Chapter Fourteen
CINDER
I don’t sleep.
I lie in their bed in the dark and listen to the island breathe and run the plan through my head for the fourth time.
I overheard brother explaining his plan to daddy and boyfriend with the efficiency of a man who has been strategizing in silence for years—detailed, ruthless in the way only someone who has survived on patience and fury can manage.
Boyfriend filled in the gaps. Daddy sat quiet and watched them, the way he always does.
I stood silent in the hallway. Absorbing every word spoken.
I memorized every word.
And then, in the small hours when their breathing shifted and the cabin settled into silence, I made a decision.
I’m not waiting.
I can’t risk them not taking me with them, I need to save myself. I may be confused and feel things for these men I shouldn’t, but my freedom means more. I won’t give up my only chance to finally live a life free of tyrants. To live my life how I want to, without the fear of being hurt and hidden.
I don’t want the crown.
I just want peace of mind.
Free will to make my own decisions.
If I can get to the eastern bluff, disappear into the water before anyone notices I’m gone, I can escape. I don’t know what’s on the other side of that water but anything is better than waiting on this island for them to decide if they should take me with them when the time comes.
Escape is now or never, Cinder.
I slide out of the bed with the care of someone who has learned exactly which floorboards in this crumbling cabin complain and which stay quiet.
I dress in the dark. I find the knife I’ve been hiding under the loose stone by the fireplace for two weeks, small, practical, lifted from the kitchen and never mentioned. I tuck it into my waistband.
I heard them talk about hiding the key. I made sure to distract them long enough tonight so they wouldn’t have the chance to hide it somewhere else.
I know they keep moving the key to the collar so I’ll never find it.
Tonight, they fucked up. I grab daddy’s discarded pants off the floor and fish the key out of his pocket.
I use the key to unlock the collar. I almost whimper out loud when it clicks open. I quietly place it on the dresser.
I don’t let myself look back at the bed.
I go.
The night air hits me like cold water. I breathe through the shock of it and orient myself toward the eastern bluff.
I move fast, staying close to the cabin wall until the shadow of the structure can no longer cover me, then I cut into the tree line and use the dark the way I have learned to on this island, not fighting it but moving through it, trusting my feet.
I can’t risk going to the docks, even with them explaining the blind spots of the cameras that are there, I can’t risk being spotted. The only other place I can risk escaping is the eastern bluffs that they mentioned.
I am two hundred feet from the eastern boundary when I hear the horn.
It’s not like the one from earlier today.
Theirs.
One long blast, low and sharp, carrying across the island with an urgency that raises every hair on my arms. I know that sound. I’ve heard them test it. It means all hands.
They know I’m gone.
I run.
I can hear them behind me now, three sets of feet and I know their rhythm well enough by now to feel the difference between a search pattern and a pursuit. This is a pursuit. They’re not spreading out to cover ground.
They are coming directly for me.
I don’t have time to understand how. I break from the trees and the bluff opens up ahead of me, dark water churning fifty feet below. I skid to a stop at the edge, look down and feel the first cold punch of doubt land in my gut.
It’s a long way down.
“Stop.”
Brother’s voice.
I spin and all three of them are there, emerging from the tree line at a walk now that I have nowhere left to go.
They are not even breathing hard. Daddy in the middle, brother on his right, boyfriend on his left.
The moonlight catches the glass of their masks and throws it back in fractured, glittering pieces, and I think with stupid, devastating clarity that I will never see anything as beautiful or as terrifying as those three men walking toward me in the dark.
“I heard you,” I say. “I found your key.”
Daddy stops walking. The others stop with him.
“You were going to swim for it.” His voice is flat.
“I was going to try.”
“You would have drowned.” Brother’s voice is quiet. “The current on the eastern side is a rip. No one has made it through that water.”
“You don’t know that.”
“We do.” He takes a step forward and I step back.
My heel finds nothing and his arm shoots out and grabs mine before my weight tips past the point of no return.
The scream that tears out of me is pure reflex and his grip is absolute.
He yanks me forward and I crash into his chest. He doesn’t let go, both arms locking around me, and for a moment, neither of us move.
I can feel his heartbeat. It is not steady.
“You’d rather drown,” he says against the top of my head, “than stay with us.”
I press my face into his chest and breathe through the shaking in my own body and choose honesty because I am standing on a bluff in the dark and I nearly went over it. My capacity for games has temporarily abandoned me.
“I don’t know how to stop wanting out,” I admit. “Even when out might kill me.”
He doesn’t respond.
