Madison sat with her eyes tightly closed, both fists clutching the frame rails of her seat as though that could stop her falling to her death if the vehicle went over. Ramin hunched rigid and ghostlike, too terrified to speak or even breathe, while Aziz silently clutched his heart and Father B murmured prayers without much conviction in the back. Holt stretched out in his seat and tried to look bored, but his face was pale and a muscle in his jaw twitched with tension. When he thought the others were too distracted to see, he quickly wiped the perspiration from his brow.

After twenty minutes of constant dread, Ben’s shirt was sticking to his back in a cold sweat. After nearly an hour, punctuated with more heart-stopping, bowel-loosening moments of super-concentrated fear than he cared to count, even his normally calm composure in moments of extreme stress had abandoned him and he felt dizzy and nauseous. From the cautious way the truck was inching along the edge of the cliff behind them, scraping its paintwork to bare metal against the wall to its left, the wing mirror on that side bent right off, the famously unflappable Jaden Wolf didn’t seem to be handling the strain much more comfortably.

At last, Ben was able to relax his knotted muscles and say to Madison, ‘You can open your eyes now.’ When she did, breathing a loud sigh of relief, she saw that the path had begun to broaden out again, snaking its way more gently down the side of the cliff to the relative safety of the valley below.

‘Well, that was interesting,’ she said in a strangled voice. She touched his arm. ‘You got us through, Ben. Saved our skins again.’

Ben shook his head. ‘Don’t thank me. Only an idiot would have led us along that road.’

‘You shouldn’t talk about yourself that way,’ she said, irritated by his self-deprecating words. ‘You had no choice. You took your chance and went for it, and you came through just like you always do. That’s who you are. The same old Ben Hope we know and—’ She hesitated, interrupting herself as though she’d been about to say something else but changed it as it was still in her mouth. ‘—and remember,’ she finished.

‘I appreciate the vote of confidence,’ he said. ‘Didn’t feel that way back there, I’ll confess.’

‘Hell, that was nothing,’ Holt said. ‘I’ve led my guys through tighter squeezes plenty of times, back in the day.’

‘Oh, I’ll bet you have,’ Madison said, giving him the evil eye. ‘Bet you handled yourself like a real man, too.’