10. Five Days Until Bonding
Chapter ten
Five Days Until Bonding
Laurel
Walking out of Shady Grove is like living life in reverse. There’s the media room with its laugh-track-fueled sitcoms, followed by the nurse’s station, then the front door looming ahead.
I grieve as I go for the loss of the father I thought I knew, but also for the dream of running away with Carrson. Of him and me, hand in hand, going somewhere new. A place The Order can’t reach.
Dad ran, and his past still found him.
Maybe Carrson’s right. The Order’s dominion reaches farther than any road we could take.
The thought is beyond depressing.
I lengthen my stride to catch up with Carr, who has walked ahead. Behind us, a nurse stops Carrson and guides him to the desk so he can sign us out of the visitor logbook.
“This is why the healing medicine works on me, isn’t it?” I ask Carr, keeping my voice low. “Or at least why it partially worked.”
Carr doesn’t slow, but he answers. “Because you carry Order blood, yes.”
“You knew.”
“I suspected.”
“You used the medicine to test me.” I can’t keep the accusation from my voice.
He sends me a sideways glance. “I had a hypothesis. You, of all people, should appreciate the value of gathering evidence.”
I gape at him. “You experimented on me while I was unconscious.”
“I healed injuries you volunteered to receive.”
The arrogance of that answer sends heat burning up my neck and into my face.
“I have a hypothesis too,” I say, not bothering to hide the bite in my tone.
Carr lifts his chin. “Which is?”
I glance back. Carrson still has his head bowed over a clipboard.
“I don’t think you were in the Middle East for all these past months. I think you were here in rehab, with Thomson’s dad.” I lower my voice even more. “I think you’re an alcoholic. Just like my dad.”
Carr’s heel strikes the polished floor harder on his next step.
“I’m nothing like your father.”
“Then why did the nurse recognize you? How did she know Thom’s name? Why did I overhear the two of you talking about sponsors?” I move closer so Carrson won’t hear. “That’s recovery talk. Alcoholics Anonymous.”
I don’t mention how I know that from all the times I begged my dad to go. The pamphlets I brought home that only I ended up reading.
“Did you tell Carrson?” I ask.
“No.” Carr glares at me as though I’m the one invading his privacy. As if he has the right to be offended. “And it should stay that way. It doesn’t concern him.”
“Don’t you have to apologize to everyone you’ve wronged? Isn’t that one of the steps?” I ask. “Because, if so, Carrson should be first in line.”
Carr bristles. “You’re a very insolent girl. Do you know that?”
I start to argue, but we’ve just passed through the front doors of the building, and my mouth has gone dry.
Two men stand outside the facility with their hands clasped in front of them and their faces blank, like they’re some kind of secret security detail. Beyond them stretches a wide grassy lawn, and perched in the center of it, its propellers already whirling, is a sleek black helicopter.
It looks like a dragonfly cast in steel.
Carrson joins us as Carr walks toward it.
“Give Brickson your car keys,” Carr tells his son. “You fly us home. I’m tired.”
He tacks on that last part with a resentful glare directed my way, a reminder of how inconvenient my little rebellion has been to him.
So now Carrson speaks multiple languages and can fly a helicopter.
Cool. Cool.
Totally normal boyfriend behavior.
Carrson’s mouth thins into a hard line, but he doesn’t protest. He tosses the Lamborghini keys high into the air. Brickson catches them easily, then heads toward the parking lot with the other man in tow.
Carrson and Carr pull ahead of me, striding toward the helicopter with their identical long legs. Meanwhile, I come to a complete stop.
I stare at the spinning blades and imagine them as a guillotine, designed to chop off my head the minute I get too close.
Carrson has his hand on the door before he realizes I’m missing. He looks over his shoulder, searching until he finds me standing several feet behind them with my mouth hanging open.
Carr notices too. Both men come back to me.
“Laurel?” Carrson asks, his forehead lined with worry. “Are you okay?”
“I’ve never been in a helicopter before.” I swallow, my nervous gaze skittering over the helicopter. It’s basically all windows, which means I can watch in excruciating detail as I fall to my death.
Awesome.
“It’s easy,” Carr says. “Duck and walk on in.”
