30. Chapter 27 - Marley
We were fucked.
Leaning against the bark of a jobo tree several feet above the receding river, I decided if a snake wanted to take me as its nutrition source for the day, I would let it. I could only hope the venom would provide a quick death, unlike the embittered hell this week had brought.
I’d thought my father’s lessons were the hardest thing I’d ever had to go through, that his death had set me free of this torture. I’d been wrong.
“You’re still alive, Marley,” Charlie chided, having taken up residence beside me, her ghostly limbs folded across her chest. “Don’t get any ideas. I need you to come back to me.”
Hah. She couldn’t know what I was thinking, could she? She was a figment, not real. I had to keep repeating the mantra before the lines between psychosis and reality blurred.
Danny and Vanessa were dead. Nikki and Maddox were gone.
Psychosis was definitely better than this reality. Maybe I could blur every line until I couldn’t feel this pain anymore.
Tears collected in the back of my nose and throat and burned a trail inside me long before they leaked out onto my cheeks. I couldn’t bring myself to say the words, wouldn’t dare to even think them.
Nikki was gone. Not dead. Gone, like Jamie was gone. He was somewhere in this rainforest, surviving off scraps, waiting for rescue alongside us. I’d see him when the Aileron plane finally showed up to take us home.
My heart was disputing what my eyes had seen, and the tear in my chest grew wider with each stifling breath.
The jungle was unbearably muggy, each movement like wading through a pool of water. Shivering despite the heat, I folded my arms just like Charlie’s and drew in a slower breath to calm my heartbeat.
Getting lost in my misery wouldn’t help those of us who remained.
Tessa, Brooks, Ambrose, and Diaz.
Maddox had escaped. I was sure of it. I didn’t have enough emotion left in me to properly respond with how I felt about it.
Could I blame a man for taking his only opportunity of escape when the biggest drug lord in the hemisphere had a hit on his head?
When he hadn’t been beyond prison walls in two decades?
No.
But the fact he’d left us—left me—stung more than a chunga palm spike. He hadn’t even said goodbye.
Diaz was a feral bear, his face warped into a cutting scowl as he paced through a cluster of ferns.
He’d struck a tree with his fist earlier, and the blood still wept out of several knuckles, but I hadn’t offered to wrap it.
Nikki would know what to say, how to soothe the anger out of him.
I couldn't care less. He wasn’t concerned for the law or for his prisoner’s well-being.
He was mad he wouldn’t get his payout or promotion or whatever the fuck it was El Chaco had offered him.
My lips cracked into a disgusted sneer. Diaz should have been the one who’d been swept under the water.
Brooks had Tessa wrapped in a one-armed hug and they leaned against a tree a few yards away.
Tessa’s sobs had faded into a symphony of sniffles, but only because her dehydration meant she was out of tears to cry.
If I had more energy in me, I’d worry Tessa had lost her will to live by losing the person she loved in such a way.
Like I was losing mine.
Ambrose hovered at the next tree. He hadn’t left my side since I’d chosen this location for my catatonic breakdown.
He hadn’t said a word to me since we’d grabbed the last of our supplies and ventured farther upward into the jungle, about a hundred feet from the river.
He and Nikki had saved the first-aid kit and our water bottles while I tried to save the women, but the lighter had washed away.
Madman had the other one. Without a source of fire, we were dead.
Not that we’d be able to light a thing tonight, anyway. Nothing would catch fire in these conditions. We’d fall asleep against these trees. Maybe we’d get lucky and something would kill us peacefully in our sleep.
Maybe Nikki had gone peacefully, too.
The sob lodged in my throat like a granite boulder. The phantom warmth of his arms settled around me, from when he’d dragged me out of the water. His frantic voice and tight grip so desperate.
I’d finally seen through the facade of our friendship and glimpsed the depth of his feelings. Too late.
I was always too late.
And Maddox—my Madman—would it have been too much to ask for a kiss goodbye? One last gaze into those stoic blue eyes. One last declaration I barely understood?
If he’d been here, he’d have caught Nikki before he fell. He protected all of us with such vehemence—how could he not say goodbye?
Silent streams of tears flowed down my cheeks, creating their own waterfalls off my nose and chin. I slid down the tree, ignoring the bark scratching down my bare legs, and settled into the warm, damp earth, my body pushing into Charlie’s silhouette.
