The crash below is violent. Metal shrieks, and an explosion of dust rises from the canyon floor.
It offers him a small window of time to make his next move as the guards rush out to see what the commotion is about. There’s cursing and yelling as they fight amongst themselves about who forgot to apply the emergency brakes, and all the while, Wyatt is scaling the side of the property directly underneath the helicopter landing pad.
He hears one of them laugh nervously. Another blames someone inside the building. Good. Let them turn on each other.
He ain’t much of a rock climber to begin with. He’s sore from the crash, though he can feel his toes a little better now, which he assumes is the adrenaline. The closest he’s ever come to free soloing a cliff is traipsing across his roof to repair a broken shingle. Even that was touch and go, but it’s funny what motivation will do to propel him forward when he thought it otherwise impossible.
The rock crumbles once under his weight, and he nearly peels backward off the mountain. His heart slams so hard it drowns out the shouting above.
He thinks of Addison as he begins the short but vertical climb. Of her beautiful smile and how fucking annoyed he would get at her constant questions until he started to look forward to them instead.
He thinks of how badly he wants to taste her lips and hold her in his arms, even one last time.
He thinks of the promise he made to her, that he has every intention of keeping, and that’s what pushes him up the side of a mountain, grabbing sketchy handholds and listening to rocks dislodged under his feet.
One arm above the next, one foot over the other, don’t forget to breathe…that last one is a challenge all in its own. He’s never been afraid of heights, but he’s been in control of the time he spent in the air. There is nothing between him and the ground below now except willpower and luck. He fears he might be running low on the second.
His burned hip screams when he stretches too far. His fingers slip once, twice, three times as one of his nails cracks in the middle. He presses his cheek against hot stone and forces the tremors to still.
When he finally crests the top and flings himself over the fence, he lands with a thud, inhaling deep and wasting no time before dragging himself up to his feet and limping toward the helicopter.
Voices are coming back toward the pad. The distraction window is closing. He either leaves in the sky or off the side of the cliff.
He slides into the pilot’s seat, and for one horrifying second, his vision doubles unless he blinks aggressively to clear it. The gas tank is half full. He’ll need to stop for fuel eventually.
It’ll still put him a hell of a closer to home that he would be otherwise, so he starts waking up his temporary ride, flicking all the right dials and buttons and smiling through the pain of his injuries as it lifts smoothly off the ground.
The blades whine before catching. The machine vibrates beneath him, drowning out the shouts below and gunshots that miss their target to hit the clouds instead.
The ground drops away. The guards shrink. All those Jeeps become nothing more than toys.
He is going home.
Chapter 19
Addison watches the horizon for hours that first day, listening for the sound of a plane that never comes.
The wind cuts across the open land in sharp, restless gusts, carrying the smell of hay and dust. Every sound makes her lift her head. Every shift in the air has her heart kicking against her ribs, hoping against reality that this might all be a terrible nightmare.
The sight of the plane overhead as she saw Wyatt leaving with Vincent is burned into her retinas, and every time she blinks, she hopes it might fade for good.
It doesn’t.
Is this what it feels like to lose something she’d been afraid to hope was hers this whole time?
There’s some strange, ridiculous level of optimism that festers within her and convinces her that he’ll be back that very same night. He’ll find a way to evade his captor and turn the plane around so he can be with them again by the time the sun sets. Hope has always been dangerous and frivolous. Practicality is all that matters. Her upbringing drilled that into her. And yet she clings to it anyway, because letting it go feels too much like giving up on the one person she’s grown to trust amid the hellscape of this wasteland.
When night finally falls, and there is nothing but the sounds of the chickens pecking at the ground and goats vaulting off eachother, she urges Emma back into the house and tears her gaze away from the sky. The cold creeps in fast once the sun dips, seeping through her boots and stiffening her fingers until they ache. How much worse had it been for him up in Alaska, she wonders, smiling sadly as she imagines Wyatt coasting across the northern-lit sky.
“He’ll be back,” she tells her daughter. “Wyatt is nothing if not resourceful. He promised he would come back, and he will.”
If she repeats that mantra in her own head often enough, then it might turn into truth.
She expects questions from Emma that never manifest except for the one that’s hardest to answer.
“Why did Dad come back if he only left us again?”
Addison sighs. She’s done her best to shield her daughter from some of the more concerning aspects of their original group.‘Because he needed me to make more children’is the truth of the matter, but that blunt answer is far from what she should hear. “Your father has always been steadfast in his beliefs. He thought I might be useful to him. Then something more useful was offered in my place.”
