“Hey, hey.” A hand stroked my cheek. “You’re okay. We’ve got search and rescue on the way to airlift you. They should be here soon. Try not to move your head too much. We need to keep your neck stabilized.”
I swallowed thickly.
Was my neck broken?
Wasn’t that code for,don’t move or else you’ll paralyze yourself more?
“Are my toes wiggling?” I asked.
There was a pause. “What?”
“Are. My toes. Wiggling.”
The shadow disappeared from view, the light from behind him blinding me suddenly and forcing me to squeeze my eyes shut to save my poor retinas from the assault. A hand ghosted over my ankle on the left side, tapping down to the bridge of my shoeless foot. I forced my toes to strain for it, meeting the curved palm as pain shot up my leg in an excruciating way.
Wow,fuckthat was rough.
But I could feel it. That meant my brain was still firing off those goddamn neurons up and down my spinal cord.
“Yes?” he said. “But don’t move your leg too much, okay? It... we have it in a splint?—”
I let out a massive sigh of relief and then laughed, a nearly hysterical sounding one.
I lived.
I fucking fell down the side of a goddamn cliff andlived.
Oh, Silas was going to owe me more than an IOU. He was going to give me that pretty little savings account he had stashed with enough money to buy a small country and he was going tolet me play around with it while I threw most of it at the stock market.
“Marlow?”
The only thing that would make any of this better was if Blake was here.
My heart ached. I missed him so goddamn much. The pain was making me delirious, tricking me into believing if I reached out, I’d be able to touch him. Wherever he was, I hoped it was far away from here. This wasn’t exactly the alluring image I wanted him to have stuck in his brain after I’d promised an unforgettable night nearly forty-eight hours prior.
“Hey. Can you do something for me?” I asked.
The shadow came back into view. “Anything.”
“Can you tell Blake I’m sorry. He’s the director of the place. Tall, tan, light brownish hair that looks kinda dark blonde in the sunlight. Cute little freckles under his eyes. Brown eyes that turn golden during a sunset. You know who I’m talking about?”
There was another long, drawn out pause. “Why in the world wouldyoube sorry?”
I let out a long, mourn-filled sigh. “I think my friends are going to sue this place. I swear I’m going to try and talk them out of it, you can tell him that, but one is a billionaire with too much time and money on his hands and the other is a hardass who believes in ‘an eye for an eye’.”
Was I making any sense?
It was hard to tell with how weird my vision was swimming and the warped shapes that moved while I tried to focus on the dark blob of a man leaning over me.
How long had we been down here for?
It was almost around noon when I fell and now it was pitch dark out.
How many days were long gone?
There were no sounds of a helicopter approaching, blades beating against the silence of the night. Outside of the man next to me and his soft breathing, I couldn’t pick up on anything else.
Normally, that would be the promise of a peaceful night if not for the absolutely heinous amount of pain I was in.
