Mehar ate slowly, one hand on her belly, pausing between bites to feel the baby move. She was doing that more now, checking in constantly, making sure every kick was accounted for. I understood it. After what we’d been through, every kick was proof of life. Every flutter was a receipt that saidstill here, still growing, still yours.
After we ate, she got quiet. That particular quiet that meant she was thinking about something she didn’t want to say out loud because saying it would make it real.
“What?” I asked.
She pulled her knees up as far as her belly would let her and wrapped her arms around them. “What if nobody comes, Quest?”
“Somebody’s coming.”
“But what if they don’t? What if the mayday didn’t go through? What if nobody knows we’re out here?”
“My brothers know. Maybe not right now, maybe not today. But Justice and Prime will notice I didn’t check in. They’re gonna call the resort, find out we never showed up, and things will start happening. Those two will turn the entire Caribbean upside down looking for us. Trust me on that.”
“And if the coordinates you radioed were wrong? You said the GPS was tampered with. What if they’re searching in the wrong place?”
She was smart.She’d put the pieces together the same way I had and arrived at the same uncomfortable conclusion. If the sabotage extended to the GPS, and it almost certainly did, then the Coast Guard was looking in the wrong grid. Which meant my brothers would eventually figure out the math didn’t add up. Justice would pull the flight data. He’d calculate the fuel burn rate against the departure time and realize we couldn’t havegone down where the instruments said we did. He’d correct the search area. It would just take time.
Time we had to survive through.
“Then we wait,” I said. “We eat. We drink. We keep the fire going. We stay alive. And when they do come, and theywillcome, we’re going to be standing on this beach healthy and whole and ready to find out who did this to us. And then we’re going to make them regret it for the rest of their very short lives.”
She looked at me for a long time. Searching my face for doubt, for cracks, for any sign that I was performing confidence instead of feeling it. I wasn’t performing. I was terrified. But I wasn’t going to fold, not at a poker table, not in a boardroom, and not on a beach. The fear and the refusal to quit had been living side by side in me since I was sixteen years old and they’d gotten real comfortable as roommates.
“Okay,” she said finally. Quiet. Steady. “Okay.”
She leaned into me and I put my arm around her and we sat there watching the fire and the ocean and the sky turning colors above us and I let myself feel, just for a second, how beautiful this place was when I wasn’t busy being terrified of it.
Somebody did this to us. Somebody sabotaged my plane, tried to kill my family, and left us stranded in the middle of nowhere. And when I got off this island, I was going to find them. I was going to look them in the face. And I was going to show them what happens when you come for a Banks and miss.
But first, I needed to catch more fish. Because my girl was eating for two and three fillets wasn’t gonna cut it.
7
Justice
Six calls. Four texts. Zero answers. And I was done telling myself it was nothing.
It had been two days since Quest left for his babymoon. Now look, I knew my brother. Quest on vacation was a different animal than Quest at work. The man was capable of going ghost for a day if Mehar had his attention, which she always did. I could see him leaving his phone on silent while he rubbed her feet on some balcony overlooking the ocean, ignoring the world because the world wasn’t her and therefore wasn’t relevant. I got it. He was in love, about to be a father. He’d earned a few days of being unreachable.
But this wasn’t a few days of being unreachable. This was silence. Complete, total, nothing. And I knew the difference.
Quest always checked in when he landed. But this time, he didn’t call. Even after the text about Serenity, he hadn’t responded. That shit was weird. My brother wasn’t the type to ignore family.
I was sitting at my desk at Banks Reserve staring at the Q4 projections on my screen and not absorbing a single number. The girls were with their other family.
I picked up my phone and called him again. Rang twice this time before the voicemail kicked in. Shorter ring meant either the battery was dying or the phone was damaged or it was sitting at the bottom of the ocean.
I didn’t like any of those options.
Called Mehar. Dead. No ring. Straight to that automated voice.The person you are trying to reach is not available.Yeah, no shit.
I put the phone down and rubbed my temples. Picked it back up. Put it down again. This was the part I hated. The waiting. The not knowing. I could handle problems. Give me a problem with dimensions and I’ll solve it. But give me a blank space where information should be and I lose my mind, because the blank space is where your imagination fills in the worst possible answers.
I called Prime.
He picked up on the first ring because Prime always picked up on the first ring. That was his thing. If you called Prime, he was already reaching for the phone before it finished buzzing.
“What’s good?”
