Chapter 114: Hanging On

This was not the first time Giselle had thrown him like that.

The place was different, but almost everything else felt the same. The angle of her grip, the clean force behind it, the way his body lost all say in where it was going. For one ugly second, it felt like the scene on that tree-lined campus path all over again, only this time there was no smooth pavement waiting below.

Elias hit the ground hard.

Sloane had said this part of the property had not been developed yet, and she had not been exaggerating. The ground was full of broken stone, loose gravel, and jagged pieces of earth-buried debris. He struck, rolled half a turn, and could not get back up right away. Dust clung to his clothes, his hands, his face, and in the space of a blink he went from soaked-eyed and frantic to thoroughly, miserably filthy.

Giselle looked at him without even blinking.

There was no softness in her face, no visible jolt of regret. If anything, the way she looked at him made it seem as though something unclean had brushed against her. She lifted a hand and brushed at the places he had touched, slapping once at her own clothes as if she were knocking off dirt that was not really there.

The crowd around them had gasped when she threw him.

Then the mood shifted.

Cheers broke out from every side. They were already people who chased danger for entertainment, people who needed speed, height, risk, and a sharp spike of adrenaline just to feel fully awake. Watching the most untouchable heiress in their circle lose her temper in public only fed the atmosphere. The noise rose at once. A few people laughed. Someone whistled. The whole place felt meaner, brighter, uglier.

Out of the corner of her eye, Giselle saw movement.

She turned again and found Elias dragging himself off the ground.

He was coming back.

She stayed where she was and watched him approach.

His steps were unsteady. Dust had smeared across his pale face, and his glasses were hanging crooked, one side slipping lower than the other. Up close, his eyes were red enough to look almost bloodshot, the rims raw from tears and wind and whatever mix of fear and desperation had driven him here.

At last, Giselle spoke.

"Stay away from me."

Her voice came out cold enough to sting.

Elias acted as if he had not heard her. He kept walking.

He still looked like the sort of boy who could be knocked flat with one hard shove. That had not changed. But there was something in the way he kept moving, something stubborn and ugly and hard to break, that made him seem heavier than he looked.

Giselle closed her eyes for a moment. When she opened them again, her gaze was even flatter than before.

"Do not come any closer."

He came anyway.

"Giselle..."

He had only just gotten her name out when she moved.

Her hand shot out and seized the front of his shirt. In one smooth motion, with one arm, she hauled him straight off the ground and dragged him up in front of her as if his weight barely counted.

"I told you to get lost." Her voice stayed level, which only made it worse. "Didn’t you hear me?"

She was not shouting.

The calm made the anger in her eyes stand out more. Her irises were blue enough to look almost unreal under the artificial lights, and at that moment they looked like rough water under a storm, with something violent moving under the surface.

Elias had to go up on his toes just to breathe properly.

There was fear in his face now, thin but real, the look of someone seeing this version of her for the first time. The tears he had been holding back finally spilled over. They ran down through the dust on his face and left pale tracks behind.

"Giselle," he said again, and his voice shook. "Come back with me."

He swallowed, and when he spoke the next words, the plea in them was so raw it would have sounded humiliating on anyone else.

"Please."

Giselle closed her eyes again.

He was so irritating.

He clung to her the way a fly kept circling after you had already tried to swat it away. Why would he not stop? Why would he not stay gone?

He had rejected her once, then again, and then again after that. He was the one who kept pushing her away. Yet every time she turned and left, he came after her and tried to drag her back like he had some right to do it.

If this was a game, she had been tired of it for a long time.

She let go.

Elias dropped straight down. His palm hit the ground by instinct, and a sharp piece of stone punched through the skin. Pain flashed across his face before he could hide it.

Giselle saw it and did nothing.

She only adjusted the parachute rig on her back and said, "Let’s go."

A fresh burst of cheering went up from the crowd.

Five or six people peeled away from the watchers and followed her toward the helicopter. They climbed in with the bright, casual energy of people who had never seriously believed their bodies could break.

Elias got up fast.

Too fast, considering how hard he had gone down.

He stumbled once, caught himself, and ran for the aircraft. His hand reached for Giselle as though he meant to drag her back down before the door could close.

"Get off."

This time she did raise her voice.

