened.
The flight attendant—a man that I was fully prepared to get fired the moment I got home—was on his way to drop the last of the trays into the rolling cart when the entire plane dropped what felt like fifty feet.
My belly was somewhere up near my ears when everyone’s leftover drinks went flying.
I somehow managed to catch both mine and my seatmate’s glasses to keep us from wearing them, but just barely.
“Holy crap!” Dru cried out.
The rest of the passengers had very similar reactions, but it was the flight attendant wearing leftover Greek salad and marinara that had my lips tipping up.
He peeled himself off the floor just as the seat belt sign went on and the pilot came over the speaker.
“Flight attendants, take your seats,” the pilot ordered. “Passengers, prepare for a bumpy ride. We hit a storm cell.”
And he wasn’t kidding.
The flight attendants worked frantically to get everything secured. Meanwhile, the now-empty glasses started to roll around the floor at our feet. A Coke can more than half full rolled around, spilling its contents as the plane started to pitch left and right.
I bent down just in time to lift Dru’s feet off the ground before the Coke spilled all over her bare toes.
“Oh,” she breathed, eyes wide. “Thanks.”
She sounded breathless.
And freaked out.
I finished what was left of my Coke, then placed it in the seat beside me before I offered her her Dr Pepper back.
She downed it, chugging it like a beer, and followed suit.
“That rude one is wearing my leftover dinner,” she whispered.
“Deserves it,” I muttered. “Been rude all flight. It’s not my fault he decided to be rude to you. Karma has a way of making it full circle.”
She nodded. “Funny how that works. I have a sister-in-law that’s experiencing it now.”
“What do you mean?”
She started rambling, letting all of her words just tumble out of her mouth at a million miles an hour.
It was good to know she got chatty when she got scared.
“My sister-in-law cheated on my brother,” she whispered.
“He caught them together and he hurt the guy that she was cheating with so bad that he’s been in a coma for five years.
The man’s father was a preacher at our local church, and Romeo was deemed a pariah.
My sister-in-law lost the baby she was carrying.
But that would’ve happened anyway. She had an ectopic pregnancy and it exploded her fallopian tube.
They weren’t able to save anything, and she had a complete hysterectomy.
She had a mountain of medical bills, and then she couldn’t access the money she stole from my brother to pay off those medical bills.
No one knows how to access it, actually.
Romeo’s asked me to figure it out, but I have no clue where to start. You know any hackers?”
If she only knew.
“I tried finding it for a while.” Her eyes turned to me. “But I have no clue about anything computer-related. I can barely sign into my computer at work. They make me change my password too much, and I can never remember it.”
I loved the way she rambled.
Would she ramble when she finally learned who I was?
“Are we going to die?” she whispered.
That I didn’t like.
“Pilots are competent people,” I said, trying to soothe her worries.
But, at this point, I wasn’t quite so sure about the pilot’s competency when we continued to pitch from side to side.
She was being jerked around so much that I reached out and caught her hip on the opposite side of her and anchored her to my side.
She wrapped her arms around my arm, fear plain as day in her eyes, and gasped out a, “Thanks.”
Her voice sounded so damn breathy that despite the way we were in danger, my cock still managed to fill with blood.
It wanted her.
“Oh god.”
The plane went down even farther, and this time I had no chance of holding on to her or even myself.
The plane dropped significantly, and the oxygen masks deployed.
“Fuck,” I breathed as I reached up and pulled the mask down to cover Dru’s face.
She looked at me, eyes super wide, and said, “You were supposed to do yours first.”
I winked at her. “I like to live dangerously.”
That was the truth.
I liked to live dangerously.
I liked even more to live life free.
That was why I’d joined the Truth Tellers MC.
I liked the way they went through life. I liked their morals and values, and I knew that I could offer them my services.
I’d been lost in life, confused and in despair after my parents had died tragically in, ironically, a plane accident. Webber had taken one look at my lost self at eighteen and declared that I was his new mechanic. Little did he know that I’d had a job that’d been paying my way for years.
I’d taken that job, though.
Webber, our club president, had fed, clothed, and housed me for a solid year before I’d finally admitted that I was fully capable of doing it myself.
Our dynamic had switched, but I’d stayed, entrenched in the life the Truth Tellers had provided for me.
Now, there was nowhere else I’d rather be.
And now that the plane was literally fighting to stay aloft in the sky, I was man enough to admit that I needed the Truth Tellers.
If we made it out of this alive, I was going to quit politics.
I’d done what I’d set out to accomplish when I’d first started—getting rid of the disgusting filth that had been complicit in the abuse of my son.
I had no reason to be there anymore.
There was no way that I could change anything by myself.
I needed to be at home.
