Page 184 of Reverie

Breathe, Winter. Slow, deep breaths.

When I open my eyes again, the first thing I see is a pair of shoes and the legs of a chair near my feet. I’m unsurprised when I trail my eyes up and it’s Marcus Law sitting there.

“Good, you’re awake,” he says. He scrolls on his phone and the blue light from the screen highlights his bored expression. I don’t respond to his observation.

Instead, I choose to open both eyes all the way, taking in the room. It looks like I’m in a stateroom on a boat of some kind.The porthole windows give it away, along with the movement beneath my body.

We’re sailing, and we’re moving fast.

“You couldn’t have put me on the sofa over there?” I grouse.

Marcus doesn’t look at me when he replies, “Just be grateful that I had them put you here rather than the locker under the foredeck.”

I keep my face neutral, even though the idea of a dark enclosed space causes tremors of anxiety to bloom across my body.

He powers down the screen on his phone, putting it in his breast pocket.

“Hang tight, we’re almost there,” he says, settling back into his seat.

I make a deep, agitated sound in my chest. “I thought you were on our side?”

He raises his eyebrow and runs his hand back and forth over his low fade.

“Why would I ever want to help Hunter Brigham?” He draws out the sentence.

“What did Hunter ever do to you?” My chest gets tight with anger.

That question causes Marcus to sit forward on his chair in a flash of movement. “He killed my sister,” he spits. “He was there while she was used over and over on Isla Cara, and then he slit her throat on the beach. He left her there to rot like a dead whale.”

I hold my breath to keep from reacting.

“How do you know this to be true?” I say, not caring that it’s a completely insensitive question. The man has me hogtied on the floor for fuck’s sake.

He smiles and it’s grim. “I have my ways.”

I test the strength of the zip ties again, holding in a wince.

“I’m sorry about what happened to your sister. Hunter tried his best to help the people kept there?—”

“Hunter Brigham ain’t do shit for nobody but himself,” he fires back. “I’m just so fucking sorry that you got caught up in all of this. You seem like a nice girl. You could have met someone not as flashy, maybe an accountant or something. Then you could have had a safe, boring life, but now you’re tangled up in all this. It’s a shame.”

He leans back in his chair, relaxed, as if he weren’t just spewing vitriol at me for the last minute.

Shrugging, he says, “Oh well,” and picks up a glass of brown liquor.

I don’t reply to his statement because what the fuck is there to say? Nothing. Nothing at all.

So I close my eyes and wait for the next terrible thing to happen.

And I hold on to hope that Hunter will save me this time because I don’t know that I have the strength to save myself.

TWENTY-SEVEN

HUNTER

“Ihate lying to Winter,” I say to Leo as we gather in a room full of other members of The Resistance.

When Misha called to say that not fifty, but a hundred trafficked people, were delivered to Isla Cara as sacrifices in The Hunt, there wasn’t any way I could live with myself if I didn’t intervene.