Chapter 11
CHAPTER 11
CLOVER
T hat night felt like it would never end.
I’d been in survival mode ever since the moment the first bomb had dropped, but with a granola bar in my belly, a collection of rainwater on the roof, shelter over my head, and an enemy who was too injured and unconscious to hurt me, the only basic needs I had left to focus on were the ones I couldn’t meet.
Warmth.
And love.
I was used to living without the latter. I’d learned that I didn’t actually need love to survive. But what I did need, what I’d really lost in the explosion, was the hope of love. That was what had kept me going day after day. The hope that if I was good enough, quiet enough, hardworking enough, forgiving enough, Da would stop hating me. The hope that Odie would grow up to become my best friend—my only friend. The hope that, if I did what I was told and smiled through my tears and inconvenienced no one, I could convince my family to love me. Eventually. I just had to do better. Be better.
Now, that possibility was gone.
I tucked my knees inside my jumper in an attempt to stay warm, but the knitted material was so burned and torn that it did little to stop my shivering.
But honestly, I didn’t want it to stop.
The discomfort of being cold, the aches and pains of lying curled up on a rock, the gnawing in my nearly empty belly—those were the only distractions I had from the absolute agony of realizing that the family I’d lost … wouldn’t have cared if they’d lost me.
And the worst part was that there was nothing I could do to let that feeling out.
I wanted to scream. I wanted to wail. I wanted to hit and kick and break things until I expelled the poison boiling over inside of me. But making that kind of noise in this new world was a death sentence, so I had to just lie there and let the pain consume me, fill me up until it leaked out through my tear ducts and between my gritted teeth like the high-pitched whistle of a teakettle.
It was excruciating, and the longer I lay there, the louder and more uncontrollable my crying and shivering became. I covered my mouth with my hands to try to muffle it, clenched my jaw shut, curled in on myself tighter, but fighting it was exhausting, and I was already so, so tired.
Fear gripped the back of my neck, turning my shivers into full-body tremors when I realized that I couldn’t stop my sobbing. It felt like vomiting. My body was expelling the pain whether I liked it or not, and it was not a quiet process. Burying my face in my elbow, I rolled onto my knees to muffle the sound, but it wasn’t enough.
I began shushing myself between every desperate, wailing gasp of air, but my attempt to self-soothe only made me cry harder.
Because it made me realize how completely and utterly alone I was.
Turning my head, I bit my bicep as hard as I could, and my howls of grief finally quieted to whimpers of pain. But what made me go completely silent was what I heard in that stillness. Something was moving in the cave.
At first, I feared that it was the hum of drone blades, but when it stopped and started again, I realized that it was something even more terrifying. The slow, gravely scrape of a body dragging itself across stone.
I glanced up from the arm my face was buried in, but the cave was pitch-black. I couldn’t see the man approaching, but I could hear him getting closer with every push and pull of his massive body.
My heart beat so hard I could feel it behind my straining eyes, which darted in all directions, desperate to catch a flash of a brass button or gleaming white teeth. Anything that would help me prepare for what was about to happen.
I can outrun him , I told myself. If he touched me, I would jab at his injuries, grab my bag, and follow the cave wall to the entrance as fast as I fucking could.
But the truth was that I couldn’t have moved if my life depended on it. The terror had sent my body into a freeze mode so intense that it bordered on paralysis. I could hardly breathe. Hardly blink. Running was an impossibility.
With blood thumping in my ears and a whimper of fear lodged in my throat, I stared helplessly into the darkness as the scraping sound got closer. Then, once it was practically on top of me, it stopped. I widened my eyes and held my breath as I waited for something to happen. And with a grunt and a groan and a sharp hiss of pain, it did. The form of a man began to take shape in front of me, so close I could feel the warmth of his torso on my face. The brass buttons on his blazer seemed to glow in the dark as he reached up with thick fingers and unbuttoned each one.
Stomach acid seared the back of my throat as I watched those fingers do the same thing to the buttons on his white striped shirt.
I begged my body to move, to run, to kick and shove, but it simply curled in on itself even tighter as a tiny, panicked yelp slipped past my defenses.
The man then removed his shirt and jacket in one motion, and I couldn’t take it anymore. Slamming my eyes shut, I sucked in a lungful of air and debated letting it out with a scream. I had the power to stop this. To make it all just go away. The fear, the pain, the grief, the hopelessness. One scream, and it would all be over.
But I hesitated.
Because the next move the man made wasn’t to unbuckle his belt or unzip his trousers.
It was to drape his bloodstained shirt and jacket over my trembling ball of a body.
His clothes landed on me like a wool blanket on a raging fire, extinguishing my fear, my despair, and my shivering on contact. And it had nothing to do with the warmth of his body. It was the warmth of his gesture that had made all the difference.
Because for the second time in two days, I didn’t feel completely alone.