Page 9 of Brawler
“Thanks for the reminder, asshole,” Shark said with brotherly affection.
The jump light flickered yellow. Everyone shuffled toward the ramp as it groaned open, spilling gale-force winds into the belly of the bird. The howl wrapped around them, teeth in the cold, rattling every strap and buckle.
Flash tightened his chin strap, checked his O2 line again, tapped his altimeter. Brawler rose behind him, Beast tucked in like they were welded together.
“Thirty seconds!” The crew chief’s shout cracked through comms.
Flash rolled his shoulders, trying to shake the static crawling up his spine. The presence pressed closer, close enough to feel.
The light snapped green.
Tex saluted the jumpmaster and vanished into the black. Bondo next, then Shark, Twister, Easy, and the rest of the guys.
Flash stepped forward into the maw, NVGs painting the world in eerie green. Vast, infinite sky. No horizon, just stars above and jungle shadow far, far below.
Air roared past his ears, a constant, rushing wall of sound that pressed against his helmet. The cold bit into the seams of his gloves, bled into his bones. The world was nothing but black sky and the faint silver smear of starlight over an endless canopy far below.
He leveled his body into stable freefall, the rhythm automatic, drilled a thousand times. Drew in a breath.
Thin.
Not nothing. Just…not enough. The oxygen felt shallow, like trying to drink through a clogged straw. His lungs pulled, but the air didn’t satisfy.
A faint, cotton-wool pressure began to fill his skull. His ears rang.
He tried another breath. Still thin.
The NVGs swam slightly, edges of the green blur softening. His limbs felt heavier, sluggish, his fingers clumsy on the toggles. A slow, syrupy warmth crept up the back of his neck, the kind that made his instincts barkwrong.
The roar in his ears began to fade, replaced by a distant hush, as if the whole sky was holding its breath.
A tunnel closed in at the edges of his vision, black creeping toward the center.
Hypoxic.The ominous word cut through his haze, but his brain lagged behind. At this altitude, it meant his body was starving for air it couldn’t get. Judgment went first, then motor control. Blackout was next, and if that happened in freefall, he wouldn’t have the time, or the mind, to pull his chute. His altimeter was already ticking toward his hard deck, the line where you either pulled your chute or died. Below that altitude, there wasn’t enough air for the canopy to bloom before the ground punched back. Physics was a bitch.
Now, falling at thirty thousand feet, even those anchors slipped.
“Jae!”
Her voice. Clear. Not through comms, not in his head.Her.A familiar ache sliced his heart,the same one that hit him in the quiet hours, when she wasn’t there. The same one that clawed at him when the laughter died down and the training stopped, when there was nothing left but the echo of her absence. He hadn’t slept right since Venezuela. Couldn’t eat without tasting the hole she’d left behind. Only the job and the jokes kept him moving, kept him sane.
His eyes forced open.
The great white owl from his dream swept through the night beside him, ghost-pale against the void. Wings wide, catching the moonlight. She banked close, close enough that her flight brushed his cheek, a single feather sliding across skin in a soft caress.
Her amber eyes found his, and the world slowed.
It hit him low and hard, like someone had slammed a fist into his chest, knocking the air from his lungs. His gaze locked on hers, pulse heavy in his ears. She was every fantasy he’d shoved aside since Venezuela, wrapped in one impossible, breathtaking truth. Maybe if he didn’t like her so damn much, he could let her go. But she was the bravest woman he’d ever known, unapologetic, untamed, carved into his bones. He wanted her in every way a man could want a woman. Mouth, mind, body. In that split second, he felt robbed of all the time they hadn’t had, cheated out of the fire they might have set if they’d ever been free to touch. She was quicksilver and flame, sunlight and shadow, and she had him. Completely.
Those thoughts fractured like glass as the force of her hit him again. In this form, all she had for expression were those deep, unguarded eyes, amber like molten gold with a thread of orange, fierce and afraid all at once, and something else. He trembled under the weight of it, under the power of her spirit, relentless,mysterious, strong to a fault. Her gaze cut through every layer of armor he’d ever built, straight into him like a laser. She looked at him as if he were the only man in any world that mattered. His chest locked, not from the thin air, but from the ache and sweetness there. Longing. Regret, a raw feeling that sliced through the haze, stealing his mind.
She was here for him. How, he couldn’t comprehend. But it was as real as the breath suspended in his chest. As real as the sun rising and setting.
His mouth shaped her name.Killa.
“Woman? What is going on? How are you here? Like this?” The words tore out of him before he could stop them. In his dazed confusion, he added, “Don’t you see her?”
Brawler’s voice came sharp over the comms. “Flash? Are you all right? Who are you talking to? See who?”
