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CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Wick

I came awake completely disoriented, the wind whipping heavy rains into my face, making it hard to see as pain shot through my head.

It took a long second for it to come back.

The sting, the pain, the relief, the men, the storm, the last lightning strike…

I shot up, my head spinning at the change, making me wonder if I’d hit my head, if I had a concussion.

Then, as the nausea rose up my throat, I knew that I did.

Dammit.

Like we needed any more complications.

We.

Violet .

Where was she? Why wasn’t she right with me?

Another deep rumble of thunder that shook the whole ground rolled.

One, two, three…

The lightning lit up the sky, and my gaze scanned around the field, seeking Violet.

Then my heart seized in my chest as I found her a yard or so away. Her legs were pinned under a fallen, blackened tree.

“Violet!” I yelled, trying to get to my feet, but the lightheadedness had me falling back down.

Once.

Twice.

Three times.

Finally, I stayed on all fours and fucking crawled to her.

“Vi, hey, you’re gonna be alright,” I said, my hands reaching for her face. “I’ll get it off you,” I assured her. Even though I wasn’t sure how I was going to manage with my head spinning and my vision swimming.

Violet’s eyes were squeezed shut as she took slow, deliberate breaths to either try to keep calm or focus past the pain.

“I thought you were dead,” she said, her pretty eyes finally sliding open, and the redness there said she’d been crying. Possibly for a long time.

“Nah. It’s gonna take more than assassins, killer bugs, and lightning to kill me,” I teased. Then, in a more serious tone, I asked, “Can you feel your legs?”

“There’s a lot of crushing going on, so yeah.”

“Can you move your feet for me?”

There was one long, awful second that had me thinking she couldn’t until, finally, they wiggled up and down.

“Okay. Good. So, now, we just have to get it off of you,” I said, scooting down her body, getting low, and trying to push.

But there was no use.

It was too heavy.

There was no way one man could move it without some help.

Fuck, fuck, fuck.

“You have to go without me,” Vi said, tone small and sad.

“I’m not going anywhere.”

“It’s too heavy. You can’t move it.”

“I’m gonna figure something out.”

The rain was slowing, and the wind wasn’t as fierce as I racked my brain, trying to think of what I could use to try to lift or roll the damn thing off of her.

“What are you doing?” she yelped as I grabbed handfuls of mud and started slathering it up her legs. More and more until she was completely covered, the mud wedging all around the limb.

“Seeing if I can get it to slide,” I said, getting low and pushing with my shoulder. Then, when that didn’t work, dropped onto my ass and used my legs.

There was a little movement, but even if I got the damn thing to slide down, it ran the risk of breaking her ankles as it slid.

Okay.

New plan.

A lever.

I needed some sort of lever situation.

There were plenty of old, fallen limbs around. What I needed was something to act as a fulcrum to put the limb over and use to lift the tree.

I fought past my swimming vision as the storm cleared as if it had never happened, the sun starting to shine, the heat returning, the birds chirping and squawking happily.

Violet grumbled as she moved to sit up, her keen-eyed gaze on me as I tried to get to my feet, and stumbled.

“Wick, you need to sit down. You had to have hit your head.”

There was no time to sit down, to wait for the dizziness to pass. There was no luxury of softness in a survival situation. I had to grit my teeth and endure.

Especially since we were actively being chased.

If we didn’t luck out and have those guys get struck by lightning or turned around in the storm or something, they could be closing in with each passing moment.

I had to get Vi free.

Then we had to keep moving.

I had a feeling we weren’t that far from civilization now. Maybe another half a day at a decent pace and we could start seeing some signs of reaching the edge of the forest.

“Duchess, I’m just gonna go find something to use as a lever and fulcrum,” I told her, forcing my legs forward, fighting past the dizziness to start my search.

I didn’t know a lot about crushing injuries, but I imagined that the longer a body part stayed under the object, the worse the outcome.

I found the limb that I’d use for a lever relatively quickly, but finding something flat and strong enough to work as the fulcrum wasn’t an easy task.

I had to be gone at least half an hour before I finally found a rock that was just tall enough to work. I didn’t need a lot of space for Vi to be able to slide her legs out. A couple of inches should do it.

