Yep, he’s very much alive.
A fact I’m probably going to kill him for, if we get out of here.
I make a choked sound in the back of my throat.
“Oliver?” I gasp.
Just as Durham strangles out, “Major?!”
It’s Durham’s voice that spurs me back to action.
Even if something in my heart leaps wildly to see Oliver again, alive, it’ll have to wait.
That’s a story for later.
For now, I remember why I’m here.
And while Durham’s distracted, I see my chance.
Snapping around, I fling myself low and go right for his legs, diving under the reach of his Colt.
He belts out a strangled sound and starts to swing it toward me anyway—and when a gunshot goes off, I’m half expecting to feel a piercing jolt of pain ripping me open.
Self-preservation kicks in. I fling myself to one side, but there’s no gunshot wound, no bright burst of agony thrusting a hole in my body.
Because Durham wasn’t the one who fired.
There’s a smoking Glock in Oliver’s hand, and the Colt goes spinning across the floor in a haze of gold while Durham yanks his hand back, shaking it, hissing from the impact.
My roll takes me to the floor, shoulder taking the brunt of it, before I coil back around quickly and catch Durham’s ankles with mine, tangling to rip him off his feet.
With a loud cry he goes down hard, thudding against the floor with a whump!
He’s reaching for something inside his coat—but I’m on him too fast, surging into a crouch with my full weight over him.
One knee drives down on his throat.
He freezes—but with his hand pulled out of his jacket, he’s holding some kind of remote-controlled device.
And even as I crush down on his neck, he does it.
He presses a button.
A shrill, ear-splitting beeping starts echoing from the cockpit, rising higher and higher into the deafening cries of an alarm.
“What is that?” I snap. “What did you do?”
“Security,” Oliver answers for Durham. “We’ve got sixty seconds before the real cops come swarming in, and we’ve got a lot of questions to answer.”
“No,” I hiss. “No! I’m not leaving without knowing. You tell me—you tell me right now, you bastard piece of shit!” I stare down at Durham, rage a thing hotter than a thousand stars inside me. “You’d rather risk the police catching you than tell me what you did with my daughter?”
Even with my knee on his throat, Durham smiles.
“What will the police do to me?” he asks blandly. “I’m just an innocent citizen by the name of Jared Lintner, being assaulted by a crazy woman and her brute accomplice on my own private jet.”
I stare at him.
Of course. Of fucking course he’s got it all worked out.
With his new identity and his way of just disappearing...
That’s all the police will see.
Not an escaped criminal squirming his way out of justice yet again.
They’ll let him fix this plane or jump to a new one and sail off into the sunset with no one the wiser.
I know what I have to do. I’ll kill him.
“You bastard.” I bare my teeth, crushing down on him, raking my hands at his face. “You bastard!”
“Fuchsia!” Oliver roars, and that damnable beeping, shrilling, murder-inducing alarm takes me back.
Fourteen Years Ago
I hate the damned beeping.
And I double hate the way they keep saying my name.
I’m so tired.
I’m so, so tired, and I can’t think, the drugs they gave me mean I can’t think and everything hurts but I know the baby’s coming too soon.
It’s my fault.
Everything is always my fault.
Oliver’s gone and it’s my fault.
And now my baby might die because I worked myself too hard trying to forget Oliver, trying to forget the pain and fear and loss and grief and loneliness I told myself I couldn’t feel. Now it’s all building up inside me in a scream of anguish because I’ve gone into labor too soon and this doctor is standing over me saying “Push, Fuchsia, push, Fuchsia.”
Just repeating my name again and again in that monotone I hate while the heart monitor blips sharply behind me, and I try not to sob.
It’s driving me into a hot, lunatic mess.
That incessant beeping.
That awful beeping, going faster every time I push, speeding up as my body collapses in on itself trying to get this kid out of me.
Please, little girl.
Please be okay.
Please be alive.
The rest is a haze of sweat and tears and dull hurt.
Then this feeling like a huge pumping fist squeezes my whole body over and over again as contractions convulse through me. I’m swimming, lost in time. Everything smells like bitter chemicals and blood and my own salty skin.
I don’t know what they gave me, but it’s potent.
Everything goes fuzzy through tears, through delirium, through agony.
But I know.
I know when I hear a baby’s cry. I know she’s okay.
I know when that beeping speeds up faster because my heart races with joy that my little girl made it through. She’s alive. I have her and she has me, and one way or another we’re going to be okay.
Except that beeping takes over everything, eating up every other sound in the room.
Hypnotic.
The whole world swims with that steady, harsh sound.
And I remember the eyes behind the mask look suspiciously like Dr. Maximilian Ross as he leans over me and tells me to sleep. Then he says some word I can only half make out, and some switch flicks in my brain so that I just...
Go dark.
And wake up to that beeping still, slow and steady and sluggish while a man I don’t recognize, a doctor I don’t think was even there even if I can’t trust my memory, says the one word that will drive my life for the next decade, my insane obsession with my work, and my even more insane secret mission to destroy Galentron.
“Stillborn.”
My daughter was stillborn.
And now I have nothing.
Nothing left but myself.
And a mission I won’t stop even if it kills me to finish.
I’m going to avenge her, one way or another.
I’ll live to avenge them both.
Present
I still remember that day.
The very blinding moment when I swore I’d take revenge for both my daughter’s and Oliver’s deaths.
Except now I’m realizing my daughter must be alive somewhere, and Oliver stands over me, and maybe what was really stolen away all those years ago wasn’t just the people I loved, but...
Me.
What Durham took away from me most was myself.
And any chance of ever being happy.
It doesn’t make me want to kill the scum any less.
My throat burns, tight and closing off my air, but I grasp him by the shoulder, digging my fingers into a deadly pressure point. One easy flick of my wrists and he’s a dead man.
For now, he lets out a strange, howling cry like a wounded hyena, arching against the knee pinning him by his throat.
“Tell me where she is,” I grind out again around the rough, wet feeling in the back of my mouth that tries to make me cry.