Chapter 5 Dead End
FIVE
Dead End
EVIE
The words hang in the air between us.
“I’ve climbed this wall before.”
Riot stares at me like I’ve started speaking a language he doesn’t understand. His mouth opens, closes. Opens again. For the first time since he walked through my bedroom door, the easy confidence cracks.
“You’ve... what?”
“Climbed. This wall.” The words come easier the second time.
Something is loosening in my chest—a fist I’ve been clenching for years, slowly uncurling.
“I’ve free climbed it at least a dozen times.
There’s a line that follows the vertical fissure on the left side.
” I point to a dark seam in the granite, barely visible from this angle.
“It’s a 5.10b. Technical, sustained, but moderate if you can find the flow.
Good handholds, solid feet. I could do it in my sleep. ”
“You’re a rock climber.”
“Yes.”
“A kindergarten teacher who rock climbs.”
“People can be more than one thing.”
He’s still staring. The calculation happening behind his eyes is almost visible—every assumption he made about me reshuffling, reorganizing, building a new picture from pieces that don’t fit the frame he constructed.
He looks at the two-hundred-foot drop, then at my hands, then back at the cliff.
For the first time, he looks unsure. Out of his element.
Too much, Daniel’s voice whispers. It’s sharp today, a serrated edge in the back of my mind. You’re being too much, Evie. You’re being dramatic. You’ll get to the middle, panic, and he’ll have to scrape your broken body off the canyon floor. Just like always.
I swallow the ghost of his criticism.
“Show me,” Riot says.
“What?”
“The route. Show me what you see.”
No one has ever asked me that before. Not about climbing, not about anything. My whole life has been people telling me what they see—what I should be, what I should want, what my own eyes and instincts are getting wrong. No one has ever just... asked me to show them.
I move to the canyon's edge. The drop yawns below, two hundred feet of air and shadow, and my body responds the way it always does at the lip of a climb.
Not fear. Recognition. My hands find the rock before my brain gives permission — cool, rough, the mineral grit of granite that I know better than my own kitchen.
This is my place. This is where I belong. This is what I'm for.
“There.” I trace the route with my finger.
“The crack system starts about fifteen feet up—we’ll have to boulder through the start to reach the main seam.
Then it opens into a hand crack, perfect for jamming.
See where the rock changes color? That’s a rest ledge.
Enough room to stand, catch your breath. ”
“And above that?”
“The crux. There’s a section around a hundred feet where the holds get thin.
Sharp crimps and insecure slopers. It requires technical footwork.
” The memory rises—my first time on this wall, arms shaking, fingers screaming, the moment I almost let go.
“But if you trust your feet, if you don’t overthink it, the holds are there. They’re always there.”
Riot is quiet. He reaches out, touching the stone with a tentative hand, feeling the unforgiving texture. He looks like a man realizing his gun and his tactical gear don't mean a thing to a vertical mile of ancient stone.
“You free solo this?”
The question lands like a stone in still water.
Free soloing—climbing without ropes, without protection, without anything between you and gravity except your own hands and the rock.
The thing that would make my mother cry, my sister lecture, my father shake his head in that disappointed way he’s perfected over twenty-nine years.
“Yes.”
“Yes?” He exhales. Runs a hand through his hair. He looks at the wall again, and I see the shift—the Alpha operator stepping back, the professional recognizing a superior officer on a different kind of battlefield. “You climb two hundred feet of granite with no rope. For fun.”
“Not for fun.” The distinction matters. “For me. There’s a difference.”
I meet his gaze. The canyon wind cuts between us, cold and sharp, but the space between our bodies feels warm. Charged. Like the air before a storm, all that electricity looking for somewhere to ground.
“Evie.” My name in his mouth does something to my pulse. “Can you get us across?”
Not can you get yourself across. Not, I’ll find another way. He’s asking if I can lead us both. Trusting me—a kindergarten teacher he met two hours ago—to get him up a cliff face that would kill most people.
Say no, Daniel’s voice whispers. You’ll fail, you’ll fall, you’ll prove everyone right about you.
But Daniel’s voice is static now. White noise. The man in front of me isn’t looking at me the way Daniel did—like I was a problem to be managed, a creature to be caged. Riot is looking at me like I’m a surprise. Like I’m a solution. Like he’s genuinely curious what I’ll do next.
“Yes.”
The word comes out steady. Certain. More certain than I’ve felt in years.
“There’s a crevice at about a hundred and twenty feet.
” The plan is forming as I speak, instinct and experience weaving together.
“It’s invisible from below—you wouldn’t know it was there unless you’d been inside.
Big enough for two people, protected from the elements.
