Chapter 35
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
SLOANE
One hour earlier
A fter pulling on my running outfit, eating yogurt, and slipping into running shoes, I watch Luca sleep peacefully. I wonder if I should wake him, but he smiles in his sleep, and I can’t bring myself to do so.
I decide against a note, too. We’re not that serious to where he needs to know where I am every moment of every day. At least, I don’t think we are. I want us to be, but I can’t make more of things than they are.
Sure, we’ve spent the last two days in shacked-up bliss. But I think we both know how it ends. He will repent, and I will return to my apartment if it’s not gone.
For all I know, no one’s paid the bills, and my shit is sitting on the side of the road for the trash trucks to haul to the landfill.
The thought makes my chest beat hard.
I need this; I think as I close the door and head down the steps.
Evading the guard is easy. I noticed unless we tell them we need them specifically; they watch over us and keep their distance.
“I’m going for a run, and no, I’m not taking anyone with me,” I shout toward where I know they have a base camp set up.
No one says a thing in reply.
I shrug at no one, looking above me at the rolling clouds and the sound of far-off thunder approaching the island.
Hopefully, it’ll pass over us or steer the other direction.
But I need the burn in my muscles like my next heartbeat.
Running along the same trail I did the other day with Rich feels ominous. Like the far-off storm is a warning for me to turn back. There’s a foreboding in my bones that I’m choosing to look away from. I can’t give it life.
I’ll soon grow too afraid to leave the cabin if I do. Then, I’ll be too scared to leave my house before long. So that even when I get back to my life, I’ll be a prisoner.
I bear down, pushing myself further, harder as my body cries out in delicious waves of sinuous tissue, seizing and burning.
My breaths waft out in moist, foggy clouds.
I push until I reach the edge of a cliff that overlooks the roaring ocean below the island. Stopping, I heave a breath in and out, looking below as tears flow steadily down my cheeks.
I don’t know when I started crying.
Flashes of the man in the alley, the boy in ninth grade, and Matteo Barone haunt me as I close my eyes. Men who felt they were owed something from me. That they were worthy enough to touch my body, even when I cried out. Even when I begged them to stop.
I don’t know if Rich’s death brought this about. If his soul leaving triggered all these feelings that I usually keep wrapped up so well. Bound tight with twine or ropes. It could’ve been that the rosary bound them—the one Luca broke my neck in the wee hours this morning. The beads still lay scattered on the bedroom floor, reminders of our sins.
Though, to me, he doesn’t feel like a sin. He feels like a blessing.
Like an enlightenment, one I’ve been waiting my entire life for.
But to have him, I must ruin him to his very center.
And that’s the part that stings.
I can’t escape this part, no matter how I feel or how much I try to justify my feelings about him.
My eyes fly open as a twig breaks behind me.
But it’s too late.
A man grips his hand around my mouth and nose tightly.
“Don’t fight, little slut. I was told to bring you in without a scratch. I don’t want to know what Mr. Barone will do if I accidentally snap your delicate little neck, do you?”
I fight with all my might, slipping out of his arms to the ground below and crawling as fast as possible.
My heart is thundering away, blocking out the rain that’s starting.
“Shit, get her ass!” he calls to someone else, and I don’t have time to look behind me. My nerves are frayed, building and tussling in my body like a war.
I use a fallen tree to heft up, jumping over it with a leap as I make off toward the cabin as fast as possible.
“Get her fucking ass! And don’t harm a hair on her head!”
The accent is New York, and he mentioned Barone. He’s here for me.
They found me.
Ardesia had been sure no one could find us here. But he underestimated his opponent, and now I’m trying to escape men trained for this exact purpose. Extract and kill.
I feel it like the darkest, hottest breath down the back of my neck as all the hairs stand on end.
I’m being hunted.
Stalked by the very man in the flashbacks I was letting wash over me as my guard fell only moments ago.
I’ve got to stop doing that.
Letting it down makes me weak. It makes me vulnerable.
“Here, pretty kitty!” a deep, resounding voice calls as I look around and slow down. I ran from the obvious trail and thought I was headed in the right direction, but now I don’t know.
I’m too unfocused to figure out where the cabin is in my panicking.
My eyes land on a makeshift camp just about a hundred yards to the right, and excitement thrums through my stomach.
Basecamp.
“Help!” I scream as I rush through the camp. “Help!”
I can’t understand why no one’s coming out of their tents. Nor why they didn’t react when I told them I was going for a run earlier. Luca told me the entire place was rigged with cameras and microphones.
Once I’m in the middle of camp, I stop.
Decimation lies on the ground all around me. Men with their throats split and mortal wounds lie dead or dying all over the place.
