The Heart of the Real Deal
The travel from Forest Trail, Blackwood National Park to Helipad Ridge, Blackwood National Park consumed the next hour. Headlights cut cold through the gathering dusk.
The helipad was a concrete scar carved into the granite spine of Blackwood National Park. Wind howled up from the valley below, whipping Isabella’s hair across her face as she stood at the edge of the ridge, Jace pressed tight against her leg. Behind them, Flynn Sterling held his phone aloft like a priest offering a sacrament.
“Tick-tock, Miss Reyes,” he said. “I have a man on the highway. He’s been following Killian since he left the office. One call, and your ex-husband becomes a memory problem.”
Jace’s hand found hers. Small fingers, cold. “Mommy, don’t let him hurt my daddy.”
The words hit her like a physical blow. Not because of the fear in his voice—she’d heard that too many times this week—but because of the drawing in her pocket. The one Killian had nearly broken his composure over. The one with the numbers buried in the crayon sky.
*07.14.18.*
The date of their summer fling. The date of Jace’s conception. Killian hadn’t been panicking over a child’s art project. He’d been panicking because he recognized the code. Because he’d realized what it meant: that she knew the secondary extraction point wasn’t a car.
It was a helicopter.
She looked past Flynn’s shoulder. The news chopper from Channel 4 was still ten minutes out, according to the briefing Jasper had slipped her before they’d been separated. But the landing pad was clear. Waiting.
She needed to buy exactly six hundred seconds.
“You’re making a mistake, Flynn.” Isabella’s voice came out steadier than she expected. She let go of Jace’s hand and stepped forward, placing herself between the Sterling patriarch and her son. “Killian doesn’t have the evidence on him. He never carries hard copies. It’s in a safe deposit box at Meridian Trust, and I’m the only one with access.”
Flynn’s eyes narrowed. The phone in his hand wavered, just slightly. “You expect me to believe that?”
“I expect you to be smart enough to verify.” She crossed her arms, forcing her posture into something that looked like command rather than terror. “You’ve been hunting for those drone surveillance records for six months. The ones that show your company was running illegal overflights of federal land, tracking environmental activists, selling the data to foreign buyers. Killian found them three weeks ago. He told me before he filed for divorce.”
Grant stepped up beside his father, his face pulled tight with barely contained violence. “She’s stalling. Put the bullet in him, Dad.”
“Shut up.” Flynn didn’t look at his son. His attention was locked on Isabella with the cold focus of a predator reassessing its prey. “If there’s a box, you’re taking me to it. Now.”
“I can’t.”
“Excuse me?”
Isabella pointed at the helipad. “The box has a biometric lock. Only activates between nine and noon on weekdays. It’s nine forty-seven now. If we leave for the city, we’ll miss the window. The only way we make it in time is by air.” She let her arm drop. “You wanted leverage, Flynn. This is it. I get my son on that helicopter with me, I open the box, and you get the evidence. No witnesses, no paper trail. Clean.”
The wind gusted, carrying the distant thrum of rotor blades. Grant checked his watch. Flynn’s thumb hovered over the phone’s screen.
Jace tugged at her sleeve. “Mommy, is Grandpa coming to get us?”
The question was so innocent, so perfectly timed, that Isabella almost laughed. She knelt down and cupped his face. “No, baby. We’re going to take a helicopter ride. Just you and me. Okay?”
“I want Daddy.”
“Daddy’s going to meet us there.” She kissed his forehead, then stood to face Flynn. “Decide. The chopper lands in eight minutes. You either get the evidence, or you get a murder charge and nothing to show for it.”
Flynn’s jaw worked silently. He looked at the phone, then at the sky, then back at Isabella. A long, calculating pause stretched between them, filled only by the wind and the distant approaching drone of the helicopter.
“Grant,” he said finally, “call off the shooter.”
“Dad—”
“Do it now.”
Grant’s face twisted with fury, but he pulled out his phone and stepped away, fingers stabbing at the screen. Flynn lowered his own phone, slipping it back into his pocket with deliberate care.
“If you’re lying to me, Miss Reyes, I will find your son. Not today. Not tomorrow. But one day, when you least expect it, he will disappear. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
Isabella’s blood turned to ice water. But she held his gaze.
“I understand that you’re a dead man walking and you don’t know it yet.”
Flynn laughed. “Brave words from a woman with no cards.”
“You don’t know what’s in my hand.”
