2. Addie
ADDIE
PARAMORE – EMERGENCY
Thank fuck for quality equipment.
The carabiner held firm, sliding me to a gradual rest roughly a quarter of the distance across the chasm.
Dawn was still a little way off, and the moon was hiding somewhere behind the blankets of rainclouds, leaving nothing but a festering pitch-black presence beneath the line.
“You better watch your back, Sinclair!” Seb yelled as he clipped his harness onto the line and approached the edge. “‘Cause I’m coming for you!”
Shit, time to go.
Unfortunately, keeping hold of a pair of gloves had been the last thing on my mind when teaching Bodie and Eric some manners. When I realised I’d dropped them in the scuffle, I resigned myself to hauling ass the remaining hundred-and-fifty metres across the wire bare-handed.
This was going to suck—and not in the fun way.
A quick glance confirmed that Sebastos—notably gloved and regrettably single-minded—was gaining on me. If I continued to sit here contemplating past fuck-ups, I’d be dead in the next ten minutes and well on my way to joining the Widow at the bottom of her ravine.
That was a fate neither of us—presumably—wanted to share.
I wrapped both hands around the rain-slickened cable and dragged myself forwards. All I had to do was get there quicker than Seb. The dude was solid, but that made him slow, and I’d definitely be able to outpace him and his cronies down the mountain, provided I got there first.
The rain pelted down harder as if the smell of resolve leaked out of my pores and the sky took it as a personal challenge.
It lashed at my skin and made the cable nigh on impossible to grip.
Every time I wrenched myself forward, my hands slipped inches back, cutting my progress in half but costing the same amount of energy.
By the midway point, my shoulders were screaming for respite, and my palms were blistering agony.
I had to stop and shake the pain away every couple of metres just to trick myself into thinking it felt better.
Risking a glance back at my murderous stalker, I full-body flinched. Seb was far too close for comfort and, of course, watching me like a hawk. He noticed the second my eyes grazed over him and grinned like the Cheshire fucking Cat.
“You’d better hurry up, princess. It would sure be a shame if your gear failed.”
“It would sure be a shame if your dick magically fell off,” I huffed under my breath.
With a renewed sense of dread leaching the warmth from my veins, I tugged harder on the slippery line.
Choosing not to throw a leg over the line was a calculated risk and forced the carabiner to bear more weight for longer—but it made me just that little bit quicker, and seconds were the only currency that mattered out here.
Clips had been known to fail. Just ask Irina Novikov, who joined the Widow a few months ago, thanks to a failed harness system. There wasn’t even enough of her body left to recover, much less bury, after they’d scraped her off the rocks at the bottom.
I shook my head, trying to shake off the memory of watching her fall hundreds of metres to the ground—of watching her splat like a discarded water balloon.
I would not be another Irina Novikov.
Eighty more metres to go. You can do this, Addie.
As if cursed by the gods themselves, my left palm tore open a second later, coating the cable in blood as well as rain. I yelped, then cursed at the echo of Seb’s manic laughter bouncing back at me.
It was alarmingly close, and he’d catch me for sure if I stopped any longer.
Move your ass, bitch!
I fell into the same monotonous reach, grip, pull rhythm, doing my best to ignore the crescendo of pain in my left hand, keeping my eyes trained on that distant ledge instead. A ledge that was less and less distant with every tug of my aching hands.
Thump.
With fifty-odd metres left to go, I jolted hard.
My left arm dropped dead, hanging limply in the air as I hissed a sucking breath through my teeth.
It felt like I’d just copped the full force of a fist to my left shoulder, but how was that possible when Seb was still metres behind and no one else was in sight?
Confused, I looked down at the offending limb, surprised to see the black leather-wrapped handle of a military-grade dagger glaring back at me.
“What the fuck?” I snarled through clenched teeth, subsequently drawing in another short breath when the pain of the blade finally hit. Like, six-out-of-ten, finally hit.
“Oh, shoot. I missed,” Seb crooned. “Next one won’t, princess.” His teeth flashed in a feral, lethal grin. He was enjoying this assessment entirely too much.
