by Zara Starr
No, she had to be very careful. She had to try to climb out without breaking anything, without making a sound.
Carefully, Amelia pulled herself up against the thick curtains. She hoped that they would hold her weight, and thankfully, they did.
With her feet as high as the opening now, she dangled precariously in the air.
She slid her feet through the opening first, shift against the glass with her shoes, and then tried to angle her body so that she could lower herself through the opening.
It took a lot of strain, her muscles screamed at her, aching, protesting at the strange activity that Amelia had never done before. But she couldn’t afford to let go, she couldn’t afford to even readjust her grip. If she changed anything now, she was going to either fall on the glass and break it, or she was going to fall down the cliff to her death.
Finally, her feet touched the small ledge outside the window, and she stood. She ducked her head through the opening, and only her hands were still inside the room, gripping on to the curtain.
There was absolutely nothing else to hold onto. The ledge she balanced on was barely the width of her feet, and the house was built directly above the cliff, so no edges were jutting out.
Amelia glanced both ways. If she was going to get out of here, she was going to have to move very carefully. The ledge was her only way out, there were no other places to walk.
She picked the side that was closer to the edge of the cliff. She hoped that by the time she reached the end of the house, there would be something else for her to hold onto, a place she could step on, something that she could get a grip of.
She couldn’t see from where she was though, so it was a gamble. A very big one.
Amelia took one last deep breath, trying to steady herself. She tasted her heart in her throat and had to focus on not letting fear overcome her completely. She wasn’t going to look down. The moment she looked down, she was going to lose her nerve. The sheer drop was incredibly far, and there was no doubt that if she fell, she was going to die.
Amelia stood on the ledge, her back pressed against the window, hands flat against the glass behind her. She moved carefully, taking her time to edge across. She had nothing to hold onto, nothing more than her balance to keep her safe.
When she reached the end of the ledge she was on, she could see the side of the house. She couldn’t go that way – the tall wall continued further on. There were no ledges there. If she did make it to the wall, there would be nothing to stand on.
She glanced in the other direction, the direction from which she had come, but she knew that it would be the same on that side. It was safe to assume.
Amelia squeezed her eyes shut for a moment and swallowed hard. Then she did what she had promised herself that she wouldn’t do – she looked down.
The drop was about fifty feet. There was a canyon beneath her. Her throat swelled shut and fear wrapped around her like a blanket. She couldn’t succumb to it. She had to stay in control, she had to focus.
She continued looking down, trying to swallow back her terror. As she studied the cliffside below, she realized that it wasn’t completely smooth as she had thought at first. Rocks were jutting out, not very large, but maybe enough for her to use.
Amelia had never done rock climbing, but she had watched others do it, she had seen movies, and that kind of information – however ridiculous – was all she had to rely on.
The only way for her to go was down. She definitely couldn’t go up.
The wind picked up, tugging at her clothes, and Amelia let out a yelp when she felt like the wind was going to push her off the edge. It made everything that much scarier.
Amelia managed to lower herself down, slipping twice, newly losing her balance. Her heart was hammering against her ribs, the beat a constant companion, but despite nearly falling twice, she managed to sit on the ledge with her legs dangling down.
Now that she was seated, she felt a little safer. But it would not last because she couldn’t stay there.
With her feet, she felt around for a rock jutting out, something she could step on. She had to press her hands onto the ledge, lift herself, and lower her legs further down the cliff with only her hands as balance. There was nothing she could reach right away.
Her arms trembled and Amelia cursed herself for not spending more time in the gym.
She didn’t know how much lower she would be able to sink before her arms gave way, but just as she thought she was going to fail, her foot brushed against an outcropping.
She stepped on it, found that it was solid, and let out a sigh of relief.
With her foot on the outcropping, her weight now evenly distributed between her arms and her foot, she lowered herself a little more. Then, she managed to turn around. She held onto the ledge and lowered even further, searching for another foothold with her other foot.
By some miracle, she found one.
If she continued like this, if she kept finding one rock after the other, she could make her way down.
Carefully, Amelia felt her way down the cliffside. She used rocks, no matter how small, to step on. She remembered the cardinal rule of rock climbing – as if she had ever imagined herself hanging off the side of a mountain.
She knew that with her two feet and two hands, she had to make sure that at least three of them were steady at all times so that she could move the fourth. Whether it was looking for another handle with her hand or searching for a foothold, the rest of her body had to be stable.
Miraculously, it worked.
As soon as she returned home, Amelia vowed that she was going to start training. She had never really seen the merit in working on her body – she didn’t exactly need a well-trained body to be a scientist and study insects. Though it would have come in handy to be fit at a time like this. Her arms were already numb and her legs were trembling. She was running out of energy.
But Amelia couldn’t give up now.
Every now and then, she looked up to see how far she had come. It felt like she was moving incredibly slow. The ledge that she had let go of hours earlier, or so it felt, was only a few feet above her.
