Chapter 30 Emery
EMERY
I’m not scared of heights, flying, or even skydiving. But HALO jumping is an entirely different beast. We’re over twenty thousand feet in the air and we’re not supposed to pull our chutes until at least thirty-one hundred feet in order to avoid detection.
And we are by no means professionals. Not even close.
“Ready?” Erik calls out through the headsets. A whirr of air thrashes us as he opens the drop door at the back of the plane.
We all give him a sharp nod and hold tightly to our safety lines attached to the drop line above.
“Three, two, one,” the lieutenant counts down and Thomas dives off the end. Gage does a backflip, while Wraith and Damian walk off the edge the way most soldiers would.
I keep to their heels, and once I’m at the ledge and about to jump, Cameron pushes me. A gasp tears from my throat, but it’s quickly replaced with laughter as my body descends at high acceleration.
Cameron is falling at my side in the next moment.
I can’t see his face past his oxygen mask and black air-tight goggles over his eyes.
His lovely voice filters in through my headset.
“I wouldn’t have pushed you if you hadn’t taken so long to jump.
” His sarcasm is blatant and it tugs a grin from my lips.
“Just remember that I’ll get you back for it,” I reply airily. I hope he can hear the smile on my lips.
“For the love of God, can you two just get on your own channel already?” Gage complains, but he sounds like he finds it entertaining.
He knows as well as we do that we can’t have our radios off of the group channel during this training.
There’s too much at stake in case something goes wrong. We need open communication.
Cameron pointedly looks down below us and flips Gage off before holding three gloved fingers up to me, indicating that he wants me to go to channel three.
We still have a while to go so I entertain him and switch channels. Thomas is going to flip shit about it. I giggle to myself.
“You know we can’t do this,” I tease him.
Cameron laughs and the sound is rich and free of worry.
We’ve been a little off the deep end lately, but how else are we supposed to cope with everything that’s been going on?
If this is all the time we get, then I want to enjoy it.
This adrenaline rush is certainly no different. I’ve never felt so alive.
“We can do whatever the fuck we want, Em. What are they going to do? Kill us?” he jokes, and it shouldn’t be funny at all because we both know the grim truth of it.
“Pfft!” I try to hold in the laugh to no avail. “You can’t say that! What if someone’s listening in?” He actually shrugs in the air, and it brings the giddiness right back to my heart.
“Don’t pull your parachute too low, okay?” His voice stiffens back up. I stare at his blacked-out mask.
“Yeah, I won’t,” I reassure him, though I’m not sure he buys it. “I’m changing back to the other channel.”
He only nods before doing the same.
“Four thousand feet. Get ready to deploy,” Thomas says the moment I switch to the main channel. I move into position, distancing myself from Cameron enough that our parachutes won’t tangle.
The rest of the squad does the same, moving into the formation we spent all morning practicing on the ground.
Adrenaline spikes in my bloodstream as I watch the ground inch closer and closer. It feels like oxygen is filling my lungs twice as fast up here.
My fingers fidget over the rip cord.
Thomas’s voice comes over the radio once more. “Thirty-one hundred feet. Deploy!” He pulls his cord first, sticking to the training as planned, but the rest of us hold out longer, seeing who’s going to be the last one falling.
“Fuck this,” Gage says as he pulls his cord.
Damn, he could only hold out for a few hundred more feet. I silently judge him.
Damian’s head moves to each of us before he quickly pulls his next without saying anything.
Cameron’s voice fills my headset. “Pull your rip cord, Emery.” I know he won’t lay off me until I do, so I pretend to shift my hand up to tear at it. Cameron pulls his, and I can instantly hear the panic in his voice when he sees that I was faking. “Emery!”
Sorry, Cam. I smile and bite my lip with the excitement that thrums through my veins.
I turn my head to stare at Wraith. His black helmet glares the sun and I know he’s doing the same with his eyes beneath it. “Twenty-four hundred feet.” He sounds as jittery with terror as I feel.
“Waiting on you, princess,” I snap back.
“Emery, this isn’t a fucking game. Deploy your parachute!” Cameron sounds angrier than I’ve ever heard him. It does something to me, excites me even more than I already am. Heat pools in my core. Oh, this is new. I swallow the lewd thoughts of what Cameron would be like in punishment sex.
Wraith curses and hurriedly pulls his rip cord.
I laugh as I wait one second longer before pulling mine. The rush of being yanked up by the backpack makes blood race through my veins and thunder through my head.