I couldn’t report him for any of it, though—not with his father as the Academy’s Commander—but I’d be damned if I didn’t give him a little dose of his own medicine in an equally unreportable way.
Dangling from the zipline by nothing more than a questionably secure carabiner, I reefed the dagger out of my shoulder with my right hand and cocked it back.
“Hey, Varco!” I called out. “I think you misplaced something.”
“Don’t you fucking dare,” he growled, eyes alight with something more than malice, for once in his putrid existence.
“You should be more mindful of where you leave your things, asshole,” I said sweetly, flinging his dagger back at him with pinpoint accuracy, skewering his right thigh, just as intended.
Let’s see you run now.
I left Seb to his shouts of indignant fury and hauled my broken, bleeding body the remainder of the way across Widow’s Drop, onto the sharp, blue-tinged gravel of Sapphire Ridge.
I wanted nothing more than to lie down on the ground and have the rain wash my blood away—actually no, I wanted nothing more than a hot shower, but that wasn’t happening just yet. And neither was a brief respite, because resting for even a second could get me killed.
I had no interest in dying—not today or any other day. Steadfast resolve had gotten me through the last year-and-a-half of training, after the Academy had quite literally dragged me kicking and screaming off the streets and through its basement doors.
I was twenty-five then, and pretending I’d been doing better than I actually was, when a stereotypical, creepy, white van pulled up kerbside. The next thing I knew, a pair of strong, tanned hands yanked me in, right off the pavement in broad daylight, and somehow, no one was any the wiser.
I’d thought I was finally being apprehended due to my string of recent heists—everything from grocery stores to jewellery shops.
Never more than they could afford to lose, and only enough to put food in my belly and pay the next bill on my crappy little apartment.
I’d had nothing else but those four walls to my name when the Academy yanked me out of that life and into another, even more horrifying existence.
The police had no clue who I was, of course. They’d had no idea that a hungry, lonely young woman had been London’s master thief—but I guess the Academy had been watching.
And I guess I had skills they thought they could utilise.
I unclipped my harness and tossed it to the ground with the others. Seb was only twenty or so metres away, with malice in his gaze and venom on his tongue. No other motivation was needed to hightail it out of there.
I sped down the long, twisting dirt track, dodging claw-like branches I could barely see in the downpour. My shoulder pulsed painfully with every dogged step, and I knew with blood-chilling conviction that I was leaving a trail of blood behind me—the most macabre kind of breadcrumbs.
An agony-filled ninety seconds later, I reached the first obstacle down Sapphire Ridge: The Gaps.
Ingeniously named after four gaps in the cliffside trail, each section was a little wider than the last. The first spanned a metre and a half with nothing but air below.
Falling through was a fast-track to the bottom of the mountain, but you’d cop an instant fail because you’d be DOA: dead on arrival.
I leaped, hit the man-made steel platform, and peered across the second opening, two metres wide.
With only a metre-and-a-half of ledge to work with, I backtracked as far as I was able, then took off.
With a leap and a prayer, I cleared the span of missing track, landing with a tumbling roll that almost went too far.
“Fucking rain,” I swore through gritted teeth, cursing the weather, the wound, the assholes on my tail that would arrive any second, and that next goddamned gap. And then I cursed myself for wasting time cursing.
Four-and-a-half metres away, another metre-and-a-half of rain-slickened metal protruded from the rock face, leaving me with two less-than-stellar options:
I could make use of the rough, rocky wall to climb across. Given the state of my shoulder and the span of the last deadly gap, that would be a fool’s wager.
Or, I could leap onto the tiny, single square foot platform, positioned like a stepping stone smack bang in the middle of the gap.
It had never been my first choice in any of our practice runs, but given that the last interval was six metres wide—and didn’t possess any handy stepping stones—I needed to save my shoulder for that climb.
The sound of snapping branches signalled that my lead time had disappeared. I prepped for another running jump, wincing as I heard Sebastos come barrelling around that last corner with Bodie and Eric in tow.
A whoop of malice came from one of the three, quickly followed by a shush.
