“Turn around,” he said against my ear. Low and thick and barely controlled.
I turned and braced my hands on the smooth rock edge of the pool. The stone was warm under my palms and the water sat at my waist, taking the weight off my belly so I felt weightless and free. He pressed against me from behind and I could feel how hard he was against my ass and I pushed back into him because I was done waiting.
He slid inside me from behind, slow and deep, and I felt every single inch of him stretching my pussy wide and filling me up until my mouth fell open and nothing came out but breath. My fingers gripped the rock edge and the water moved around our bodies and his hands gripped both my hips and he started stroking with a rhythm that matched the waterfall behind us. Steady and relentless and deep enough to make my arms shake.
“Right there,” I whispered. “Don’t stop.”
He didn’t stop. He pulled my hips back into him with every stroke and the water splashed between us and his breathing got heavier and his grip got tighter and I could feel the pressure building, deep and slow, coiling in my lower belly like a fist closing.
“This pussy,” he growled against the back of my neck. “Even out here, stranded on a fucking island, this is still the best thing I’ve ever had.”
“Then act like it.”
He went harder. Deeper. His hand slid from my hip to my belly, holding it gently even while the rest of his body was anything but gentle. That contrast undid me completely. I came with a sound that echoed off the rocks around us and he followed right behind me, pushing in one last time and holding himself there while his body shook against mine, his forehead droppingto my shoulder. We stood there in the water breathing hard, holding on to each other and the rock edge because neither of us trusted our legs anymore.
We stayed in the water for a long time after. He turned me around, pulled me into his chest. We floated together, my belly between us, his hands never leaving it. He kissed my forehead and I closed my eyes and for the first time since the crash I felt something other than fear or survival or the dull ache of waiting for rescue.
I felt peace. Fragile and temporary and probably stupid given our circumstances, but real.
• • •
We dressed and walked back to camp holding hands. My body was loose and warm, my mind quiet for the first time in days. I was leaning into Quest’s side and thinking about baby names, actual baby names, because we hadn’t talked about it yet and maybe tonight by the fire we could and maybe that would feel like something normal people do instead of something survivors do.
We came through the tree line and I saw the camp and the fire still smoldering and the raft pulled up on the sand and everything looked the same as when we’d left except for one thing.
The boar was standing in the middle of our camp.
It was bigger than I expected. So much bigger. Built low to the ground and wide through the shoulders with dark bristled fur and tusks that curved up from its lower jaw like two dirty white hooks. Its head was down and its small black eyes were locked on us and it was completely still in a way that made my stomach drop because animals that are about to run lookdifferent from animals that are about to charge and this one was not about to run.
Quest’s hand tightened around mine. I felt his body change beside me, the looseness from the waterfall gone in an instant, replaced by something coiled and alert. His other hand moved toward his pocket where he kept the folding knife. A knife that was not built for self-defence, was not built for hunting. No one could take on a wild boar with just a knife like that. No one.
We’d let our guard down. For one hour, we’d let ourselves be something other than survivors and the island had been watching and waiting and now it was reminding us exactly where we were and who was really in charge.
The boar lowered its head another inch and huffed and the sound that came out of it was deep and guttural and vibrated through the ground under my bare feet and I squeezed Quest’s hand so hard my knuckles ached.
“Don’t move,” Quest said. His voice was low and steady but I could feel his pulse hammering through his palm. “Do not move.”
10
Justice
If the Coast Guard wasn’t gonna move fast enough, I’d move for them.
I’d filed the missing aircraft report two days ago and all I’d gotten back so far was a confirmation email and a case number. A case number. Like my brother’s life was a file in somebody’s inbox waiting to be prioritized between lunch and a shift change. I understood bureaucracy. I worked inside a corporation. But this wasn’t quarterly revenue. This was my brother’s life and his pregnant fiancée and I was not about to sit in my office refreshing my email while the federal government took its sweet time deciding whether or not to look for them.
So I drove to Virginia myself.
Quest’s estate sat on forty acres outside of Middleburg, tucked behind a tree line that made it invisible from the road. Main house, guest cottage, private runway, and a small hangar where he kept the Citation. The property had been empty since he and Mehar moved back to the city. No staff, no groundskeeper. Just cameras and silence. I punched in the gate code and drove the half-mile gravel road in and the whole place felt wrong before I even parked. Not because anythinglooked different. Because everything looked exactly the same. The house, the trees, the gravel, all of it sitting there like nothing happened. Like two people didn’t leave from here and vanish off the face of the earth.
I went inside the main house first. Kitchen clean. Living room untouched. The master bedroom had that half-packed energy of people who left in a hurry and a good mood. Quest’s loafers by the closet. One of Mehar’s scarves over a chair. Her prenatal vitamins on the bathroom counter next to a half-used bottle of cocoa butter. I set it down and walked out of the bathroom because if I stood there any longer I was going to punch a wall and that wasn’t going to help anybody.
The security system was accessible from the iPad in Quest’s office. Twelve cameras covering the perimeter, the driveway, the main entrance, the guest cottage, and the back acreage. I pulled up the camera list and went through them one by one and that’s when I noticed it. No camera on the hangar. Twelve cameras on forty acres and not a single one pointed directly at the building where my brother kept a twenty-million-dollar airplane. The closest one was a wide-angle on the south perimeter that caught the edge of the runway and about half the hangar door in the far right corner of the frame. Everything else was blind.
Quest was meticulous about damn near everything. His suits were tailored to the centimeter. His cars were serviced to the mile, not the month. His security protocols for the casino were military-grade. But somehow the hangar had no camera.
I started scrubbing footage from the week before the flight. Hours of nothing. Trees, gravel, a deer cutting across the driveway. I fast-forwarded through days of empty property, nobody coming or going, the estate sitting vacant the way it had been since Quest and Mehar moved to the city. Then, two nights before the flight, something showed up.
Far right corner of the south perimeter feed, almost completely off-screen. A shape moving along the tree line. Fast, low, no headlight. There for maybe two seconds and then gone. Quest and Mehar weren’t even at the property yet. They didn’t arrive until the next afternoon.