Cameron starts shouting again over the headset, so I turn off my receiver, smiling guiltily because I know he’s going to be furious with me, and I’m hoping he’ll do something about it.
I’m enjoying this too much.
It reminds me of the good times that Reed and I used to have.
God, we were truly the worst. We’d go from reading poetry and history out on the eighty-acre lawn to stealing one of my father’s old sports cars and driving down to Malory’s old abandoned barn to see how long it took for the world to notice we were missing.
By that time Reed had already found the bunker my father built there. Reed was fond of them. He was so much smarter than me and loved to find out the passcodes from spying on Greg when he was unsuspecting.
Carlton, Reed’s father, wanted him to go into engineering like his forefathers, but I knew Reed would never follow one path.
There was always something dark within him, and he took to me because he saw some of the same shadows lurking in my gaze.
He was tired of people who were too wary around him, and he saw curiosity in my eyes when I didn’t mean to show it.
I smile at the past, enjoying the moment of pure silence as my feet hit the ground.
Cameron snuffs out that moment when he stomps over to me, unclips my helmet before throwing it to the ground, and glares into my eyes.
He’s already tossed his helmet, and his wild hair only makes him look angrier as he grabs me by my shoulders and shakes me enough to make my heart leap into my throat.
“What the fuck, Em! That was way too low. If there had been trees or a hill you weren’t aware of, a goddamn gust of heavy wind…” He inhales laboriously, sweat beading down his jaw.
Oh shit. I try not to focus on how hot he looks right now, out of breath and pissed off. He instantly picks up on my thoughts as I suck in my lower lip.
His anger vanishes instantly and his sage eyes flicker with hunger.
“Fucking brat,” he murmurs, bringing his lips down over mine and kissing me hard. Our parachutes are still attached to our backs and everyone is watching, but Cameron couldn’t give a shit less. “You make me fucking crazy, you know that?” he says in a lethal tone over my lips.
I inhale his birchwood scent and press my thighs together as need heats my core. “You’re already insane, remember?” I whisper back.
He chuckles, and what a dark, tasteful thing it is as he kisses me once more, sucking in my lower lip and biting it. “I guess you make me sane then, and somehow I find that a terrible mindset to be in.”
I laugh and shove him back playfully. “Why is that?” I unclip my parachute pack and unzip my jacket. The sun and adrenaline have effectively made me sweat my ass off and the idea of a shower with Cameron sounds like the exact thing I need right now.
“Because all I seem to do is worry incessantly about you.” His voice is smooth as he lets his pack slip from his shoulders and fall to the ground.
The others move around behind him, talking to us, I’m certain, but they are a blur and their words don’t meet my ears. All I see is Cameron, sweaty with a wild glint to his eyes.
Two hands come down over his shoulders and break the trance between us.
Gage shakes Cameron’s shoulders. “I thought you were going to fucking lose your shit again!” Then Gage looks at me, hardly containing his amusement before muttering, “I’ve never heard him that pissed off before.
” He laughs. “Not even when he’s psycho killing and throwing eyeballs. ”
Damian’s eyes go wide and he gives me a horrified look. “And you like this guy?”
“Hey,” Cameron snarls and Damian flinches, hiding behind Wraith.
Thomas shouts at us. “That was dangerous!” I assume he’s talking to all of us who ignored his deployment order, but he stares hollowly at me more than the rest of them.
I shrug. “The lower the better, right?”
“There will be buildings and trees,” Damian mumbles quietly, but I hear him and shoot him a scowl. He smirks before slipping past Cameron to stand beside me and nudges me with his elbow.
Lieutenant Erik parachuted down on the return loop and lands twenty feet to the groups’ left. Before he can come over here and yell at us I quickly look at Wraith. “I won your dumb contest,” I gloat while there’s still time.
He considers me emptily for a beat before grinning and crossing his arms. “I let you win.”
Damian stifles a laugh and mutters, “Didn’t you say you were an instructor too? I can’t believe you lost your own trade.”
“More like battle of will.” Wraith sounds annoyed.
Erik pulls off his helmet as he reaches us.
“Which one of you deployed at two thousand feet?” His eyes raze over us.
I hesitantly lift my arm. Erik takes me in and smiles.
“I want everyone to get comfortable deploying that low. We’ll have a better chance at evading detection from their defense systems.”
That earns me a collective look from everyone. Flat stares that are not at all impressed.