“What?!” I can’t figure out how this happened.
I’m alone in the woods with predators I hadn’t known had even stepped foot on the island.
And all the while, I was fucking Luca like everything was perfect.
While a monster hunted me.
“Come with me, little slut.” He approaches before me, and I back away slowly, trying to plan and think.
My back hits the hard lines of a chest covered in a Kevlar vest, and I whimper.
“Mm, now you’re caught. Like a mouse in a trap. What will you do now?”
“Die, I suppose…” Swirling on the man behind me, I grab his gun out of his holster and hold it to my head.
He smiles. “You won’t.”
I smile back, my hand shaking.
He lunges for me, and I pull the trigger.
A cacophony of blinding sound and lights invades my senses, and I drop to the ground like a sack of potatoes.
“What the fuck? What has she done?”
“I didn’t think she would…”
“You fucking egged her on. I saw you!”
“Shut the fuck up, Sully! I need to think. What do we do?”
There’s nothing more to do, boys. I’m free!
I wake with a sick feeling in my stomach. The room spins as my heavy eyes open against the immense swelling. My fingers come up and inspect a bandage around my head.
Beeping sounds far off, but it gets closer as the moment stretches, and I come back around.
“Well, hello there,” a woman says, leaning over the bed and smiling warmly at me.
I’ve never seen her before.
“Where am I?” I manage.
My mouth is dry, and my body aches. My stomach feels like someone is gnawing at it with very sharp teeth.
“I’m Aggie, your nurse. I didn’t think you’d wake so soon. We only just weaned the anesthetic from your system a few hours ago. I see why he likes you; you’re a strong one.”
For a split-second, my belly warms with the idea that Luca’s found me and I’m in a hospital he got me to.
But then she says, “Mr. Barone loves the girls who have a strong will. Not that it matters in the end. Because his will is stronger, I suppose.”
I try to move my other arm, and handcuffs clang against the metal arm of the bed.
“Precaution, dear, of course. Once you’re better and settled, those will be a thing of the past.”
The sick, gnawing feeling in my gut gets worse. Burrows deeper.
He caught me, and now I will be a caged bird for the rest of my life. However long that’ll be.
“Hell of a wound they had to sew up. What were you thinking?” she asks me as she moves around and checks all the bags of medicines and fluids surrounding me.
I was thinking I’d be free of him.
I keep my mouth shut. I don’t know this woman, and she works for him. It’s no use speaking. It’ll only make it worse, like last time.
I close my eyes.
Fuck, I hate that I’m back here.
“You were thinking you’d be free, hm? It’s the first time someone’s tried to escape that way; I’ll give you that. It’s a good thing they got to you in time. You’ll have a nasty scar, but that’s about it.”
She whistles as she takes down some notes on her clipboard.
I watch her vehemently, looking for any landmarks to figure out where I am. It seems to be a warehouse. There’s blue sheeting surrounding me and lights beyond them. The hospital bed and machinery have been brought in, but it is likely not for me.
It’s just like the place where Ardesia had taken Lorenzo when he got shot protecting me.
“Everything looks wonderful, dear. I’ll be back in a few hours. If you need pain medicine, click that button right there.” She points to a button on a chord connected to a pole, with medicine steadily dripping into an intravenous line.
She waits at the sheeting as if waiting for me to thank her.
I press my lips into a complex, thin line, narrowing my angry eyes at her.
“Well, then.”
The sheeting rustles as she moves it back and goes out. Her footsteps draw further away as the metallic sound of a door opening and shutting resounds through the room.
However, as the curtain shifted, I saw the red lights of an exit sign right across from my bed. And if I can figure out how to get out of these cuffs…
They’re ungodly tight, and that plan dies as quickly as it had formed. And I lay back in a huff.
“Goddamnit, how did I get here?”
Talking to myself won’t help, and I’m sure cameras surround me if I look hard.
I honestly thought Luca had found me, and the joy I felt at the idea was unfathomable to what I awoke to.
Fuck, Luca…
Is he okay? Is he dead? Is he here?
After the shit we did together, will he get into heaven, where he belongs?
All of this shit I’ve been through lately now feels for naught. It feels like all of it has been for absolutely nothing.
All the ways Luca has changed me churn in my veins like a new personality being born. How soft I’ve gotten. How much I’ve let my thick walls fall for him. There’s no going back from that. There’s no way to undo what he’s done.
A tear falls down my cheek.
I should have just stayed under that fucking bed. If this was my fate all along, I would have hidden better.
Because now I know what it feels like to love someone so deeply, you’d give your life for theirs.
And now I know what it feels like to lose them.
And none of it is fucking fun.