CHAPTER 30
JASON
I couldn’t find her.
I had been putting Sparkles back in her enclosure, the last of the animals to be settled after the show, and I turned around and Camila was simply not there. Not at the entrance, not with Jess, not with Audrey who was breaking down the trestle tables on the far side of the space.
I asked Audrey. She hadn’t seen her in twenty minutes.
Twenty minutes.
The cold moved through me fast and complete.
I was moving toward the building when Luna appeared.
She was at the edge of the parking lot, barking — not the casual territorial bark of dogs, but something with urgency in it, high and insistent, her huge body oriented toward the back corner of the lot. She looked at me, barked again, and looked at the corner.
I ran to her.
She took off immediately, moving fast for something so big, cutting through the back of the parking lot and past the delivery area and into the narrow service road behind the shelter. I followed.
There were tire tracks in the soft ground at the edge of the road — fresh, heavy, a large vehicle that had pulled out recently and headed toward the tree line.
I looked back at the shelter. Audrey was standing at the edge of the parking lot watching me.
“Call Briggs,” I shouted. “Tell him they have Camila.”
I didn’t wait to see her reach for her phone.
The motorbike belonged to one of the younger shelter volunteers — I found him at the edge of the lot and told him I needed it, and something in my face communicated the urgency. He handed me the keys.
I followed the tracks.
The service road narrowed into a dirt path, and the dirt path narrowed into a forest track, the canopy closing overhead and the light dropping rapidly as I rode. The tire tracks were visible in my headlight, heading in a straight line away from everything.
Then they turned into the trees and disappeared.
I stopped the bike, left it on the path and went on foot.
The forest got dark, not gradually but all at once, the remaining light going out like a busted lightbulb. I moved without the flashlight, not wanting to announce myself, using the pale strip of sky visible through the canopy to orient.
I smelled the cottage before I saw it. It was the particular smell of a wood structure that had been closed up, mixed with cigarette smoke.
I stopped behind a stand of palms and waited.
The cottage was small, a single light inside throwing faint yellow through a cracked shutter. Through the gap I could see shadows moving, four of them, and then I angled further and found the gap that gave me a better view.
Camila was on the floor.
She was tied at the wrists and ankles, in just her bra — one cup pulled down in a deliberate cruelty that made something cold and absolute settle in my chest. She was alive.
Her chin was up. She was watching the room with fear in her eyes, but also something else —the persistence to remain dignified despite her humiliating condition, and the stubbornness to not surrender.
That was my Camila.
Scarlett was at the far end of the room. Three men I didn’t recognize were distributed around the space, one by the door, two near the window.
I counted the exits. I counted the angles. I found the blind spot one guard’s position created at the hinge side, barely enough, but enough if I was fast enough.
I waited until the guard shifted his weight and looked away.
Then I moved.
What happened in the next four minutes I will not account for in detail.
I have done things in my life that required me not to think too carefully about what I was doing while I was doing it, and this was one of those times, except that I was thinking about one thing only: Camila, on the floor, on the wrong side of every person in that room.
I got to her.
I cut the rope at her wrists with the knife from my belt, then her ankles, and she was already trying to stand before I’d finished.
I pulled my t-shirt over my head and got it on her in one movement — it fell to her mid-thigh — and then I had her on my shoulders and I was moving toward the door before anyone in the room had fully processed what was happening.
One of the men shouted.
The shot came a second later, hitting the doorframe as I cleared it.
I ran.
The forest was dark and the ground was uneven and Camila held on with both hands, her head low, not making a sound. I ran until I found what I was looking for, a natural depression in the ground, deep enough, sheltered on three sides by tree roots and earth.
I put her down in it carefully.
She looked up at me — my t-shirt enormous on her, her hair loose and wild, her eyes bright with controlled fear.
“They will answer for what they did to you,” I said. My voice came out very steady. “Every one of them.”
“Jason—”
“If I don’t come back.” I stopped. Looked at her properly, in the dark, the way I should have looked at her every day for three years and taken nothing for granted. “Remember that I love you. You’re the only person I have ever loved. That was true from the first day and it is true right now.”
Her face flinched. Tears ran down her eyes.
“Don’t go,” she said. Her voice broke on the second word. “Jason, don’t—”
I put my hand against her cheek. She was warm and real and entirely herself, sitting in the dark Bahamian forest in my t-shirt, and I held her face for one moment and looked at her.
Then I straightened up, turned toward the sound of the men moving through the trees behind us, and went to meet them.