Chapter 19 #3
She can do this. She has extensive experience in pretending she’s not disgusted with her partner to protect herself.
Done it a hundred times before with her first husband, and if there’s one thing she knows how to do, it’s disassociate.
Nora pushes him unceremoniously onto the bed and straddles him, getting a smug laugh in return and a compliment on how ‘feisty’ she is that makes her want to punch his teeth out.
Somewhere in the background, the commotion must have alerted the animals because the fox begins to chatter and the penguins make agitated little noises, the bars on all the cages starting to rattle.
Then she hears Theo scuffling with the other men, and her attention shifts, worry clouding her eyes as her body trembles.
“Get your head in the game, darling,” her opponent scowls.
‘I left a hunting knife under the pillow. Barrow was overrun last I saw, but there could be survivors.’
Gwen’s words in that letter whisper softly, and Nora leans forward, resting her lips close to the other man’s ear, trying not to gag on the smell of his sweat as her hand slips carefully under the pillow behind him. “Do you have a preference for how you want me?”
“On my coc—”
The thing about killing someone is that she never imagined she might be in the position where that’s the only logical option.
Now that she is, she absolutely never expected that her body would fight through the nerves and adrenaline to act on its own, bringing the blade up to his throat and slicing a clean line from one ear to the other.
It’s not as simple as she thought it might be, though.
Doesn’t cut deep enough on the first try.
How the hell is she supposed to know how much pressure to use to cut through a windpipe?
Maybe she should have stabbed him instead.
Fuck, that would have been easier, she thinks, right before he grabs her by the neck, slamming her head into the wall.
She’s tossed off the bed where the edge of a side table collides hard with her ribs.
Blinding hot pain jolts through her like a poker from a fire pit, and she screams, trying to suck in air, only for a blackout to fuzz the edges of her vision when inhaling inflates her ribcage further.
She can’t do much except writhe on the floor while trying to catch her breath. When she finally blinks back into focus, Dalton has fallen beside her in a pool of his own blood. After a few strangled gurgles, the room goes silent.
Turns out she did cut deep enough, after all.
The horror of what she’s done has little time to set in.
That has to be for later. Right now, Nora scrambles toward the door, fighting shock and grabbing the rifle in the corner.
Doesn’t have any idea what she’ll do when she gets outside, but Theo’s already got one of his captors in a headlock when she flings the door open.
They struggle like bulls, and Theo cries out when he’s slammed back into a tree, but his grip is strong and soon the other man slumps to the ground in a red-faced heap.
She points the gun, sending their final challenger running into the woods, only for it to jam, allowing the man to escape. Nora growls in frustration, wishing he were close enough to throw the whole thing at him instead.
“Is he dead?” She points to the last one passed out in the snow.
“I don’t know.” Theo drops to his knees and she clears her weapon, raising it to finish him off, as if that’s a thing she does all the time, when it certainly is not.
It shocks her how quickly that choice is made in her head.
Maybe they all really are animals when pushed to the brink, she thinks sadly.
“I got it,” he says quickly. “You don’t have to. I’ll do it.”
He takes the other man’s knife, fallen in the snow, and plunges it into a soft temple with a single, swift thrust. She slumps at his side, a whoosh of breath leaving his lungs as he catches her with a pained groan and pulls her in close, and then it’s her turn to let out a high-pitched yelp because everything in her fucking hurts.
“Are you okay? Tell me you’re okay,” she begs, barely able to pry herself away long enough to examine his blood-coated face. It matches the red covering her own shirt, and he pales at the sight.
“It’s not mine.” She uses her clean sleeve to wipe the blood gently from his eyes.
“Are you okay? Did he touch you? I’m gonna kill him—”
“I already did,” she admits. “I already did.”
They’re surrounded by the dead, and the weight of that is heavy between them.
Never planned on racking up a body count, but then again, they never planned on any of this.
What were they supposed to do, anyway? Her survival instinct is far stronger than she thought after spending years assuming it was gone.
She can see the headlines now if they ever get rescued. ‘Stranded plane crash survivors go on murderous rampage.’
Theo wipes the tears from her face with a cold thumb, and she tries not to shatter under his touch. “There’s still one left.”
“He’s alone and unarmed. He’s not coming back. He’ll hide out in Barrow until he freezes.”
She wants to melt into a puddle right here in the snow for however long he’ll hold her, but her ribs flare as the adrenaline begins to crest and fall, and she pales, letting out a litany of curses.
“What’s happening? Nora? Talk to me.”
“I think my ribs are broken,” she grinds out. “But it’s fine, I’ll be fine…”
That would be a whole lot more convincing if she didn’t follow up the promise by coughing up blood into freshly fallen snow.