And bonus, there was a certain lady, who was literally holding on to my arm, crying now, that would be there, too.
If we made it out of this…
I cut off that repeated thought and looked over at the woman at my side as I reached for my own oxygen mask and pulled it over my face.
We were spinning now.
A loud crack had me glancing out the window, and my entire stomach pitched sideways as I watched lightning hit the plane.
Horror continued to overwhelm me as I listened in terror as the sound of the engines just…stopped.
The loss of the sound was like a shock to my senses.
At first, I couldn’t comprehend what I’d been hearing, then it all came back like a horrific blow straight to the solar plexus.
“Holy fuck,” I breathed.
The words felt like they were torn straight from my soul.
“What?” she gasped.
“The engine’s not on!” I heard yelled from somewhere behind me. “It’s on fire!”
The pilot yet again came over the intercom.
He didn’t sound calm any longer.
“Passengers, we’ve lost an engine.” He took a deep breath. “And we’re missing the tip of our left wing.”
Nothing else could be heard after that.
It was pure chaos.
I don’t know what made me do it.
Something in my heart just told me to reach out and unbuckle her seat belt.
I left mine buckled and pulled her into my arms.
“Are we going to crash?” she asked just as I slammed my mouth down on hers.
It was stupid.
I should’ve left her where she was.
I should’ve done a lot of things differently, but if I was going to go down, then at least I’d know what she tasted like when the plane made impact.
“Prepare for emergency landing!”
I thrust her back into her seat and hastily buckled her in, then remembered a video that I’d seen a long time ago that pointed out that when we crash landed, first class usually died.
That was the last coherent thought I had for a while.
The next five minutes were the third worst of my life.
Things popped and crashed.
Steel tore like tinfoil.
The ground came up closer and closer until it wasn’t just “close” anymore, it was right upon us.
I didn’t remember the crash.
I only remembered the pain.
Then nothing.
When I woke up, I could see the sky—it was still dark and black, letting me know that it looked just as bad from the ground as it did from the sky—and I could hear water dripping.
I twisted, turning my head so that I could see to the right of me almost on reflex, and froze.
I was still strapped into my seat, but the seat next to me was gone.
Hell, the entire plane was gone.
I was in my seat, but there were no other seats around me any longer.
There was a bunch of twisted steel and broken trees, though.
The trees were all bent at awkward angles, and it took me a second for my brain to comprehend that the kind of damage that was done here wouldn’t have been caused by just a plane hitting the ground.
Everything that I could see for what felt like forever was nothing but emulsified trees.
Trees were uprooted. Ripped in half. Split down the middle.
A tornado.
Not only had we been in a plane crash, but we’d also been in a tornado?
What the hell were the odds?
“Finnian.”
Finnian.
I swallowed hard and turned the other direction, ignoring the screaming pain in my neck, and found her lying on my left.
Still strapped in.
That’s when I realized that there was a twisted bar of metal that was curled around and over my legs, suspending her in midair on my left side about a foot off the ground.
“What the fuck,” I breathed.
“We went through a tornado…”
“We survived a plane crash,” I finished for her.
She nodded, her necklace slipping free from underneath her shirt and falling to suspend in the air between us.
It was a silver chain with a soccer ball charm on the end.
“You play soccer?” I rasped.
“Co-ed.” She nodded her head.
“Are you any good?” I wondered.
She smiled, and that’s when I saw the blood in her teeth. “Not really. But the guys from the hospital need girls to fill the team, and I’m the only other one they know willing to play with them.”
I reached up and caught it in between two dirt-covered fingers before asking, “Did you witness us in this tornado?”
She nodded, causing the necklace to slip from between my fingers. “Yeah.”
I bit my lip. “Was it cool?”
She nodded.
“Are you ready for me to try to unhook you?”
“That would be grand.” She grimaced. “My hips are screaming at me. I’ve been hoping you were alive for about ten minutes now.”
My lips quirked and I braced myself to sit up.
Nothing hurt too bad, so I scooted over.
That, however, did hurt.
But not badly enough to stop me from getting her down.
Ignoring the pain in my left hip, I reached up and pulled the silver tab on her seat belt.
What I was not prepared for was her landing directly on top of me.
She landed on me with a squeak, and I grunted and fell back to the ground, my eyes once again on the black sky.
“What are the odds, do you think, of a plane crash, a tornado, and then a second tornado?” I asked curiously.
“Three for three is pretty impossible statistically,” she admitted. “Now, I’m not saying I’m the best in the world when it comes to statistics, but I really feel confident enough in this to say that a second tornado isn’t going to happen.”
That’s when the entire sky went green.
“That doesn’t look good, does it?”
She rolled off of me so she could lie by my side and stare at the green sky.
“No.”