1. Addie #2
The peak was supposedly named over a century ago—after a woman whose husband slipped and fell into another woman’s vagina.
When this Victorian-era badass caught them both in the act, she proceeded to murder the lover, heinously and chaotically, making her bastard husband watch.
Then, she took her knife, as well as her sweet time, and meticulously dispatched him—piece by treacherous piece—starting with his foreskin and ending with his heart.
She finished by tossing every scrap of them both off the jagged cliff face, then joined them at the bottom.
Hard not to feel a little in awe of the woman after learning that.
My boots skidded on the wet gravel as I pulled up short in the small clearing a few metres from the edge of the Drop, with a handful of recruits who’d made it here before I had.
A chasm stretched out before us—a wide, yawning trench carved between Black Mountain and its closest neighbour, Sapphire Ridge.
Colourful names for haunted ridges. Kind of juxtaposing if you thought about it.
Rain pelted down in heavy sheets, so much colder and needle-like at this altitude than it had been at the mountain’s base. The worst of it was my feet. My socks were now thoroughly and uncomfortably saturated, my boots squelching with every step.
A certifiable sensory nightmare.
The wispy bits of hair that usually framed my face were now plastered to it, and my gear was soaked—but my conviction remained unshaken.
Like hell I’d be last on this godforsaken course.
I had a lot to prove from the start. I was no volunteer initiate, no influential rich kid dropped here in lieu of military school. I was a capture—because I had skills the Academy wanted at their disposal.
Ice Queen said a lot about what my higher-ups thought of me—of all five-and-a-bit feet of platinum-blonde petiteness. But instead of breaking me as Beckett intended, the slander only drove me to prove him wrong. To prove them all wrong.
I was more than just a pretty face.
And I’d be damned if I had to use that pretty face in life beyond the Academy. I was gunning for that one top spot: Eagle. The lone sniper designation. And I had a damn good chance at it, too; my marksmanship was almost flawless.
The wind picked up the longer we stood around waiting, and the trembling in my limbs along with it. My heart raced in time with its howls and its lulls as each initiate crossed the length of wire, knowing it would only take one small miscalculation for the gorge to devour them.
I knew better than to peer over the edge earlier than necessary, though. Any one of the dripping, shivering faces surrounding me right now wouldn’t hesitate to shove me off the edge if they thought they could get away with it—if they thought they could take my place just to move ahead in the line.
They’d be weeding out the weak. And the Academy let them get away with it—encouraged it for that very same reason.
There were only two people I trusted in this entire cohort—and they had both earned that trust with blood, sweat, and the occasional tear.
Both were well ahead of me, too, on their way down the second ridge.
Between us lay a single zipline spanning two hundred metres across the deadly chasm—and I still had to traverse it, hand by hand, and metre by fucking metre.
The line moved up, and I claimed a harness and carabiner set from the huge, weatherproof storage locker in the centre of the clearing. Giving them a quick once-over, checking for rust—or worse, tampering—I stepped into the harness loops and snicked it shut around my hips.
While waiting for the two recruits ahead of me to cross the wire one at a time, I attached the quickdraw carabiners to my harness and scooped up a pair of gloves from the box. Three sets of thudding feet and huffing breaths pulled up behind me—the three boys I’d passed on my way up Black Mountain.
“Sure you don’t want to take a running leap yourself?” an oily voice drawled from the front of the line.
Sebastos Varco, the Academy’s perfect initiate: evil incarnate. If anyone deserved a mutilated foreskin, it was him. Unfortunately, the Widow was long dead, done with that particular kind of butchery, and he was the Commander’s son—virtually untouchable.
“Come here, princess,” he taunted, crooking a finger at me. “You can take my turn.” His shark-like eyes darkened, and cold clarity flooded my system as two large bodies pressed in from behind.
I straightened, knowing two things were about to happen.
One: Seb’s cronies would shepherd me closer to their leader and he’d then try to drop me off the edge for a playdate with the Widow’s husband.
And two: they would fail—painfully and embarrassingly.
The two meatheads behind me chuckled, nudging me ever closer to Seb—and the edge of the cliff behind him. There were zero doubts in my mind that it was Bodie and Eric, though I wasn’t about to take the time to verify.
Fortunately, they weren’t untouchable.
Before either could slap a sweaty hand around any part of my body to throw me off the mountain, I snapped my head backwards—earning a deliciously squelchy crunch and surprise-laced hiss—and drove my right elbow back into the other’s gut.
The move gave me enough space to spin around to face my would-be assailant—with his legs parted just perfectly enough to deliver a solid knee to the balls.
Eric howled, clutching his smaller-than-expected package, and all six feet of him crumpled to the ground in agony.
“Bitch!” Bodie spat, charging me for having dropped his pal.
I sidestepped and snaked a foot out, tripping him.
He stumbled towards the cliff at an alarming pace, with Seb just watching it all unfold—two blonde brows raised and zero fucks given. Bodie crashed down beside him, eating gravel, and landed just a smidgen short of the edge with an arm dangling over it.
Damn.
He cried out in alarm, scooting backwards.
But the commotion had been the break I needed to dash to the front of the line and hook my carabiner onto a zipline that was no thicker than my thumb.
The sound of the clip snicking shut swung all eyes back around to me, and Seb’s face contorted in malice when he realised what I was doing: getting away.
“Get back here, whore!” he yelled, lunging at me.
But his fingers closed around empty space.
Because I’d already taken a flying leap and launched myself headlong into the chasm. With nothing but a single metal clip between my body and certain death, all I could do was pray the carabiner would hold whenever gravity and friction decided to team up again.