Chapter 2
Santi
The sudden lack of combustion is deafening. The right engine failed minutes ago. Now the left engine chokes out, leaving the helicopter a dead weight beneath the storm. The canvas of my shoulder strap digs into my collarbone as gravity takes command of the airframe.
The forest canopy rushes upward to meet the glass.
The sheer velocity makes the terrain blur into a solid wall of ice and wood.
The wind howls through the hairline fractures forming in the windshield.
The temperature inside the cabin plummets instantly.
The smell of burning oil and electrical wire fills the tight space.
Reese holds back a scream.
She wrestles the cyclic with brutal efficiency.
One hand works the collective while her boots fight the pedals, forcing the helicopter to obey for a few more seconds.
Her arms strain, tendons standing out starkly beneath her skin.
She fights the descent, wrestling a two-ton coffin away from a sheer granite cliff and aiming us toward the only patch of dense timber that might cushion the impact.
I watch every micro-adjustment she makes from the co-pilot seat, still and strapped in beside her, as she defies death.
Before the engines choked, my mind was anchored three states away.
I was locked inside the fortified walls of the Costa compound in Chicago.
The compound holds more women than it used to.
The fortress my brothers built out of grief smells of bread and perfume and gun oil.
The basement war room. The glowing screens.
The dead man's signature on the financial ledger.
The intelligence file held the key to the operation, but that problem belongs to another day. Survival eclipses betrayal.
The nose of the helicopter clips the first enormous pine.
The tree snaps like a dry matchstick. The sound is deafening. Wood splinters and tears through the aluminum hull. The helicopter yaws hard to the right. Reese corrects the spin with a full-body pull on the controls. We hit the second tree. Then the third. The tail boom shears away.
The world turns upside down into a blender of snow, splintering glass, and shrieking metal.
The fuselage slams into the earth. The impact is a brutal, bone-shattering collision of momentum and solid rock.
The safety harness bites into my shoulder.
My head snaps forward. Darkness edges my vision.
The cabin rolls violently through the deep snow, crushing brush and snapping small trunks until the battered metal tube finally slams to a halt against a massive boulder.
The ringing in my ears is the only sound.
It is the kind of quiet that follows a slaughter. Slowly, it fades, replaced by the hiss of hot metal melting the deep snow packed against the smashed windows.
I blink. I scan my body. My gold watch is scratched but intact on my left wrist, the second hand sweeping smoothly across the dial in stark contrast to the destruction around me. My lean, defined muscles ache with a deep, throbbing heat, but nothing is broken. I turn my head.
I catch my reflection in the cracked glass of the altimeter gauge hanging loose from the panel.
Dark hair heavily laced with stark silver streaks.
A sharp salt-and-pepper beard masking the hard set of my face.
A cold, calculating stare looks back at me.
I look as I did when I boarded this flight. Undamaged.
Then I look at her.
Reese is slumped forward against the control panel. Her safety harness holds her flush against the seat, but her head rests dangerously close to the smashed instruments. Blood drips steadily from her temple, pooling on the cracked console.
My chest tightens. A sharp knot of adrenaline locks behind my ribs.
Two decades ago, the world stopped spinning.
My Uncle Carlo was lured to a South Side warehouse meeting.
Executed without mercy. Dumped in an alley six blocks away like garbage.
Matteo found him in the rain. Identified him at the county morgue the next morning while the rain washed the blood from the streets.
I was twenty-one and still too young for that kind of ruin.
I sat in a sterile hospital hallway and waited for the news.
Then came the other bodies. My parents, in their car, on a road my mother had driven a thousand times.
Two locations. One night. I did not explode.
I did not scream. I absorbed the grief in silence and let it hollow me out.
I became the patient, silent watcher the Costa family required.
Present in every room. Alive in none of them. A dead man occupying my own life.
Until this exact second.
I unclip my harness. The metal buckle clicks loud in the dead quiet. I crawl forward through the twisted debris of the cabin. My knee crushes a rogue piece of navigational equipment. I do not care. The world narrows to the woman bleeding in the pilot seat.
I reach her. I lean over her shoulder. Her breath fogs faintly in the frozen air, fast and thin, but present.
Her scent hits me.
