31. Chapter Thirty-One #2
He’s at the shelter entrance, his back to me, watching the tree line.
“How long?” I ask.
“Three hours. You needed it.”
I sit up. My shoulder aches. Everything aches. I eat the ration bar.
“Did you think I was asleep?” I ask. “When you said those things?”
He’s quiet for a moment.
“That depends on what you heard,” he says.
“All of it.”
A long pause. Long enough that I know he’s not going to give me the easy answer.
“I don’t know if I wanted you to hear it,” he says finally. “I needed to say it. Whether you heard it… I think I told myself it didn’t matter either way.”
“But it does.”
“Yes.”
I don’t say anything else. I don’t have words yet. I stand up, test my weight, find my legs are functional.
“How far?” I ask.
“Twelve miles.”
“Let’s move.”
He gets up without a word. Doesn’t push. Doesn’t ask what I think about what he said. Just steps into the woods beside me.
Twelve miles. We push.
The afternoon stretches long. We move through it without speaking much, but the silence has changed—less like a wall, more like weather that’s passed through. Still cold. Not the same storm.
Around hour thirty-six we stop to shed anything we don’t need for the final push. We go through our packs in parallel, the way we’ve worked for weeks, each knowing what the other’s doing without checking.
I trust him completely in the field. I always have. Even now.
I don’t know what to do with that either.
HOURS 42-48 | 0000-0600 | DAY 30
Darkness falls around hour forty. We’re six miles out.
A ridge ahead. Two routes. North takes us around the base. It’s two extra miles, fully concealed. Direct goes straight over—shorter, but exposed on the skyline for twenty minutes.
“We should go around,” Sulla says quietly. “Hunter force works the high ground at night. That ridge is a natural checkpoint. They’ll have thermal imaging.”
He’s right. I can see the tactical logic clearly.
But we’re six miles out at hour forty. We’re exhausted. Two extra miles might be the difference between placing and losing.
“Over’s faster.”
“Getting caught on that ridge is slower than going around it.”
I look at the ridge. At the dark sky. At him.
He’s watching me. Not arguing; he made his case. Now he’s watching me choose. That patient, steady attention I’ve felt since day one and still haven’t gotten used to.
I’m the one who decided not to cross upstream.
And I nearly drowned.
“We go around,” I say.
Something in his face shifts. Not relief exactly. The absence of something that was there.
“North route,” he says. “Let’s move.”
We come out onto the final approach at 0200. Four miles. Four hours.
We can do this.
The darkness is almost complete—cloud cover, no moon. Running on compass and instinct and the particular trust that comes from weeks of moving through the same terrain. I know his pace. He knows my signals. In the dark, that’s enough.
Hour forty-five. Two miles out. I start to think we might actually do this—not win, Jacks and Aiden have been running clean, but place. Finish. Survive this.
And then my radio crackles–accidental activation, pack compression on the transmit button.
Mac’s voice, “All teams, be advised… challenge closes in two hours. Hunter force will intensify final sweep. All remaining contestants—”
I scramble to turn the volume off. Six seconds. Maybe seven. But the night is very quiet and sound travels.
A light sweeps the hillside above us.
“There.” A voice from the ridge we went around. They were waiting. They swept south looking for us. We were already past them, and I killed it with my own radio.
We run.
Through dark forest at a full sprint, branches tearing. My shoulder screaming from the rocks this morning. Sulla’s beside me—not in front, not behind, beside—his breathing controlled where mine is ragged. Two hunters behind us, fast and coordinated.
A hand on my arm. Sulla, pulling me left into a scramble over rocks.
“Trail dead-ends ahead. Left takes us to open ground.”
I don’t question it. We go left. The rocks slow the hunters. We come out onto open ground and I can see lights ahead—the extraction point.
Less than two miles.
We run.
A mile out. My lungs are burning. Sulla’s ankle is giving. I can hear it in his gait, the almost-catch every fourth stride. Old injury. He’s not going to say anything.
Half a mile. The hunters are falling back. Desperate turns out to be faster than fit.
Quarter mile. I can see Mac at the extraction point.
And then the hunter force captain steps out of the trees to our left.
Second team. They split. One to push, one to flank. It’s what I would have done.
“Compromised,” he says. “Challenge over.”
I stop.
Quarter mile from the fucking line.
My hands go to my knees as I suck in air to catch my breath. Sulla stops beside me, not speaking.
Mac’s voice over the radio, very calm, “Team Echo. Stand down. Challenge over.”
We both know the truth. If we’d been working together the way we were before, we would have made it. If trust hadn’t been destroyed, we would have won. This is what betrayal costs.
They fly us back to base camp. The other teams are already there.