She stood in the open doorway of the helicopter and held her ground while Elias grabbed at her. He pulled, shoved, reached, but she did not move an inch, and her position blocked him from climbing in with them.

Behind her, one of the boys already inside was grinning like this was the funniest thing he had seen all night.

"If you’re that committed," he called out, "try hanging onto the helicopter."

It was a joke.

It was also the kind of joke you only made when you did not consider the person in front of you fully real. Elias’s life meant so little to him that he could turn it into a punch line without even thinking about it.

At some point Elias’s glasses had fallen off. They were gone now, lost somewhere in the dirt. Without them, his face showed fully, and under the work lights the changes were impossible to miss. His hair had been cut shorter, the black dye now settled into something soft and clean that fit him too well. For one brief, disorienting instant, Giselle thought she was looking at Lucien Hart.

Then the thought vanished.

This was not Lucien.

It could never be Lucien.

Lucien would never look this wrecked. Lucien would never cry this badly. Lucien would never make her feel this kind of disgust, this mix of anger and rejection and something that itched under her skin until she wanted to tear it out.

Giselle stared straight at him and said, "Start."

The engine noise swelled at once.

The helicopter was close enough now that the sound filled the air and pressed into the bones. The rotors gathered speed overhead. Wind came hard off the blades and whipped both their hair loose, silver and black tangling in the blast for an instant before the current tore the strands apart again.

Elias still refused to let go.

"Giselle..."

The muscles in her face tightened. "Lift."

The helicopter surged upward.

At the same time, someone screamed.

Elias had both hands hooked onto the frame of the open doorway, and when the aircraft rose, it took him with it.

The reaction around them was instant and chaotic. Several people shouted at once. Someone on the ground started swearing. Inside the aircraft, the easy amusement died on more than one face.

"Miss Frost." The pilot’s voice came from the front, and for the first time there was strain in it. "Are we really continuing?"

If this had been anyone else, she would already have shouted at them for asking.

Because it was Giselle, the pilot held on and waited.

Giselle looked down.

Elias’s face had gone white. The height was not yet catastrophic, maybe six or eight feet off the ground, still low enough that he could have dropped and rolled and probably gotten away with bruises if he did it immediately. He had time. He had a chance.

He showed no sign of taking it.

Even now, he was still hanging on.

Anger and disgust were still there in her expression. Neither had disappeared. Yet something moved under them anyway, something she had not wanted and did not welcome.

Her father had destroyed himself without anyone stopping him.

By then he had already had a wife. He had already had a daughter. There had been people whose lives should have been enough to anchor him. None of it had mattered. No one had kept him from falling. In the end he still plunged straight into the dark and shattered at the bottom of it.

For a long time, Giselle had believed she would end the same way.

Not in the same form, perhaps, but in the same direction. She would keep walking toward whatever edge answered her, and when the moment came, no one would really stop her.

But now there was someone grabbing at her with both hands.

Someone who, in theory, had almost nothing to do with her.

Someone staking his own life on keeping her from moving forward.

She looked down toward the ground. Even from where she stood, the distance was enough to make the body hesitate before the mind did. Elias, meanwhile, had not hesitated at all.

The boy who cried when people’s words hurt him, the one who looked fragile and easy to crush, the one whose fear always seemed close to the surface, had climbed onto a rising helicopter without even stopping to think.

Giselle said, "Take us back down."

The pilot did not waste a second.

She had been waiting for permission and seized it immediately, lowering the helicopter as fast as she safely could.

Then Elias lost one hand.

His grip slipped without warning. One arm dropped away, and the change in weight yanked the rest of his body outward. For one sick second it was obvious what was about to happen. He was going to fall.

Giselle moved before the thought finished.

She bent, caught his wrist, and locked onto him.

But the angle was wrong. Too much of his body was hanging outside the aircraft. If the helicopter touched down like this, his legs would hit first, and the force would snap bone before anyone could do anything about it.

She did not spend even a full second considering alternatives.

Giselle jumped.

Still holding Elias, she launched herself out of the helicopter with him. Gasps exploded around them, louder than anything the crowd had shouted all night. In midair she twisted, turned her body beneath his, and dragged him hard against her chest, wrapping him tight so that when they hit the ground, it would be her taking the impact instead of him.