The sharp tang of altitude clings to her skin, mixed with the metallic smell of fresh blood.
Her chest rises and falls. Slowly. Evenly.
She breathes.
She kept us alive. She did not panic. She fought the sky and she won.
She survived.
The realization anchors itself in my mind. I have watched the world happen behind a sheet of bulletproof glass for years. I want this practical, fearless woman to open her eyes.
"Reese," I say. My voice is a flat scrape of sound. Rough and unused to the emotion coating it.
She groans. The sound is low in her chest. Her eyelashes flutter against her pale cheeks. She blinks slowly, staring at the wrecked dashboard in front of her. Instead of screaming, she assesses the damage with a slow turn of her head.
"Status," she croaks, her voice hoarse from the dry, freezing air.
"We crashed," I say calmly, hovering inches from her ear.
She scoffs. A weak, sarcastic sound that drives a spike of raw obsession straight through my spine. "No shit. Are you dead over there, Costa?"
"I am alive."
"Miraculous," she mutters. She tests the movement of her neck. She winces. "Are we burning?"
"Not yet."
"Good. Get the emergency bag from the aft compartment. We’re leaking fuel. I can smell it."
She orders me. She sits in the wreckage of her livelihood, bleeding from the head, and gives me a direct command. I need to get her out of this metal coffin before her adrenaline crashes and the shock sets in.
"I’m getting you out of this seat first," I state.
"I can unbuckle myself," she fires back, her hands reaching for the release latch on her harness. Her fingers slip on the metal. Her fine motor skills are compromised from the shock.
"Hold still," I command.
I reach around her. My chest brushes against the canvas of her jacket. I release the latch. The straps fall away. I grip her shoulders, assessing her stability beneath the winter gear. She is solid enough to hold steady under my grip without flinching.
"Can you move your legs?" I ask, my gaze scanning the crushed floorboards. The metal has crumpled inward, trapping her boots against the firewall.
She tugs her left leg. It comes free easily. She tugs her right. It catches on a jagged piece of aluminum.
"Stuck," she says flatly. No panic. Just a simple reporting of facts.
"Hold still."
I fold myself down into the cramped gap between the seats. The sharp edge of the console digs into my ribs as I wedge my hands beside her boot. I brace my shoulder against the seat frame and pull. The aluminum groans, then bends. The trap opens.
"Pull it out," I grunt.
She yanks her boot free. I straighten as far as the crushed ceiling allows, my head pressed against the buckled metal.
I offer her my hand. She looks at my palm for a fraction of a second.
A calculated assessment. She takes it. Her grip is strong.
I pull her up from the seat. She wavers on her feet as the vertigo of the crash catches up to her. She falls forward.
I catch her. I pull her flush against my chest.
She is solid against me. The top of her head tucks under my chin. Her hands press flat against my chest. She freezes against me for one long, suspended second.
“I’m fine,” she mutters, pushing back with a stubborn shove.
She steps away, creating distance. I let her go, but I track her.
"The go-bag is under the rear bench," she says, turning her back to me to inspect the jammed door mechanism. "Grab it. We have less than three minutes before the fumes ignite if a spark hits the electrical panel."
I turn and rip the rear bench seat from its mounts.
The canvas survival bag sits wedged beneath a pile of loose luggage.
I haul it out, slinging the strap over my shoulder.
My own tactical bag is still wedged between the front seats where I dropped it before impact.
I grab it on the way past—a clean change of clothes, two extra magazines, and an encrypted burner are not items I leave behind. I sling it over my other shoulder.
Reese kicks the mangled door of the cabin. It does not budge. The frame is warped.
"Step back," I order.
She glances at me over her shoulder. She reads the absolute focus in my gaze. She takes a single step back.
I face the jammed door. I do not test it. I do not assess the hinges. I lift my leg and drive my boot into the center of the warped aluminum. The metal shrieks. The latch shatters. The door blows outward, tearing free from the hinges and tumbling into the deep snow outside.
Brutal, sub-zero air floods the cabin. It steals the breath straight from my lungs.
The wilderness awaits. A vast, unbroken sea of white powder and towering evergreens. The sky is a bruised purple. The storm that brought us down is still raging, dumping flakes of snow into the open wound of the cabin.