RESULTS | DAY 30 | 0700
Mac gathers everyone for the announcement.
“First place, completing the challenge in forty-one hours: Jacks and Aiden. Two hundred and fifty thousand dollars each.”
Applause. They embrace, ecstatic.
“Second place: Trevor and Zay. One hundred thousand each.”
More applause. Relief on their faces. That’s still life-changing money.
“Third place: Sulla and Reid. Captured at the quarter-mile mark—farthest of the three teams that didn't complete. Fifty thousand each.”
A pause, then, "Sienna and Juno, James and Heather—eliminated earlier in the challenge. No placement prize.”
Fifty thousand.
My stomach sinks.
I do the math automatically. Dad’s care. What he needs for another year. The next five. The gap between fifty thousand and enough.
Not enough.
I keep my face still. I glance at Sulla. His face is carved from stone.
We would’ve won. We had the skills. The preparation. A quarter mile from the money Dad needs and we lost it in pieces. My radio. His silence. My river crossing. His late truth.
Both of us. And neither of us. And entirely the fault of the truth we couldn’t overcome.
Medical. Bruising on my shoulder, functional. Sulla’s ankle—they strap it, he doesn’t wince, and I watch him not wince and say nothing.
A final confessional. I don’t give them more than I’ve given them for the past four weeks.
Then a production assistant explains sequestration.
It’s in our contracts. I read this section; I just didn’t absorb it at the time.
No discussing results, no social media, no contact with press.
The NDA has teeth: violation forfeits the prize money.
We’re free to go home tomorrow. Tonight, hotel rooms. Separate.
We’re required to attend the reunion special when filming concludes, smile for cameras, present as partners.
The outside world doesn’t get to know we aren’t.
I sign exit papers. Sulla signs his. We don’t look at each other.
Separate cars to the hotel. I ride alone, watching the Highlands slide past the window, trying to remember what I thought this moment would feel like.
I thought I’d be calling my mother from the car.
Telling her we won. Telling her everything was going to be okay.
Then telling my father, even if he didn’t understand.
I don’t call anyone, not that I could anyway with the NDA. I watch my reflection in the glass and feel nothing but exhausted.
I’m in my room by eight. I take the world’s longest shower, order room service I don’t taste, and then sit on the edge of the bed and stare at nothing.
Four weeks. Four weeks of falling in love with someone who turned out to be a monster.
Four weeks of building trust with someone who was keeping a devastating secret.
He saved my life twice. I saved his once.
We lost the thing I came here for and I’m sitting in a hotel room with a check for fifty thousand dollars and a chest full of something I don’t have a word for.
Not hate. I thought it was hate, for a while. It was close.
But how do I hate a man who whispers “I love you” into my hair in the dark?
I lie back on the bed. Close my eyes.
It’s eleven. My body’s so tired I should be unconscious, but I can’t sleep.
Every time I close my eyes, I see his face. The way all the color drained when I told him I knew. The way he looked running the bank with that rope, terrified. The way he held me after, tender even in survival, whispering apologies into my hair that he thought I couldn’t hear.
I hate him.
I love him.
I need to not see him for a while.
I need to see him right now.
I’m standing before I consciously make a decision. I grab the knife from my gear bag, his knife, the one he loaned me earlier today, and walk down the hallway to his room and knock.
The door opens. Sulla stands there in sweatpants and a t-shirt, hair damp from a shower. Exhausted. Wrecked.
He sees me and his eyes widen. “Reid—”
“This is yours.” I hold out the knife.
He looks at it. “Keep it.”
“I don’t want anything from you.”
I shove it at his chest. He catches my wrist instead of the knife.
“Let go,” I say.
“You walked into my room.”
“To return your—”
He kisses me.
Hard. Angry. Desperate.
I shove him backward, but my hands stay fisted in his t-shirt, pulling him closer even as I’m pushing away.
“I hate you,” I breathe against his mouth.
“I know.”
“You lied to me.”
“I didn’t lie. I just didn’t—”
“Same thing.”
I kiss him back, biting his lip hard enough to draw blood. He gasps, pulls me fully into the room. The door slams shut behind us.
“You almost got us killed,” he says. “You stopped trusting me.”
“Because you’re a monster!”
The word hangs between us. True. Merciless. Devastating.
He goes very still. “Yes,” he says quietly. “I am.”
Something breaks in my chest.
I kiss him again. Furious. Desperate. Trying to purge something I can’t name.
“This doesn’t mean anything,” I say against his mouth.
“I know.”
“This doesn’t change anything.”
“I know.”
We’re moving toward the bed. Shedding clothes. This isn’t like the bothy. No tenderness. No whispered Latin. No reverence.
This is rage and hurt and four weeks of everything exploding into something dark and necessary.