Page 179 of My Big, Fat, Secret Billionaire Baby

No.

I got the raw feed from Red Bull. That, combined with the feed from my helmet action cam, allows me to watch every goddamn horrifying, gut-wrenching second of it.

I view the Red Bull feed first.

There I am. A sleek, arrogant blur against the jagged teeth of the Alps.Luca threads through the Serpent’s Coil first. He’d pushed the line, dared me to follow.

And me?

I couldn’t justfollow.

No.

I had to be better.

Faster.

I had to shave milliseconds off his time, take a tighter, more aggressive angle through that final S-bend, prove I was still the king of this goddamn mountain.

Carving impossible lines, pushing the fucking envelope, because that’s what Leo Maxwell does.

Ordid.

Then the gust.

That fucking unpredictable mountain wind shear I should have anticipated, the one I misjudged because I was too focused on showing up Luca, on feeling the goddamn exhilaration of absolute mastery.

Then the sickening crunch of carbon fiber, Kevlar, and bone against unyielding granite.

Then the ricochet.

The spin.

The blur.

My body, hanging limp and lifeless from the parachute.

The landing, rolling like a sack of potatoes on the ground, my leg twisting back at an impossible angle, my chute wrapping around me, until I come to a final, excruciating stop.

The Red Bull camera zooms in.

I look like a dead man.

My face is pale.

Covered in blood.

My wingsuit and parachute are ripped to shreds around my body.

My tibia protrudes from my calf. A gory, broken stump.

I force myself to watch the helmet cam footagenext. Then I watch it again. And again. Alternating between helmet cam, and Red Bull external cam.

Each time, a cold dread snakes through me, colder than any mountain wind. This isn’t about analyzing flight dynamics or pinpointing the exact moment of impact.

This is about confronting the reality. The brutal, undeniable reality of what I almost threw away.

The life I nearly lost not just to the mountain, but to my own fucking ego.

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