Chapter 44 - The Crash on Widow’s Reef
The world inverted into violence.
The Sikorsky struck the canopy of ancient coastal pines with the force of an artillery shell. Branches sheared through the cockpit glass like iron spears. The rotor mast snapped, sending the blades pinwheeling into the black woods, and the fuselage slammed into the rocky granite ledge of an offshore promontory, skidding eighty yards through brush before rolling onto its port side with a sickening crunch.
Silence descended, heavy and suffocating, punctuated only by the hiss of hot turbine oil dripping onto frozen moss.
Elena blinked against the darkness. Her body felt shattered, every nerve ending screaming from both the trauma of childbirth and the violent deceleration of the crash. Yet, her arms were locked in an unbreakable, maternal cage around her chest.
Underneath the thick wool blanket, Scarlett gave a tiny, muffled whimper.
She was alive.
"Christian..." Elena whispered, her voice barely a dry croak. "Christian?"
A groan answered her from the twisted wreckage near the cockpit bulkhead. A flashlight flickered to life, its beam shaking violently. Christian pulled himself free from beneath a collapsed equipment rack, his face covered in blood, his left arm hanging limp at his side—the collarbone clearly broken.
"Elena..." He crawled toward her, coughing up dust and fuel vapors. "The baby?"
"She's alive," Elena breathed, clutching the infant closer. "Where's Marcus?"
Christian shone the flashlight into the crushed cockpit.
Elena looked away, bile rising in her throat. The trunk of a massive hemlock had impaled the front console. Marcus was slumped over the yoke, lifeless, his neck broken upon initial impact. He had held the bird level until the very last millisecond, sacrificing himself so the cabin wouldn't pancake into the granite bluff.
"He saved us," Christian said quietly, his jaw tightening into iron. "We can't stay here. The fuel line is cracked, and Julian’s private security will be tracking the emergency locator beacon."
"Julian is dead," Elena said, shivering violently as the freezing northern wind poured through the shattered fuselage. "He was on the helipad when the rotor blew."
Christian paused, shining the light out the torn cargo door. Below them, through the dense pine woods, the black ocean crashed against razor-sharp sea cliffs.
"Julian has nine lives and the devil’s own luck," Christian said grimly. "Until I see his corpse in an incinerator, he’s alive. Can you walk?"
Elena looked down at herself. She was bleeding, torn, and utterly depleted. But as she looked at Scarlett's tiny face—her perfect, rosebud lips suckling weakly against the wool—an ancient, terrifying power surged through her veins.
"I can walk," Elena said.
Christian helped her to her feet. The cold hit them like a physical blow. They were on an isolated, fog-drenched island off the coast of Maine—the jagged silhouette of monolithic granite cliffs cutting into the stormy night sky.
As Christian swept the flashlight beam across the tree line, the light caught a pair of massive, wrought-iron gates rusted into the granite rock face two hundred yards up the ridge.
At the center of the iron gates was a crest cast in oxidized bronze: a sea hawk clutching an anchor.
The Montgomery family crest.
Christian froze, his breath pluming in the icy air. "No. It's impossible."
"What is that?" Elena asked, clutching Scarlett tightly beneath her coat.
"Widow’s Reef," Christian whispered, dread bleeding into his voice. "This was our grandfather’s summer sanctuary. The compound was abandoned forty years ago after my uncle drowned here."
"Why are the perimeter lights on?" Elena asked, pointing a trembling finger through the pines.
May you like
High on the granite bluff, behind the rusted iron gates, the third-floor windows of a Victorian stone mansion blazed with warm, golden light.
***