If they’re tracking us by ground, they won’t see us once we’re on the wall.
If they’re using helicopters, the crevice will give us cover. ”
“You want to climb the wall and hide in a crack in the rock.”
“I want to climb the wall, rest in the crevice until the pursuit passes, then finish the ascent and get to your extraction point.” I meet his eyes, and something in his expression makes me bold. “Unless you have a better idea.”
He laughs. Short, sharp, surprised. “Sweetheart, I don’t have any ideas. I’m a decent climber—military training, some recreational stuff—but this? The geometry of this wall... it's beyond me. This is way out of my league.”
“Then follow me.”
The words land between us. A gauntlet. A dare. The kind of thing the old Evie—the careful Evie, the agreeable Evie—would never have said.
But the old Evie was a cage, and I’ve been inside it for twenty-nine years, and I’m done.
Riot’s smile changes. Slower now, less performance. His eyes move over my face like he’s seeing me for the first time. Like everything before this moment was preview, and now the real thing is finally emerging.
“Okay.”
“Okay?”
“You’re the expert.” He spreads his hands, yielding the lead. “Lead the way.”
The descent to the canyon floor takes ten minutes—steep but manageable, a scramble down a rocky slope that my boots handle easily. Riot follows close behind, quiet now, watching me move. I can feel his attention like heat on my skin.
At the base of the wall, I stop. The granite rises above us, impossibly tall, impossibly beautiful. Gray and gold and streaked with dark veins, catching the morning light like it was made to be looked at. To be touched.
My hands find the rock before my brain gives permission. Cool, rough, solid. I can feel the bite of the crystals against my fingertips. The texture I know better than my own heartbeat.
Home, something whispers. This is home.
“The start is the hardest part.” I’m talking to Riot, but I’m also talking to myself. Remembering. “The first fifteen feet are slab—low angle, no good holds. You have to rely on smearing. Trust the friction. Trust that the rubber on your shoes will stick even when it feels like it won't.”
“Smearing. Trust the friction.” His voice is closer than I expected. Right behind me, close enough that I can feel the warmth of his body against the morning chill. “Is that a climbing thing or a life philosophy?”
“Both.” I turn to face him. He's close enough to see the gold flecks in his brown eyes, the thin white scar through his eyebrow, the way his jaw is shadowed with stubble he didn't have time to shave. “Are you ready?”
“No.” His honesty catches me off guard. He looks at the vertical slab with a grim kind of respect. “I’m terrified. But I’m more terrified of what’s behind us than what’s above us.”
“Good.” I nod once. “That’s the right answer.”
“What’s the wrong answer?”
“That you’re not scared at all. That you think this is going to be easy.” I hold his gaze, willing him to understand. “Climbing isn’t about not being afraid. It’s about being afraid and moving anyway. One hold at a time. One breath at a time.”
Something flickers in his expression. Recognition, maybe. Like I’ve said something that resonates beyond the rock.
“One hold at a time,” he repeats.
“Stay close. Watch where I put my hands and feet. Don’t look down unless you need to check your footing.
” The instructions flow out of me—the same things I’d say to a beginner at the climbing gym, except this beginner has a gun on his hip and cartel soldiers hunting him and the most infuriatingly attractive face I’ve ever seen up close.
Focus.
“If you feel yourself slipping, tell me. Don’t try to be brave. Don’t try to power through. Just tell me, and we’ll figure it out together.”
“Together.” He says the word like he’s testing it. Like it’s foreign in his mouth.
“Together.”
The wind picks up, whistling through the canyon, carrying the distant sound of engines. The pursuit is regrouping. Time is running out.
I reach for the rock—the first holds, familiar as old friends.
“Evie.”
I look back.
Riot is watching me with an expression I can’t name. Intense. Focused. The skepticism is gone, replaced by a raw, quiet admiration. “For what it’s worth,” he says, “I don’t think you’re too much.”
My breath catches. I didn’t tell him that. Didn’t say those words, that specific wound. But somehow he heard them anyway. Somehow, he saw the shape of the cage I’ve been carrying and named it without being asked.
“Thank you,” I whisper.
“You'd be surprised." I say it quietly, almost to myself. "I've been hiding my whole life." A beat. "You're the only person I've ever brought to this canyon. I've never shown anyone the route."
This is exactly the kind of thing Daniel couldn't stand.
The wildness of it. You're showing off, he'd say.
You're being reckless. What he meant was: don't be anything I can't contain.
I spent three years making sure he never found out about this wall, this canyon, this version of me that didn't ask his permission to exist.
Something underneath is coming to the surface, something that's been buried so deep I didn't even know it was there.
Then I start to climb.