“She’s right where she needs to be. Waiting. Just like my brother waited to become a pilot. Shame he can’t be one anymore.”
Crew’s throat tightened.
Conner’s face flashed behind his eyes—grinning, cocky, young in a way that made the loss even worse.
“This isn’t about her.” Crew’s jaw flexed. “You want me? Fine. But you leave her out of it.”
Reed’s voice snapped. “Don’t you dare say that! Don’t you dare act like you get to decide what this is about!”
Church shifted in his seat, tension rolling off him, but he kept his mouth shut. Letting Crew handle it.
Crew swallowed down the burn in his throat. “I didn’t decide any of it. I didn’t decide the malfunction. I didn’t decide who lived and who didn’t.”
Reed hissed out a breath. “Must’ve been nice. You got to eject. You got to float down. You got to go on living. Sure, you wouldn’t have decided that.”
The words dug deep, right into the dark, ugly place Crew kept his guilt.
He felt it like a physical thing, a hand closing around his ribs.
“I didn’t go on.” His voice pitched low, controlled. “I’ve been stuck in that cockpit every damn day since it happened.”
For a second, the line went quiet except for the underlying hiss of static and wind.
Then Reed’s voice came back with a wicked lash.“Liar.”
Crew’s teeth ground. “Conner was my brother too, goddammit.”
Another pause—longer this time.
Crew’s mind went to Conner’s laugh and the way he’d slapped Crew’s shoulder after training runs and countless beers to celebrate between trainings.
Reed’s breathing came through the speaker, uneven, as if he hated that what Crew said hit home.
Then his voice turned harsh again, as if he had to shove the softness away before it infected him.
“You don’t get to claim him,” Reed bit out. “You don’t get to mourn him like you’ve earned that right. You walked away.”
Crew’s chest burned. “I watched him die.” His statement was flat, brutal truth. “I watched the sky stay empty where his chute should’ve been.”
Church’s eyes flicked to him, a hint of something like respect and sorrow.
Reed made a sound between a laugh and a choke.
“You come up here.” Reed’s voice trembled with rage. “You come get her. If you’re really the man everyone thinks you are. Ifyou’re really—” His voice broke, then snapped back into that sick sing-song. “Come and get her, Wolf.”
The line went dead.
Crew’s stomach dropped as if the helicopter had fallen out of the sky.
“Fuck,”he breathed.
Church leaned forward, scanning the landscape below as they reached the break in the trees they were looking for. “That’s it, Crew.”
Crew didn’t answer. His brain was working too fast, too alert, mapping what Reed was doing and what he wasn’t. Reed didn’t want Fern dead. Reed wanted Crew broken. Reed wanted control.
The helicopter bucked violently as they crested the tree line. Wind slapped them sideways.
Crew corrected hard, sweat slick under his hands. His heartbeat thundered, PTSD snapping at his heels like a rabid dog, trying to drag him backward into the past.