I rolled the rock back, letting out a little whistle as I saw Violet frantically searching the tree line for me.

The relief on her face made a warm sensation move through my chest.

I wasn’t an idiot.

My feelings for Violet had been growing by the day. And once we finally gave fully into it, yeah, shit had just accelerated.

When you were spending every minute of the day together, talking to pass the time, you ended up knowing more about each other in a few days than you would likely learn in months or even years if you were dating in a normal situation.

She’d told me what it was like to grow up in an outlaw biker club, about her mom’s bounty hunting and her dad’s horrific childhood. She talked fondly of her older brother who’d gone off on an adventure years back, but had come home and fallen back in love with his high school sweetheart.

I knew the names of all of her aunts and uncles—all of them from said biker club, not blood—and cousins who were all her best friends. Especially the girls. Who she thought might be moments away from hopping a plane and coming to find her themselves if she didn’t show up soon.

Not having a lot of family left to talk about, I told her mostly about my travels, about how doing so had expanded my mindset, made me really give a shit about the environment that I’d never really considered before. But when you watched deforestation driving out precious animal species, when you’d lived through some of the worsening storms, and seen the aftermath of horrific wildfires, you started to care.

That was why I started to invest in my uncle’s company. I wanted to encourage people to see the wonders of the rainforest… without negatively impacting the rainforest itself.

Some part of me wished I had never decided to invest.

But that said, if I hadn’t, I never would have been arrested. I wouldn’t have skipped out on bail. Violet wouldn’t have come across my file and followed me. We wouldn’t have gone deep into the jungle together, gotten to know each other, and had feelings start to grow.

“Hey, duchess. Think I got the solution here,” I said, rolling the rock over to the side of her body and setting up the rock fulcrum. “How’re the legs doing? Can you still move your feet for me?”

In answer, she wiggled her toes.

“Okay, good,” I said, turning to go drag my limb over. “Now, I’m gonna need you to move as fast as possible as soon as I get this thing lifted. Don’t try to stand or anything, just pull your legs out of the way.”

“Can do,” she agreed, moving to sit and reaching down to wrap her hands under her upper thighs, ready to pull them if she needed to.

I positioned the limb to act as a lever, then looked at Violet.

“Ready?”

She gave me a tight nod before her gaze slid to her legs, watching closely for the slightest bit of room.

A loud curse escaped me as I pushed down with everything I had onto the beam.

Sweat pricked my brow as my arms, back, and shoulders screamed.

“Got it,” Vi said, pulling her legs back with so much force that she rolled back into a ball, hugging them to her chest.

Careful not to drop the limb too hard and risk hitting her, I lowered it back to the ground before rushing to her side.

“You okay?” I asked as she stretched out and stared up at me, her breathing fast.

“It’s like pins and needles dialed up to eleven,” she said, rubbing the heels of her hands against her thighs.

“Just the blood returning,” I assured her. Honestly, I had no idea for sure. That was just my hope.

Violet shook her legs, hit them with her hands, clenched them together—anything to try to ease the nerves firing off.

She had some scratches from the bark, and I imagined the bruises would set in as the day went on, but it could have been so much worse.

“Okay,” she said after a long moment. “Alright. Let’s try standing.”

I got up first, still feeling a little spinning, but it eased more quickly.

Vi took my offered hand, but as soon as her legs took her full weight, they buckled.

I pulled her up against me, letting her hold onto me as her legs adjusted. I hoped. Otherwise, our movement would be even slower if I had to have her piggyback or pull her.

Slowly but surely, though, she took more of her own weight until, finally, she was standing on her own.

“This has been a crazy twenty-four hours,” she declared as she reached upward, feeling my head. “You have a giant goose egg.”

“It’ll be fine. The nausea is better, and the dizziness is only when I move my head too fast.”

“And it’s not like there’s much we can do anyway,” she said, sighing.

“We’re almost out of here. I can feel it.”

“Let’s hope. We should get moving, right? Those guys weren’t far behind before the storm. And getting that limb off of me…”

“Yeah,” I agreed, hating that I couldn’t give her more time to rest and recover. But I would hate it a lot more if she ended up shot, so I sighed and started walking.

Hopefully, that was our three things.

And everything else would be smooth sailing from here on out…