Page 20

He was precision. Pressure. Power barely held in check. Maybe that was what scared me the most. Because I’d walked away from a hundred bad ideas before.
But Elias Dane didn’t feel like a bad idea. He felt like a bomb with no timer. And I was the one lighting the fuse.
Jessa didn’t push—she never did—but she shot me a sidelong glance that said she saw everything.
The reckless hunger in my eyes. The obsession already curling around me.
She didn’t ask if he was worth it. Because we both knew that question didn’t matter anymore. I was already in too deep. And I didn’t want out.
The Ravenel Bridge loomed ahead, all cables and steel, cutting across the sky like a ribcage. The sun had dipped below the marsh. The bridge glowed in the haze, majestic, dangerous, begging to be touched.
“Driving over it?” Jessa asked, slowing.
“No.”
I pointed to the gravel turnout near the base on the Charleston side. “We’re climbing it.”
She barked out a laugh. “You’re out of your goddamn mind.”
“Absolutely,” I said, already pulling off my sweatshirt to reveal the black tank top beneath. “Let’s go.”
But she didn’t move right away.
Jessa stared up at the dark steel skeleton of the Ravenel Bridge, her expression suddenly less amused and more … tense.
The wind cut harder this close to the water, sharp and unpredictable. From the open Jeep windows, it lifted the ends of her braid and whipped my curls into my mouth.
“You know if we fall,” she said slowly, “it won’t be a broken ankle this time. It’ll be game over. Splat on the pavement. Or the water, if we’re lucky. But from that height?” She shook her head. “Water feels like concrete.”
I paused, hands gripping the dash. The air smelled like rust and salt and wet metal. Down below, the harbor traffic passed obliviously. Boats. Barges. Giant container ships that didn’t stop for much of anything.
Jessa’s voice dropped to a whisper. “We won’t survive it, Vivi. Not a misstep. Not a gust of wind at the wrong time.”
For a second, just a heartbeat, her fear twisted something inside me.
But I looked up.
At the cables soaring into the sky like silver wires spun by gods.
At the massive pylons that held it all together, strong and impossible.
At the promise of flight and falling and the thin line between the two.
“Yeah,” I said quietly. “But imagine if we don’t fall.”
Jessa exhaled hard, like she knew I couldn’t be talked down.
Because I couldn’t. Not tonight.
Not with that pressure in my chest, the same one that had followed me from Elias’s voice echoing across the office to his eyes locking with mine like he was already tearing me apart.
I needed to fly.
Or crash.
Or maybe both.
We parked behind a utility trailer, ditched our bags in the back, and jogged to the fence that marked the construction access path. A warning sign flashed red in the growing dark: