Chapter Fifty-Five
Feralyn
He jumped.
Terror and the force of velocity seized my heart, and wind pummeled every inch of my body.
We were going to die.
Helios was going to die.
Then he shouted, “Feel that freedom?”
My skin rippling and my hair whipping like a chaotic flag in hundred-mile-per-hour winds, I had no control of my flailing limbs.
This was not freedom.
My mouth forced and held open with my initial scream, incapable of speech, I sucked airless oxygen.
Then, all of a sudden, he jerked his arms down, and we instantly lurched back and up. Yanked into a vertical position as the parachute deployed, it was as if we’d slammed into an invisible wall of gravity.
My spine and organs violently rearranged, the noise drastically changed, and all at once, we were soaring in broad, sweeping motions from side to side as if the sky was our highway and there were no lanes.
Huge, endless views spread out as if only for us.
Bright morning sunlight.
Powder-blue heavens.
Shimmering turquoise ocean.
No other living, breathing being in sight except for me and him.
For a single heartbeat, I forgot about our dire circumstances. I forgot about everything, and his name fell from my soul with awe. “Helios.”
“Great view, huh?”
I didn’t want to acknowledge how he always seemed to step into my mind and extract my thoughts as if they were his to take. “Where’s the plane?”
Pulling down with one arm, he made the parachute turn, and I saw it.
So far in the distance, almost as if it weren’t real, the nose of the plane was already sunk, but the tail bobbed in the waves once, twice, then disappeared.
Adrenaline, insanity, the sheer force of oxygen forced into my lungs, I had a moment of pure elation.
We were not in that plane.
Then Helios pulled heavily on the parachute toggles, and reality slammed back into me as he clipped out instructions.
“Hitting the water in ten seconds. Point your feet, hold your breath. Cutting away in three, two… one.”
The soaring float of our bodies in the wind immediately ceased, and we dropped like a ten-ton cement block, plunging into the ocean.
For a split second, warm surface water hit my body. Then it turned ice cold, we were sinking too deep, too fast, I was still hooked to Helios, and panic hit. My mind jerked into survival mode, and I started to kick.
An arm wrapped around my waist like a vise grip as a giant hand gripped my thigh and squeezed.
In the next second, a Delta Force operator was kicking us to the surface.
Our heads hit air, a swell slammed into us, the sunglasses he’d given me disappeared, and he yanked a cord on my chest.
My life preserver inflated, and I bobbed up and over the next swell, but Helios went under.
Horror struck.
Helios didn’t have a life vest. He’d never put one on in the plane. He didn’t have a life preserver. “HELIOS!”
Surfacing next to me and whipping his head back to get his hair off his face, just like he would’ve done in the pool at the house, he grabbed my upper arm. “Right here, Haven.”
“Y-you don’t have a life vest!”
He smirked. “I know how to swim, woman.”
“F-for how l-long?” There was no shoreline in sight, not even from the sky.
His expression turned Tier One operator serious. “As long as I need to.”
“Th-then d-don’t go un-under again.”
“I was retrieving the life raft.” He held up a cord, but there was nothing attached. “The ocean temp’s eighty-one degrees.” Treading water, he snaked an arm around me. “No need to shiver.”
Dear God, was he serious? “We almost died.” As if to prove my point, a rolling swell bobbed us up, then down so low, I couldn’t see over it.
“No, we didn’t.” His intense gaze cut to my lips for a second and turned heated. Then his eyes were back on mine. “Stutter’s gone.”
The adrenaline was wearing off. Fast. And that heart-seizing panic from the plane was crawling back in. “Sh-sharks.”
“Don’t bother them, and they won’t bother us. Stop kicking, Feralyn. I got you.”
Feralyn.
All at once, it hit me harder than the force of impact in the water.
Engine failure.
Critical fuel loss.
The second Mayday on a different channel.
The parachutes at the ready.
The cord of a life raft in his hand, but he wasn’t inflating it.
Oh. My. God.
“You did this on purpose,” I accused, but even as I said it, I didn’t know how to wrap my mind around it.
“You crashed us.” He flew a multimillion-dollar jet into the ocean.
“You let us crash.” He risked our lives.
He risked his life. I’d given up the island location to a murdering terrorist. I’d risked everyone’s lives.
The Vulture, the scarred man, that evil, evil trafficker who’d tortured and threatened me, who’d stolen so much from me, he was dead.
But Helios had kissed me. He’d crashed us into the ocean.
And my hand was fisting, my arm was swinging back, and before I knew what I was doing because everything was so fucked-up that I couldn’t—
A swell slammed into us.
The impact of my fury capsized, I choked on a mouthful of seawater, and tears came. “You destroyed that plane!” He’d destroyed us.
Holding me, threading water, Helios said nothing.
NOTHING.
I couldn’t breathe, and this was my worst fear—everything, all of it.
I hated flying. I hated anger. I hated fear. I hated the ache in my ankle when I ran, the burn in my wrist when I rode motorcycles, the airlessness in my lungs when they betrayed me. I hated memories and isolation and crowds, and I hated the end of any driveway.
I hated everything I couldn’t control.
It’s why I flew with Helios. Why I’d forced myself to ride on his motorcycles, then learned how to drive them when he’d taught me. Why I drove fast. Why I ran. Why I always looked over my shoulder no matter what. Why I did anything.
Because I was terrified of life on the other side of my camera lens.
And he’d done this.
He’d flown us up in that plane, right as the sky came alive, like he’d painted it with bright sunlight himself. Then he’d hurled us into the ocean.
He’d kissed me, he’d crashed us, he’d killed us.
He’d destroyed our trust.
And he’d done it all on purpose.
All of a sudden, my aborted fist was back, and I pounded against his chest as an ugly, grotesque lie, caked in fear, flew out of my traitorous mouth on a choking sob. “I hate you!” I loved him.
“More than when I kissed you in front of Ares, Saint, and Chaos?”
My entire world collapsed.