This particular island had a helipad. The first I’d created and the most important. Serigala housed so many souls. If it protected a new addition, then Eleanor was lucky she’d found salvation on its shores.
The irony of that thought tightened yet another knot inside me. This one wrapped around my heart, complete with poisonous vines and venomous fangs.
If Eleanor was on Serigala…I honestly didn’t know how I’d react. How my past would cope tangling with my present. How I would behave staring at a future I had never planned to face.
“We’ll do the outskirts first,” the pilot crackled. “Then we’ll land and search the interior on foot.”
“Fine.” I kept staring out the window as we slowed and hover-crawled over the entire island. I spotted many of the island’s inhabitants. Creatures that belonged and so many that didn’t. Perfect and broken, whole and in pieces, but nothing with two legs. Nothing that looked like a goddess who had the goddamn power to knot me up and make it hard to breathe.
She’s probably waterlogged and dead on the ocean floor.
Something clawed at my throat and made it hard to swallow.
A spray of parrots took flight from a banyan tree as we drew closer to the centre of the island. Banded lories and Moluccan Kings. All bigger and brighter than Pika but native to their homeland while Pika was a foreigner, brought by a cage and released by a teenager who’d buried his parents and fought his brother to retain a company that’d brought so much heartache.
“There!” I sat up, threw off my headset, unbuckled my harness, and kneeled on the floor to rip open the fuselage.
A burst of wind and drone of noise whipped inside.
“Sir! Close the damn door!”
My hand wrapped around the handle, my body pivoted on one knee as the helicopter swooped left, spotting what I had.
A girl.
A goddess standing in the middle of my helipad.
Bold and brave, hair whipping like Medusa’s snakes, her power over me crackling like lightning, singeing with fire, pulling me down toward her.
Chapter Sixteen
WIND LICKED AND LASHED as the helicopter traded weightlessness for Earth’s gravity, its skids disappearing into thick grass of the overgrown helipad.
I’d made the choice to step out of hiding and greet my escort rather than hide. I chose life over death—or at least I hoped I had.
I braced myself for Calvin to step off the helicopter, or the man who’d checked up on me three times the day before, delaying my departure by precious hours.
But…
Sully.
My stomach fluttered and feathered as he leaped from the chopper and turned back to yell at the pilots over the din. He gesticulated with his arm, shook his head, his anger turning his motions aggressive. The pilot argued back, but Sully was boss, he was god, his word was scripture chiselled into stone and obeyed at all cost.
Finally, the pilot nodded, waited as Sully slammed the door and stepped back, then added more power to the rotors to skim into the sky. My head tipped up as I watched the mechanical bird skip to the left, climb in height, and vanish in a burst of noisy speed.
Only once silence descended did I drop my gaze to Sully’s.
He stood on the opposite side of the clearing. Fists in pants pockets, charcoal suit covering him majestically from head to toe; an aubergine tie loose and hanging around his neck. Sweat gleamed in the hollow of his throat. His dark hair with its unpermitted sun-bleached tips was wild and wind-tangled.
He was undone.
The most ruffled I’d ever seen him.
He was no longer cold-blooded, standing in the tropics without any sign of discomfort. He vibrated with ferocity, boiling with need and fury.
Our gazes locked, and whatever minor dregs of dignity and energy I had left siphoned into the ground. My toes grew roots, anchoring me in place. My legs became bark, brittle and unable to bend. I planted myself into the soil, seeking purchase to weather another storm…the storm of Sullivan’s temper.
I didn’t know how this would go.
I didn’t know if I’d be alive after it.
But…I would be brave.
I would not break.
I squared my shoulders and waited.
Without a word, he stepped toward me.
Chapter Seventeen
MY PSYCHE SPLIT DOWN the middle.
Part of me remained my own. It recognised my power, my rule, my right to hurt, humiliate, and harm the girl before me. It whispered monstrous things full of anger at being thwarted, temper at being denied, and rage at no longer having control over the situation.
The other part of me watched from a safe distance. The part that I’d always kept locked away because it was born from compassion, empathy, and rapport. Once upon a time, that part ruled all of me. These days, it had no sway in my decisions.
Yet, for the first time in forever, I had to admit I’d lost where this girl was concerned.