“I need that bag,” she cries.
“I have it.” I pick it up and despite the tilt of the plane manage to make my way to her seat. “Here.” I hand her the real bag. She hugs it to her body and releases a sob of relief.
“How do you know my name?” Ava blurts out.
“What?” I answer her distractedly. I’m not looking in her direction.
Afonso has my attention now. He’s somehow found a parachute. I lean across Ava and see the limp arm of the stewardess nearly brushing the floor of the plane. Fuck. That goddamned asshole shot the stewardess to get access to the emergency chute. Her dead body sprawls in a nearby seat.
I glance back at Afonso and the parachute. Ava and I need that chute. Afonso turns to the exit door and starts tugging. Dumbass. He’s never going to get the door open. Cabin doors can’t be opened when the landing gear is up but he apparently doesn’t know that. He struggles with the door, pulling hard on the handle.
How long would it take me to get to him? I unbuckle my belt and press my finger to my lips so Ava won’t give me away. Inching forward, I creep toward Afonso but he hears me and pulls his gun from his waistband and shoots.
I duck back but a sting hits my eye. I brush it and realize that his bullet must have caught part of the metal of the seat, which ricocheted and struck me in the face. I blink rapidly and brush away the blood. He must have caught a vein over my eye. Those wounds bleed profusely. Shit.
“Stay here,” I shout to Ava. The rattling of the plane has reached epic levels.
“I’m not going anywhere, asshole,” she snaps back.
I can’t stop the grin from spreading. That she’s chippy is a good sign. We’ll need attitude to survive this.
I push off with my legs and launch myself toward Afonso. He brings his gun up and shoots again but the plane pulls to the right suddenly. We go flying, my body slams against the seats, and Afonso crashes into the opposite exit door. Near Afonso lies my emergency kit. I reach for it.
“Mendoza, the wing. The wing is gone,” Ava screams. I right myself and look out the window. She’s right. I abandon the stolen bag, Afonso, the parachute, the Boy Scout pack. My only chance of making it out is to belt in and hope that the seats break our fall into the Amazon. Afonso grins wildly and grabs the purse, looping it over his arm. When we land, I’m finding him and gutting him.
With both wings gone, the plane starts a free fall. The rumble inside the tube is deafening. Hand over hand, I climb back toward Ava’s seat and manage to fling myself into the seat. She reaches over and helps me buckle in.
“Your eye,” she gasps. “You’re bleeding like—like—”
“Like I’ve been stabbed in the eye?” I finish. Now that I’m upright and can feel my laceration-free forehead, I realize that the shard must have pierced my eyeball. The hazy vision in my left side isn’t due to blood but because I got a piece of metal in my eye. I turn to her. “Is it bad?”
“I don’t see anything,” she frets. Her hands pat my face and even though we are hurtling toward our death in a metal can, I can’t help but think of how soft her hands feel. They’re like flower petals or silk sheets. They are the softest goddamned things in the world, and the last thought in my head before I black out is I wonder how they’d feel on my dick.
CHAPTER SEVEN
AVA
I wake up with my face pressed against a warm, broad chest and my legs tangled in the leaves of a tree. Somewhere close by, I hear birds chirping. There’s sunlight dappling my face and everything feels damp.
Everything also hurts.
I’m dazed and my head is ringing with pain, and the sun is beaming right into my eyes, which is freaking annoying as hell. I rub a hand across my face and it takes me a few moments to realize that I shouldn’t see the sun at all if I’m inside an airplane.
Then I remember the storm. The thunderous boom as the plane was hit by lightning. Screams. The wing catching fire. The chaos of Afonso with his gun. Free-falling through the cabin, my grip on the seats the only thing keeping me from flying through six thousand feet of empty air.
Mendoza’s hand ripping out of mine when the cabin depressurized. The screams of people going silent.
Mendoza.
I remember him, too.
A noise from somewhere nearby catches my attention. It sounds like heavy breathing. I open my eyes and look around.
I’m still strapped to my seat. There’s a portion of the plane underneath me, and the two seats Mendoza and I buckled into are still together.