Daddy steps in close behind me and I feel him there, solid, furious, warm. Boyfriend comes to stand at my side and the four of us stay like that while the island breathes around us and the water churns below.
“You are not going to drown on this island,” Daddy says finally.
“You don’t get to decide that.”
“I just did.” His hand finds the back of my neck, not punishing, something else, something that moves through me slow and devastating and does nothing to stop the shaking. “In the morning, we are going to talk about what happens next. But you do not go near that water again.”
“Or what?”
“Or I chain you to the bed and let my brother take you apart piece by piece every time you think about running.”
Brother’s arm tightens around me. Not a threat. A promise.
I tip my head back and look up at Daddy.
The threat is real. I know it is. I also know from the look in his eyes he knows I know that the chain is not the part keeping me from moving.
“Fine,” I say.
It costs me.
They all hear exactly what it costs me.
Daddy’s hand stays at the back of my neck and he tips his head down until his mask rests against my forehead, the cool glass of it grounding me in a way I refuse to examine too closely. Brother’s arms don’t loosen. Boyfriend’s shoulder presses warm against mine.
“Good girl,” Daddy murmurs against the glass.
And the four of us stand there on the edge of the bluff until my shaking stops and the dark around us settles back into something survivable.
They knew I was listening, they were testing me and I fell for it.
They don’t take me back to the bedroom.
They take me to the kitchen, where the fire is still low and the table has been cleared.
The three of them move around each other with the practiced ease of men who have shared a space for years.
Brother adds wood to the fire. Boyfriend fills a cup and sets it in front of me without a word.
Daddy stands at the far wall with his arms folded and watches me with the particular quality of attention that has never once felt safe and I have stopped wanting it to.
I wrap both hands around the cup.
“You set me up,” I say.
“Yes.” Daddy doesn’t move from the wall.
“You knew I’d run.”
“Yes.”
“You left the key out on purpose.” I hold his gaze. “You wanted me to try and escape, only to realize there is no way off this island without you three.”
The silence that follows is its own answer.
“You hoped to scare me enough to stay close,” I say quietly. “But I wasn’t supposed to run for the water.”
“No,” he says. “You weren’t.”
I laugh. It comes out short and dark. “Backfired.”
“Somewhat.”
Boyfriend makes a sound from the far end of the table that might be an agreement. Brother is looking into the fire.
I set the cup down, stare at the table and feel the weight of the month pressing down on me all at once. The bluff I almost went over.
The way Brother’s heartbeat felt against my face. Not steady at all.
I look up.
“Tell me something true,” I say. “Not about today. Not about the island.” My eyes stay on Daddy’s. “Something real.”
The fire pops. Nobody moves.
Then Daddy pushes off the wall and crosses to the table.
He doesn’t sit. He stops behind the chair across from me and wraps both hands around the back of it.
He looks down at me through the glass of his mask with an expression I have never seen on him before, not hatred, not hunger, not the cold surgical contempt I have learned to navigate.
“We know who you are,” he says. “We know about what you did.” His voice is low. “We know about the lie.”
“Lie?” I ask.
The word sits between us like a blade laid flat on a table.
“Don’t play dumb,” he says.
I hold his gaze for a long time.
Then boyfriend is behind me and his hands find my shoulders, unhurried, and I feel him lower his head until the cool glass of his mask grazes the side of my neck.
“Tell us,” he says against my skin, and the words land somewhere between a threat and something else.
“You’re still ours, Cinder Soot. Lie or not. ”
His mouth finds the curve of my throat. My eyes fall shut and the questions dissolve, which I suspect is entirely the point. I am too tired and too undone from the bluff to pretend I want him to stop.
Brother appears at my side. His hand finds my jaw and tilts it toward him, and even through the glass mask I feel the intensity of his gaze like a physical pressure. “You scared us tonight,” he says.
“Good,” I breathe.
His grip tightens. “Don’t do it again.”
“Make me.”
The sound he makes is dark, immediate and takes me with him in one motion.
Lifting me from the chair, he sits me on the edge of the table with a force that scatters the cup and sends the firelight lurching.
I don’t protest. I wrap my legs around him by instinct and feel him settle between my thighs.
The look in his eyes through the glass makes every remaining rational thought I have dissolve completely.
Daddy’s hands find my back from across the table.
Boyfriend brackets me on the left.
The three of them surround me the way they always do, deliberate, a wall of heat and intention that leaves no room for anything outside the four of us, and this time, when I stop fighting it, it is not because I am too far gone to care.
It is because I choose to.
A dream is a wish you make with your heart. Forgive me, Father. I’m starting to wonder if this island is exactly where I was always going to end up.