The heavy feeling of eyes on me—whether they were Charlie’s, the survivors’, or the snake that would finally take me out of my misery—I couldn’t be sure past my closed lids, but it didn’t matter.
They were waiting for me to pull myself together. To give them direction. How could I possibly be the person they turned to now? I’d put us on that floodplain. I hadn’t moved us after the first rainfall, even though the signs were there.
A faint rustle cut through my spiraling thoughts, then a warm body leaned against me, corporeal this time.
His large arm snaked around my back and he rested a palm against my biceps with a gentle squeeze.
The other threaded our fingers together and rested them against the bare skin of my thigh.
Opening my eyes, I caught the faint, watery outline of a familiar man.
Ambrose. He was … comforting me.
“I’m sorry, Jagiya,” he murmured against my temple, soft lips brushing my damp skin. I didn’t know the word, but it was musical and delicate on his tongue. “I’m so sorry. This was not your fault.”
His body heat warred with the muggy air, but his skin was soft, and his sweat had a pleasant, sweet smell, like musky tropical fruit.
The longer strands of his dark hair swept against my cheek when he held his head to mine.
The gesture was consoling and intimate, like long-lost lovers. We were barely even friends.
“Fuck off, Ambrose.” The last words I’d said to him before. What did I say to him now when everything he’d thought about me from our first moment was right? How could he hold me when his eventual death could be on my hands, too? If the jaguar’s slashes got infected …
His bandages. I hadn’t checked them in two days.
“Let me check your wounds,” I muttered pathetically and shifted my position to pull out of his hold and face him.
Driving my knees into the dirt, I looked up into his angelic face, surprised at the weight of the concern in the honeyed brown of his eyes.
His rose-pink lips were as dry as mine, but still had the audacity to look supple.
He removed his arms from his shirt sleeves in silence and let me push up the sticky fabric of the expensive polo up to his shoulders, exposing the dirty bandages across his pecs. My hands drifted over the ratty cotton that had needed changing days ago, but was surprisingly dry.
“Did these get soaked in river water?” I asked as I worked on unraveling the threads.
Ambrose raised an arm over his head to scratch his neck, uncomfortable. “Um, no.” His gaze darted over to the now-full river, in the direction of the plane. “Nikki insisted I didn’t go above my waist—he had me come up to help on dry land when it got too high and help the others from here.”
Of course, he had. Relief, brief but powerful, filled my bloodstream like a hit of adrenaline. The four scratch wounds were puffy with yellowed crust, but they were fully sealed and on the path to healing. One tiny piece of good news.
I’d spare the ointment for now—it was our most precious commodity—and he wouldn’t need the bandages anymore, either.
Ambrose let out a bitter laugh, like a bark cutting through water. “He was kind of rude about it, actually. Guess I’ll have that fucker to thank if I don’t die of infection out here.”
My fingers stilled, hovering above Ambrose’s chest. I had Nikki to thank, too. Ambrose closed his hand around mine and squeezed with a gentleness so at odds with his general disposition.
“I’m not sorry he pulled you out of the water,” he whispered. “I’m not sorry you’re still here, Marley.” He swallowed hard, his eyes taking on a glassy glint as he searched mine. “I wish he was still here, too. But I can’t do this without you.”
My breath caught in my throat at the sincerity in his voice.
“You got these”—I dipped my head toward the angry red lines that would scar his perfect body—“because you saved me.”
His laugh was soft, rueful, and light. “I got these because of me. I followed you because I’m a petty fuck who wanted to crucify you.
” His hand tightened, and he used it to tug me closer to him.
I fell into his body, my breasts brushing up against the heat of his exposed chest with our faces so close our breaths mingled.
“I chose to jump in front of the jaguar, Marley.” The honey of his irises was almost yellow in the eerie light of the mid-afternoon jungle gloom, the earnestness in them unfiltered and raw. “I weighed my odds, and knew I couldn’t survive without you.” His fingers lightly danced along my jawbone.
How were our faces this close? I could see the silvery tiny half-moon scar just a finger’s width away from his right eye, and the way his cheek curved into the slightest dimple when his lips pulled upward.
My breath hitched as he drew closer—our lips could brush with only the smallest tilt of the head.
“I bet on you then, and I’m betting on you now, Marley. Don’t you dare forget who you are.”
His tone was so vehement for barely whispered words, but I didn’t have time to think about his intensity when those dry-yet-supple lips pressed against mine.