Chapter 5
Bail came through on a Thursday.
Not because Damien arranged it. My former attorney — before the communication stopped, before the retainer ran dry — had filed a procedural motion that finally worked its way through the system without anyone's help. A clerk processed it. A judge signed it. A guard called my name.
I walked out into gray morning light and stood on the sidewalk and breathed.
That was all I could do for a moment. Just breathe.
I looked like what I was. I knew that. I'd caught my reflection in the processing window on the way out — gaunt, hollowed, bruised along the jaw and under both eyes, moving with the careful economy of someone protecting ribs that hadn't been formally examined but were making their opinions known with every inhale. The fever had broken sometime around day ten, leaving behind a specific kind of weakness, the kind that lives in your joints and makes each step feel like a negotiation.
I didn't go back to the penthouse.
I used the last cash I had — folded in the inner pocket of my jacket, the one I'd packed when I felt the arrest coming — and rented a room in a budget hotel twelve blocks from downtown. No loyalty program. No credit card. No name on any account that connected to anything.
I was asleep before I finished the thought.
I slept for eighteen hours.
---
I woke to knocking.
Not urgent. Measured. The knock of someone who is certain the door will open.
I already knew before I looked through the peephole.
Damien was in the hallway in his good coat, the charcoal one, the one he wore when he wanted to signal a certain kind of authority. His hair was neat. His face carried the expression I recognized as his version of patience — controlled, slightly tired, the look of a man waiting for a situation to arrange itself back into an order he understood.
I opened the door because I had no deadbolt on the chain and he already knew I was here, which meant the shared bank account — the one I'd been too depleted to think about — had led him here like a thread.
'Sutton.' His eyes moved over me once. Something crossed his face. Then it was gone.
'How did you find me.'
'The account. The hotel charge.' He said it without apology, because in his framework there was nothing to apologize for. 'You look — ' He stopped. Started differently. 'I want to talk about the way things have been handled.'
I waited.
'Giana and I have been discussing things.' His voice was smooth and familiar and carried that specific undertone that had always made me feel like the conversation had already been decided before I arrived. 'We think the best path forward is something collaborative. A reset.' He paused. 'There's a helicopter excursion. Private, remote, a few hours. Somewhere we can talk away from all the — noise. Like adults.'
Like adults. The phrase landed in my chest.
I looked at him in the doorway and I calculated what I had: one change of clothes, a dead cell battery, no lawyer currently reachable, a fever that had broken but left me moving at sixty percent, and a body that hadn't eaten a real meal in eleven days.
He was waiting.
'Fine,' I said.
---
The helicopter was a private charter. A four-seater, clean, the kind used for wilderness tours. Giana was already there when we arrived, sitting in the rear passenger seat in a white jacket, her hair braided back. She looked at me when I climbed in and gave me a small, composed smile.
I buckled my harness.
The pilot — not Damien, a hired one — ran through the safety check. We lifted. Seattle fell away below us, gray and wet and ordinary, and then we were over the tree line, then the mountains, the snow coming up to meet the sky, and there was nothing beneath us but white in every direction.
I pressed my thumb against the inside of my ring finger. Old reflex. I noticed it and let my hand go flat against my thigh.
The flight took forty minutes before Giana moved.
I don't know exactly what she touched. She was positioned behind the co-pilot's seat and she had waited — patiently, with that specific patience of hers — until Damien turned to say something to the pilot. Her hand moved. It wasn't dramatic. It was small and quick and practiced, the motion of someone who had done her research.
The helicopter lurched.
Then the lurch became something worse.
The pilot's voice changed register. Damien grabbed for something. The aircraft tilted and corrected and tilted again and then stopped correcting, and below us the white came up fast, the tree line rising like a wall, and I had just enough time to brace — the flight attendant in me, automatic, useless — before the impact.
---
Afterward: cold.
That was the first thing. Cold through the split fuselage, cold against my cheek where my face had turned into the snow, cold in my hands when I tried to push myself up and found that one arm didn't do what arms should do.
I lay still and took inventory the way you do when your body is reporting too many things at once and you have to triage them.
Ribs. The same ones from the detention center, worse now. Something in my left shoulder that made my vision white when I tested it. My head — the back of it, contact with something during impact, a warmth there that was the wrong kind. Internal, I thought. That's internal. That's the kind that doesn't hurt as much as it should, which is its own warning.
I heard Giana first. Her voice, that perfect tremor, carrying across the wreckage.
Then Damien's voice answering.
Then movement — his footsteps in the snow, deliberate, moving toward her.
I turned my head.
He was lifting her. She leaned into him with one hand pressed to her temple, her white jacket barely dirty, and he had his arm around her and the emergency beacon in his other hand, the orange one from the kit, already activated.
He didn't look back.
He walked her toward the treeline, toward the clearing where the beacon signal would be strongest, where the rescue helicopter would be able to see them, and he didn't look back.
I watched him walk away.
I watched until the tree line took them and there was nothing left but snow and the sound of wind through the broken fuselage and the distant echo of a rescue frequency activating somewhere I wasn't.
I put my hand against my ring finger.
The snow fell.
It was very quiet.
I thought: *He's not coming back.*
Not as a question. Not with any heat left in it. Just the fact of it, settling onto me like the snow was settling, gentle and complete.
My vision pulled at the edges. The cold was becoming something else — not painful, which was the part I knew to be afraid of.
I pressed my thumb against the inside of my ring finger one last time.
Then my hand went still, and the white took everything.
You may also like