She wouldn’t let it put her off. She couldn’t afford to become despondent now. She was managing an escape, which was more than she had been able to do the entire time she had been at the gladiator dome. That was all she had to focus on. The next foothold, the next crevice that she could push her fingers into.
Amelia had made it down a couple of feet more when her hand slipped. She cried out, clinging to the cliffside as small rocks broke free and crashed down to the valley below.
Blood rushed in her ears and her heart pounded as she let out a cry, breathing hard.
To close, that had been too close. She was getting tired. If she pushed herself further, she was going to be so tired that she wouldn’t be able to hold on. Then she would be in trouble.
Amelia knew that she had to look for a place to rest. But how was she going to find a resting place against the cliffside that was nothing more than a ball with outcroppings? It wasn’t like she could just step to the side and sit down for a moment.
She looked from side to side, studying the cliff all around her.
Toward the side, and with a little bit of work, she saw an opening that seemed almost like a cave. It was small, but if Amelia could hoist herself inside, she could sit down in it with her legs dangling out. And above it, the rocks created a bit of an overhang. Not only was it a good place to rest but it would also keep her hidden from anyone who was peering down.
It was exactly what Amelia needed right now. A place where she could just catch her breath and not be in danger of being found out.
Getting to the overhang, to the place where she could rest, was a little more complicated than she thought at first. The space between where she was now and where she needed to be had no rocks that jutted out of the side of the cliff, and she had to reach much further to find something to hold onto, or somewhere to rest her foot.
It was dangerous to reach that far, but Amelia knew that if she didn’t, it would be much more dangerous if she ran out of energy.
She stretched, almost letting go of one of the rocks, so that she could reach the other. The wind picked up again and it felt like it was trying to pull her off the cliffside. She gritted her teeth and tried not to cry out.
When she managed to grab the next rock, the outcropping that she wanted to use for her foot was too far for her to reach. No matter how far she stretched.
Amelia closed her eyes, clinging to the cliffside where she was, and she felt like she was going to cry. There was no way to go. There was no way she was going to be able to escape. She couldn’t reach the overhang where she could rest and she couldn’t keep moving downward. How had she come this far only to fail?
Maybe it would be better to climb back up to the room. At least there, she would be safe and warm. And she would be fed soon.
But what kind of life was that? Amelia didn’t want to be a slave. She didn’t want to be with Gage. Not as something he owned anyway. She wanted her life back, her freedom.
The only way she was going to get that was if she tried to reach the next rock.
And if she slipped and fell? She couldn’t imagine death being much worse than the life that waited for her as a prisoner.
No, she had to give it a shot.
Amelia opened her eyes again and focused on the rocks that she wanted to reach. For that, she would have to swing. She would have to let go with one of her hands and she would have to trust that her foot would land on the right spot. If it didn’t, she was going to die anyway.
She took a deep breath. She was terrified, but she counted down for herself. Three… Two… One! She let go of the rock and her body swung. For a moment, she was suspended in mid-air, with nothing but the wind wrapping around her, and her stomach dropped. Adrenaline rushed through her body, and her foot reached for the outcropping.
Yes!
But her foot slipped off again and she dangled back.
“No!” Amelia cried out. She couldn’t fail. She gritted her teeth, found the original outcropping that she had stepped on, and kicked off from it, using what little strength she had left to propel herself forward.
This time, she expected the rock to be smooth. She knew what to do. When her foot landed on it, she kicked down, hard. She used the momentum of her body to grab hold of another rock, further along, and balanced herself on one rock with her foot, holding on to two further above with her hands.
She breathed hard, sucking ear in through her mouth and blowing it out again, the adrenaline pumping furiously through her body. She had made it. It was impossible to believe it, but she had done it!
Now, the little ledge wasn’t that far off. It didn’t take long to climb up, and when Amelia pulled herself onto the ledge, sitting with her feet hanging down again, the overhang shielding her from the house above, she could finally breathe. She glanced up to be sure that no one would be able to see her from the house, but she figured that if she couldn’t see the house, then no one would be able to see her from the windows either.
She wasn’t sure if the same counted for her legs, but she didn’t want to lean forward just to see. She had made it this far, she had nearly died but she had done it. She wasn’t going to take unnecessary chances now.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Gage
Gage sat on the grass, his eyes closed, legs crossed and palms turned upward. He was calm and relaxed, his mind empty, aggression and violence keeping away from him.
He was the person he had always been, stripped of the warrior that he had to become when he fought in the tournaments.
This was the person he liked being, the person he always returned to.
Since he had won his third tournament, and with that had won Amelia, it was easier than ever to find his Zen again.
Gage had no idea how long he had been on the grass, meditating, but a strange sound pulled him from the bliss that he had created for himself. At first, the sound was somewhere in the distance, something he didn’t even pay attention to. But as it continued wining in the background, becoming more and more incessant, it brought Gage back to reality.