He reaches for my arm, but Carrson gets there first. “I think you’ve traumatized her enough for one day,” he snaps at his father.
“Fine.” Carr huffs and walks back to the monstrosity.
“What’s with your family and overpowered modes of transportation?” I ask Carrson, fear knotted in my throat.
“Overcompensating, probably.” He holds out a hand. “Come on. It’s actually pretty cool once we’re in the air. I’ll take us over the ocean so you can see it. I know you miss the beach.”
“An emergency water landing does sound safer than crashing into a mountain.” I nod sagely.
I take his hand and force my quaking legs to move.
Once I’m in my seat, Carrson gently places a padded headset over my ears, then adjusts the small microphone in front of my mouth. I barely use it on the trip home.
That’s because I’m speechless.
The grass falls away so quietly that I don’t realize we’re airborne until Shady Grove has shrunk into a pale building surrounded by green hills. Cars in the parking lot become toys a child might race. The front doors Dad disappeared behind are too small to see.
I grip the armrests. A glance over shows Carr has fallen asleep with his headphones on. Sleep doesn’t make him any less threatening. It only makes him look paused, like he could snap open his eyes at any second and already know exactly what everyone around him has done wrong.
Carrson’s voice comes through my headset. “Still with me?”
“Technically.”
A low laugh rumbles through the line. “You’re doing great.”
His smile reaches over to me. His hands are steady on the controls, like he has spent his whole life doing this. Maybe he has. At this point, I’m afraid to ask what other skills Carr Ashford made his son learn before he was old enough to drive.
The helicopter climbs over the hills, and the world moves farther away beneath us.
At first, New York looks crowded from above. Roads twist between neighborhoods in long gray loops. Houses cluster close together, their rooftops packed so close they overlap. Cars crawl along highways in lines so thin they could be stitches holding the whole state together.
Then Carrson turns us east.
“Look out your window,” he says.
I do.
The Atlantic stretches along the horizon, too wide to take in all at once. It isn’t the bright postcard blue I expect. From this high, it is steel and silver, dark in some places, bright in others where the lowering sun reflects in it.
“Oh,” I say, with my forehead pressed to the window.
Carrson glances at me. “Better than a mountain?”
“A little.”
He laughs again, and the helicopter tips gently toward the coast.
The shoreline transforms. Long pale strips of beach. Tiny marinas crowded with white boats. Boardwalks and beach houses and pools.
The farther south we fly, the less crowded everything becomes.
The blocks of houses loosen. Highways thin out.
Fields are a patchwork quilt that disappear under forests so thick they look black from above.
The coast grows wilder too. More marshland with its dark water cutting through grass.
Long empty stretches where the only sign people live there is a single road, a dock, a cluster of roofs tucked into the trees.
I keep trying to guess where one state ends and another begins, but from up here the land refuses to cooperate. There are no borders visible from the sky. No lines dividing the places where people are born from the places where they die.
Carrson keeps us close enough to the ocean that I can watch the light change on it.
By the time the sun sinks lower, the water has turned to a glittering gold, bright enough to make me squint.
The land on our other side has deepened into a heavier green, a jungle dense and untamed.
The South. It spreads all the way to the horizon, so big it dwarfs the day we’ve had.
I get why Carrson likes flying.
Up here, nothing stays trapped in one shape. Cities become grids. Houses become dots. Roads become ribbons.
Dad ran, and his past found him anyway.
Which means distance doesn’t equal freedom. It means this helicopter can’t carry us far enough to erase blood or history or the things people do to each other in the name of love.
But watching the country unfold under us, I understand why people keep trying.
Running to things.
From them.
Carrson reaches over when the helicopter levels out, brushing the back of his fingers against mine where my hand rests on the armrest.
“You okay?”
There are too many answers to that question.
My dad is behind us, finally standing still enough to let his past catch up.
Carr sleeps a few feet away, close enough to remind me that every beautiful thing has a shadow attached to it.
The future Carrson and I talked about this morning feels farther away than the ocean.
Still, I look out at the last light spilling across the Atlantic and say the only true thing I have.
“It’s beautiful.”
Carrson’s thumb moves over my knuckles. Soothing.
“Yeah,” he says softly. “It is.”