"Ladies first," I say, my voice deadpan.
Reese glares at me. Her sassy, practical nature refuses to die, even in the face of disaster. She climbs over the twisted threshold and drops into the snow. The powder is waist-deep. She sinks immediately, floundering for a moment before finding her footing on a submerged branch.
I follow her out. The snow bites through my pants instantly. The wind attacks any exposed skin. I pull the survival bag higher onto my shoulder.
"We need to move uphill," Reese shouts over the howling wind. She points toward a dense cluster of massive pines about fifty yards away, sitting on an elevated ridge. "If the fuel catches, it will blow the debris down into the ravine. We need the high ground."
She does not wait for my approval. Exhausted and bleeding, she trudges through the waist-deep drifts, using her arms to part the snow like water. She leads. She breaks the trail.
I follow in her wake. I watch the sway of her hips fighting the resistance of the snow.
I watch the determined set of her shoulders.
I have spent my entire life surrounded by lethal men.
Men who kill for money, for territory, for respect.
None of them possess the unadulterated willpower of the curvy pilot currently dragging herself up a frozen mountain.
She is a force of nature. I will keep her breathing.
We reach the tree line. The canopy of the pines provides a slight reprieve from the snowfall.
The ground here is relatively bare, covered in dry, rust-colored needles.
Reese collapses against the trunk of the largest tree, chest heaving.
She swipes the back of her glove across her bleeding temple, leaving a crimson smear against the canvas.
I drop the survival bag at her feet. I stand over her.
"Sit down," I instruct.
"I need to check the manifest," she argues, panting heavily. "I need to know exactly what we have in the bag before it gets dark."
"Sit the fuck down, Reese." The command rips out of me, sharp and low.
She blinks. Her spine stiffens against the bark. She opens her mouth to argue, her sharp wit preparing a comeback, but she reads the absolute finality burning in my gaze. She slowly slides down the trunk until she is sitting on the dry needles.
I crouch in front of her. I pull the medical kit from the top pocket of the survival bag. I rip open a sterile gauze pad. I reach forward.
She flinches as my gloved hand approaches her face.
"I will not hurt you," I say quietly. The words carry a blood oath.
She stops moving. She tilts her chin up, exposing the long, pale line of her neck. She gives me access. The trust costs her something. I can see the fierce independence warring with the logical need for assistance in her eyes. I press the gauze firmly against the laceration on her temple.
She hisses through her teeth.
"The cut is shallow," I report, keeping the pressure steady. "The bleeding will stop soon."
"Good," she whispers. Her breath ghosts over my knuckles. The heat of it is a stark reminder of how fragile human biology is against this terrain.
A deafening groan echoes through the valley.
We both snap our heads toward the sound.
Down in the ravine, the broken fuselage of the helicopter shifts. The boulder that arrested our momentum slowly gives way under the sheer weight of the twisted metal. The ice beneath it cracks with a sound like a rifle shot.
We watch in absolute silence as the helicopter slides backward. Slowly at first. Then rapidly.
The metal screeches against the rock. The damaged tail boom snaps against a tree trunk.
The entire machine tips backward over the sheer edge of the granite drop-off.
It plummets into the abyss, disappearing into the whiteout conditions below.
Ten seconds later, a muffled, distant crash echoes up the canyon walls.
The helicopter is gone.
The emergency radio bolted to the dashboard. The extra blankets stored in the cargo hold. The remaining emergency rations tucked under the passenger seats. All gone.
We’re left with the clothes on our backs, the single survival bag at my feet, and the rapidly descending night. The temperature drops another ten degrees in the span of a single minute. The wind howls, a terrifying, mocking sound that promises a slow, freezing death.
Reese stares at the empty space where her helicopter used to be. Her expression hardens. She remains eerily composed. She slowly turns her head back to me.
"Well," she says, her voice stripped of all its previous bite, replaced by a hard pragmatism. "That complicates things."
I stare down at her. The wilderness surrounds us. A frozen hell designed to kill everything it touches. The blood in my ears finds a new rhythm. I have never been more focused.
I will dismantle this forest branch by branch before I let her die out here.
"We survive," I say, my voice an absolute promise in the swirling snow. "Nothing else matters."