Chapter 890
In the command center, Jarrod watched the vital signs stabilize on the screen.
Only then did he breathe.
K.C. Bell stood beside him, still and silent. Jarrod’s voice came out low, wrecked, and absolute.
“Find the bypass. Find who opened it.”
K.C.’s eyes were already cold. “Yes, sir.”
Jarrod looked at the screen one last time. Caroline was alive. Injured, furious, and alive. His ruined hands had not saved her.
His command had.
And somehow, that felt both like victory and the cruelest punishment imaginable.
The peace was fragile, fleeting. As her senses returned, Caroline was the first to notice something was wrong.
She looked down, past their dangling boots. The ground below wasn’t the familiar, grid-like pattern of the base’s designated drop zone, dotted with friendly lights. It was an unbroken expanse of blackness, a vast, rolling carpet of forest and mountains under the cold moonlight.
“Jarrod,” she said into her comm, her voice tight with a new kind of alarm. “We’re off course.”
He had been checking the parachute rigging, testing the strain on the lines that were now supporting the weight of two people. He followed her gaze, and his body tensed. He glanced at the GPS on his wrist.
“Far off course,” he confirmed, his voice grim. “The wind shifted.”
The knot of fear in her stomach, which had just begun to loosen, tightened again. They had escaped one death trap only to fall into another.
She looked up at him, at the hard line of his jaw. “Why did you come yourself?” she asked, the question that had been burning in her mind since she recognized him in the sky. “It was too reckless. You could have been killed.”
He was silent for a long moment, the only sound the gentle flap of the canopy above them.
When he finally answered, his voice was raw, stripped of all artifice. “Because I couldn’t lose you again.”
The words were a physical blow, simple, direct, and carrying the weight of a terror she couldn’t comprehend. It wasn’t a declaration of love; it was a confession of a fatal weakness. Her.
She was stunned into silence, the depth of his admission shaking her to the core. All her anger, her jealousy over Sloane, suddenly felt petty, childish.
“Was it Sloane?” she whispered, needing to know, needing to put a name to the phantom that had almost killed her. “Did she do this to my chute?”
His eyes, when they met hers, were no longer filled with relief or passion. They were chips of ice, reflecting a cold, murderous fury.
“I don’t know,” he said, his voice dropping to a deadly quiet. “But when I find out who did…”
He didn’t finish the sentence. He didn’t have to. The promise of brutal, absolute retribution hung in the air between them, more chilling than the high-altitude wind.
“But that’s for later,” he continued, his tone shifting back to the commander, the survivor. “Right now, we focus on living.”