The helicopter crested the ridge, a sleek black Bell 429 that cut through the morning sky like a blade. It descended toward the helipad, rotors kicking up dust and debris. Jace buried his face in her coat. Isabella shielded her eyes, watching the skids touch down on the concrete.
The door slid open. A pilot in a dark helmet gestured for them to board.
“After you,” Flynn said, motioning with the gun he’d kept hidden beneath his jacket.
Isabella took a step forward. Then another. Jace moved with her, his small hand gripping hers so tightly his knuckles were white. Ten feet to the helicopter. Eight. Six. She could see the pilot’s face now, half-obscured by the visor. Something about the set of his shoulders seemed wrong.
Four feet.
The pilot raised his visor.
It was Jasper.
He gave her the barest flicker of a nod—*go time*—and then his hand came up from beside the seat, holding not a flight checklist but a compact taser. The wire shot out before Flynn could process the shift in his expression. It caught him in the throat, fifty thousand volts arcing through his nervous system. He dropped like a stone, the gun clattering across the concrete.
“Get down!” Isabella screamed, pulling Jace flat against the helipad.
Grant was faster than his father. He had his weapon out, tracking toward Jasper, but the security chief had already vanished back into the cockpit. The helicopter’s engine whined as the rotors spun up to full speed, the aircraft lifting three feet off the pad to create a wall of noise and wind.
And then sirens. Multiple sirens, converging from both access roads that wound up the mountain.
Isadora had made it out of the hidden tunnel. She’d called the police. She’d done exactly what Isabella had asked her to do the moment they were separated.
Grant fired twice at the helicopter, the bullets pinging off the reinforced fuselage. Jasper didn’t return fire—he was a civilian security chief, not a soldier, and he’d already accomplished his mission. The Bell 429 pivoted in the air and dropped behind the ridge line, disappearing into the canyon below.
Grant stood alone on the helipad, his father twitching at his feet, a gun smoking in his hand. The first police cruiser crested the hill, lights flashing.
He looked at Isabella. For a moment, she saw the same cold calculation in his eyes that she’d seen in his father’s. The same monster, just smoother around the edges.
Then he dropped the gun and raised his hands.
“I was coerced,” he said. “My father forced me. I’ll testify.”
The car doors opened. Officers spilled out, weapons drawn, shouting commands. Isabella gathered Jace into her arms and stumbled toward the edge of the helipad, putting distance between her son and the arrest.
Grant went to his knees. Flynn was cuffed while still semiconscious, his eyes rolling, foam at the corners of his mouth. The police read them their rights in a flat, practiced litany that felt surreal against the grandeur of the mountain view.
And then, from the east, a new sound.
A news helicopter. Channel 4’s logo emblazoned on the side, its cameras already rolling as it banked over the ridge and descended toward the secondary landing zone marked by orange cones.
Isabella’s legs gave out. She sank to the ground, Jace still in her arms, her heart hammering so hard she could feel it in her teeth. Around her, officers secured the scene, paramedics checked on Flynn, and a detective approached with a notebook and a gentle expression.
But she wasn’t listening. She was watching the news helicopter touch down, its rotors slowing, the side door sliding open.
And Killian Ashby climbed out.
He was alive. His shirt was torn, there was a gash across his forehead, and his left sleeve was dark with blood. But he was alive. He looked around wildly, ignoring the reporters who swarmed toward him, ignoring the police who tried to guide him toward the medical tent.
He saw her.
He ran.
Isabella struggled to her feet, Jace in her arms, and she stumbled forward, meeting him halfway across the helipad. He fell to his knees before her, his hands reaching for her, for Jace, for something he clearly thought he’d lost forever.
His eyes were wet. This man who had never cried in front of her, not once in ten years of marriage, not during the divorce, not during any of it. Tears cut tracks through the grime on his face.
“Isabella, I was a fool.” His voice cracked. “The contract is gone. I ripped it up. This… this isn’t a deal. It’s my soul.”
He looked at Jace, his son, his blood, the secret she’d kept for six years. The truth that had nearly destroyed them all.
“Will you both stay? For real? For forever?”
As the news helicopter landed, reporters swarmed. Isabella stood frozen, Jace in her arms. Killian ran towards them, bloody but alive. He fell to his knees before her. ‘Isabella, I was a fool. The contract is gone. I ripped it up. This… this isn’t a deal. It’s my soul.’ He looked at Jace. ‘Will you both stay? For real? For forever?’