“Look at the view, Audrey,” he murmured, his breath pluming in the freezing air. He maneuvered me so my back was entirely to the drop. “Beautiful, isn’t it?”
My heart hammered against my ribs like a trapped bird. “Carter, please, it’s too slippery—”
I never finished the sentence.
I didn’t feel his hands initially—just a sudden, violent, two-handed shove against my chest. My heavy winter boots found absolutely no purchase on the black ice. My arms flailed wildly, my fingers scraping against the slick fabric of his jacket, but he stepped back with clinical precision.
Gravity took me.
As I tipped backward into the terrifying void, time fractured. I saw the bruised sky spinning away. I heard the sickening whistle of the wind in my ears. And above it all, echoing down the sheer rock face, I heard Carter laughing—a cruel, echoing bark of pure triumph.
The baby.
The thought wasn’t a word; it was an animal instinct that hijacked my nervous system. I violently curled my body inward, wrapping my arms tightly around my belly, pulling my knees up to protect the fragile life inside me. I smashed through a canopy of dead pine branches, the wood tearing at my clothes and flesh. A jagged rock clipped the side of my face, a blinding flash of agony exploding across my right cheek and temple.
I hit the ground with a bone-jarring thud, sinking deep into a massive, hidden snowdrift resting on a narrow, precarious ledge some forty feet below the overlook. The impact knocked the wind out of my lungs in a violent whoosh. Darkness encroached on the edges of my vision. The cold began its immediate, predatory work, seeping through my torn coat, turning my blood to slush.
I laid there, bleeding, broken, waiting to die.
Hours bled into a hallucinatory nightmare of shivering and numbness. The blizzard resumed, burying me alive. Just as my consciousness began to detach, floating away into a warm, deceptive peace, a rhythmic, thumping roar vibrated through the rock beneath me. The blinding glare of a searchlight cut through the driving snow, sweeping across the ledge.
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