The words hangin the air between us.
“I’ve climbed this wall before.”
Riot stares at me like I’ve started speaking a language he doesn’t understand. His mouth opens, closes. Opens again. For the first time since he walked through my bedroom door, the easy confidence cracks.
“You’ve... what?”
“Climbed. This wall.” The words come easier the second time. Something is loosening in my chest—a fist I’ve been clenching for years, slowly uncurling. “I’ve free climbed it at least a dozen times. There’s a line that follows the vertical fissure on the left side.” I point to a dark seam in the granite, barely visible from this angle. “It’s a 5.10b. Technical, sustained, but moderate if you can find the flow. Good handholds, solid feet. I could do it in my sleep.”
“You’re a rock climber.”
“Yes.”
“A kindergarten teacher who rock climbs.”
“People can be more than one thing.”
He’s still staring. The calculation happening behind his eyes is almost visible—every assumption he made about me reshuffling, reorganizing, building a new picture from pieces that don’t fit the frame he constructed. He looks at the two-hundred-foot drop, then at my hands, then back at the cliff. For the first time, he looks unsure. Out of his element.
Too much,Daniel’s voice whispers. It’s sharp today, a serrated edge in the back of my mind.You’re being too much, Evie. You’re being dramatic. You’ll get to the middle, panic, and he’ll have to scrape your broken body off the canyon floor. Just like always.
I swallow the ghost of his criticism.
“Show me,” Riot says.
“What?”
“The route. Show me what you see.”
No one has ever asked me that before. Not about climbing, not about anything. My whole life has been people telling me what they see—what I should be, what I should want, what my own eyes and instincts are getting wrong. No one has ever just... asked me to show them.
I move to the canyon's edge. The drop yawns below, two hundred feet of air and shadow, and my body responds the way it always does at the lip of a climb. Not fear. Recognition. My hands find the rock before my brain gives permission — cool, rough, the mineral grit of granite that I know better than my own kitchen. This is my place. This is where I belong. This is what I'm for.
“There.” I trace the route with my finger. “The crack system starts about fifteen feet up—we’ll have to boulder through the start to reach the main seam. Then it opens into a hand crack, perfect for jamming. See where the rock changes color? That’s a rest ledge. Enough room to stand, catch your breath.”
“And above that?”
“The crux. There’s a section around a hundred feet where the holds get thin. Sharp crimps and insecure slopers. It requires technical footwork.” The memory rises—my first time on this wall, arms shaking, fingers screaming, the moment I almost let go. “But if you trust your feet, if you don’t overthink it, the holds are there. They’re always there.”
Riot is quiet. He reaches out, touching the stone with a tentative hand, feeling the unforgiving texture. He looks like a man realizing his gun and his tactical gear don't mean a thing to a vertical mile of ancient stone.
“You free solo this?”
The question lands like a stone in still water. Free soloing—climbing without ropes, without protection, without anything between you and gravity except your own hands and the rock. The thing that would make my mother cry, my sister lecture, my father shake his head in that disappointed way he’s perfected over twenty-nine years.
“Yes.”
“Yes?” He exhales. Runs a hand through his hair. He looks at the wall again, and I see the shift—the Alpha operator stepping back, the professional recognizing a superior officer on a different kind of battlefield. “You climb two hundred feet of granite with no rope. For fun.”
“Not for fun.” The distinction matters. “For me. There’s a difference.”
I meet his gaze. The canyon wind cuts between us, cold and sharp, but the space between our bodies feels warm. Charged. Like the air before a storm, all that electricity looking for somewhere to ground.
“Evie.” My name in his mouth does something to my pulse. “Can you get us across?”
Not can you get yourself across. Not, I’ll find another way. He’s asking if I can lead us both. Trusting me—a kindergartenteacher he met two hours ago—to get him up a cliff face that would kill most people.
Say no,Daniel’s voice whispers.You’ll fail, you’ll fall, you’ll prove everyone right about you.