“Wait!” Seb shouted—his voice uncontestably violent, impossible to mistake for anyone else’s. I half-froze, thinking he was addressing me. “I want to watch her fall.”
Nope, not me.
Not wanting to give him the satisfaction, I flipped him off, then clenched my teeth and jumped.
I knew I wouldn’t make it the second my feet left the platform. Instead, I crashed into the stepping stone tit-first, slamming into the frozen, rain-soaked steel with an agonised grunt. Clawing desperately at its surface, I tried to find some sort of purchase with both my line-mangled hands.
A chorus of excited howls rose from behind me.
“Yes!”
“She’s not gonna make it!”
By sheer grit alone—and maybe the unmatched determination to piss Sebastos off—I finally succeeded. I hauled my top half up onto the platform, but—in perhaps my stupidest move yet—let my eyes flick down past my feet, which were dangling in the open air.
Nothing lay between my boots and the bottom of the mountain. Nothing but empty space and the promise of freefall.
Shaking off the instant nausea at the thought of falling, I forced my gaze back up to face the next ledge.
What the fuck am I going to do now? I only just made that jump and I don’t have a runway for this next one.
My mind whirred, dismissing every possible escape route. All except one.
“My turn.” Seb’s taunt settled heavily on my skin, though it had been barely more than a murmur.
A short grunt signalled that he’d landed the first jump. A thud and subsequent hiss of pain announced his success on the second.
“You’re toast, princess,” he jeered. “Say your last prayers.”
Like fuck.
I had one minuscule sliver of survival—and I was going for it.
Instead of climbing back atop the tiny platform, I pivoted until my feet hit the solitary metal beam connecting it to the mountain at a forty-five-degree angle. Easing myself down into a crouch, I sent a prayer up to whichever god might be listening and leaped, using the steel as leverage.
Hades must not have wanted my soul today, because my damaged hands held fast to the cold steel on the underside of the next man-made platform. I swung back and forth like a trapeze artist, pointedly ignoring the fact that there was nothing but my bloodied hands preventing me from a deadly descent.
“My, my, we’ll make a birdy out of you yet, princess!”
It was a well-aimed jab. Everyone at Blackwing knew that the female recruits tended to end up leaving in one of two ways: in a body bag or as a Swallow. I’d made it my life’s mission to leave as neither.
While body bags were self-explanatory, Swallows were not.
They were the designation that female agents tended to receive on Graduation Day—employed solely to use what their mother gave them.
Their missions were to seduce their way into a target’s bed and pull off an assassination in the dead of night.
And while the handful of other women in our cohort relished the idea of frequent beauty treatments, high-end clothing, and personal makeup artists, I’d made it abundantly clear that I wasn’t aiming for that particular career pathway.
I wanted the only sniper designation that had popped up since Instructor Pearce graduated four years ago—but so did almost everyone else.
I swung across to the next beam, using the underside of the platform like a set of monkey bars on a children’s playground until I reached its end and listened intently for any further progress from Seb.
I needed to move quick—he’d already reached the stepping stone gap with Eric and Bodie right behind him.
Despite the throbbing ache in my shoulder, I wiped what blood I could onto my pants. Clinging to the final rung with my right hand, I reached out to grasp a jutting section of rock face with my left. Once my feet were wedged in place, I repeated the action with my right.
It was a tenuous thing, knowing you were moments from death. Knowing you’d rather let the mountain claim you before the microdick-swinging douchecanoe a few metres behind.
Flicking loose strands of hair out of my face, I shimmied across the six-metre expanse, gritting my teeth when tiny rocks jammed their way into my torn-open palms. Thankfully, the rain had eased and the only thing I had left to contend with was the wind.
After five agony-filled minutes with Seb breathing down my neck, I finally flipped over the lip of the track’s edge and back onto the Sapphire’s course.
Without sparing even a second to catch my breath, or worry, or rest, I bolted into the day’s first light, with a parting threat from Sebastos lingering in my ears.
“You can run, princess, but we all sleep in the same dorm come nightfall!”