Page 44 of My Big, Fat, Secret Billionaire Baby

I shift in the back seat, the custom leather sighing beneath me as my right leg sends a familiar, unwelcome throb up to my hip. My fingers wrap around the cane resting at my side.

Eleven fucking months since Chamonix, since the granite wall decided to rearrange my anatomy, and I still have to rely on a piece of shit carbon fiber cane like some geriatric reject.

Fuck Luca.

If he hadn’t pushed that insane line through the Serpent’s Coil, if I hadn’t felt that familiar, corrosive need to prove I was better, faster, more willing to dance on the fucking edge... maybe I wouldn’t have misjudged the wind shear.

Maybe I wouldn’t have clipped that rock.

Maybe I wouldn’t have spent six weeks in a Swiss hospital and the better part of a year fighting my way back from splattered fucking pulp.

A whole lot of maybes.

When are you going to stop second guessing yourself?

They told me I pulled the chute. Instinct, they called it.

Bullshit.

I remember the spin, the G-force crushing my chest, the black tunnel closing in.

I remember grabbing the handle.

Then nothing.

Just darkness.

Turns out, blacking out might have saved my life. My hand probably went limp, the weight enough to yank the cord as I rag-dolled towards the valley floor.

Landed like a sack of broken bricks miles from the target zone, but alive.

If you can call this goddamn purgatory of physiotherapy and investor panic ‘alive.’

Eleven months and my leg still feels like it belongs to someone else, someone weaker. And don’t even get me started on the damage to myupperbody.

And the fucking irony?

Luca walked away clean.

Nailed the line, soaked up the glory while I was getting scraped off a mountainside.

Second place.

Again.

Never fucking again.

Not to him.

Not to anyone.

Darius expertly maneuvers the SUV to the curb in front of another anonymous brownstone. It’s a tree-lined street, with a stroller parked by the stoop.

Quaint.

Fucking quaint.

This is where the miracle PR worker operates? Out of her apartment?

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