He frowned, trying to place where the sound was coming from.
It took a while to realize that the sound was coming from his own home, that it was one of the alarm systems that he had installed a while ago.
No one had ever tried to break into his home before, so he hadn’t immediately realized what the sound was. His heart lurched in his chest. Why was the alarm going off?
He stood up quickly, rushing toward the house. The first thought in his mind was that something had happened to Amelia. That someone had broken in, that someone wanted to take her from him. He couldn’t bear the thought.
He rushed into Amelia’s room, tearing the door open. As he looked inside, he noticed that the room was empty and the window was open.
He cursed in his mind, adrenaline pulsing in his veins.
“Amelia!” he called out for her, but there was no response.
He hurried to the security room, checking the monitors, studying all the screens to try to locate her. Despite the window being open and the nagging feeling in his chest that someone had abducted her, he hoped she was simply somewhere else in the house.
He’d promised her a tour before, but maybe she had been hungry and had gone to the kitchen? Maybe she had wanted to explore on her own? She was clearly a curious mind and he had left the door unlocked, though he couldn’t have predicted whether she wanted to stay in her room or go outside.
Gage frowned as he studied the different monitors, realizing that Amelia was absent in all of them. He also didn’t see any signs of an intruder.
A nagging thought appeared in his mind. Amelia had been so withdrawn as they’d arrived in his home. He hadn’t been able to read her, not even the little he sometimes could when she was happy.
Could it be? Had Amelia climbed out of the window? Had it not been an intruder? Had she left on her own?
But why would she climb through the window and not simply walk through the door? Had she wanted to get away from him that badly? The thought twisted his heart, but he couldn’t ignore it. She had used him before too. But instead of anger, the feeling that surged inside him now was sadness. Loss.
How could she have climbed out of the window without falling to her death? There was no way she could have escaped through the small opening. The cliff was the only way to go – tall walls surrounded the mansion, built on the edge of the cliff just like everything else.
Desperation – and fear for Amelia’s safety – exploded inside Gage, taking away all the calm that he had managed to instill in himself with his meditation.
He ran back to Amelia’s room, looked under the bed, in the bathroom – everywhere – making sure that he didn’t miss her on the monitors, that she was there all along. But he didn’t see her. His heart thundering in his chest, he rushed to the window and looked out.
No, no, no, what if she had fallen to her death? He would not even be able to see her from this height, she would have landed in the canyon. He would not even be able to find her body.
He glanced from one side to the other, but it was difficult to look straight down without popping his head out of the opening.
When he did, he didn’t see anything either.
Gage was starting to panic. She was dead, wasn’t she? She had tried to escape and had fallen to her death. This couldn’t be happening, not after everything he had done to obtain her. Didn’t she know that he would take care of her? Why did she fight so much to get away from him? Had she leaped to her death simply because she hated him so much?
Gage rushed back to the security room. Right now, even having her abducted would’ve been the preferable option to what he was thinking had happened to her.
With a dread unlike he’d ever felt before clinging to his chest, he started to check the perimeter cameras. He pressed a couple of butto
ns on the keyboard, and the monitors flickered and displayed different pictures. Images of the cliffside, of the perimeter wall, of the canyon below.
He didn’t want to look, didn’t want to see in case he only discovered her body at the bottom of the cliff. But he had to make sure that it was real, that Amelia really was gone.
Frantically, he searched the cliffside, looking for something, anything. Even if he ended up finding her crushed body down below in the canyon, at least he would know.
Suddenly, he spotted something against the cliffside, it was almost unrecognizable because he didn’t know what he was looking at.
But then he saw it – legs. Amelia’s legs.
He zoomed in a little and found her sitting on a ledge with an overhang just above her. Hiding from him, stopping him from seeing her at all when he had popped his head out of the window.
He sat back in his chair, relieved. She wasn’t dead then. She was very much alive, safe, and hidden.
How on earth had she gotten there? It couldn’t have been easy – she hadn’t come across as very fit and muscled to him. Amelia was soft, beautiful, and feminine.
Still, she had managed to climb out of the window, down the cliffside, and to her hiding spot.
Gage shook his head. Incredible. He still had no idea how she had done it.
Gage let out a bark of laughter, but the humor faded away quickly.
He tried to imagine what she must have felt. What had gone through her mind for her to want to attempt something so incredibly dangerous? Surely, with her big brain, she must have known that she could have fallen to her death.
Did she truly hate him so much that she willing to sacrifice her life? What had she felt that made her willing to do something like that, scale the side of the cliff, risk dying, just to get away from him?
Gage frowned, dark emotions settling down on him.
Did she fear him? Was that why she was trying to get away from? He had thought that she wanted to be with him, he had thought that she was happy he had won and taken her home with him. After all, she had seemed so excited when he had collected her. She had seemed excited about it all the way through.