Thirty-Three
Cress crouched in the corner of the van, gripping her knees against her chest. She was trembling, despite the sweltering heat. She was thirsty and hungry and her shins were bruised where they’d collided with the van’s ledge. Though she’d pulled down the bolts of fabric to sit on, the constant jerking of the truck on the uneven ground made her backside ache.
The night was so dark she couldn’t see her hand in front of her face, but sleep wouldn’t come. Her thoughts were too erratic as she tried to discern what these people wanted with her. She’d played the moments before her capture over in her head a hundred times, and Jina’s expression had definitely lit up when Cress had confirmed Jina’s suspicions.
She was a shell. A worthless shell.
Why had Jina sensed value in that?
She racked her brain, but nothing made sense.
She tried her best to remain calm. Tried to be optimistic. Tried to tell herself that Thorne would come for her, but doubts kept crowding out the hope.
He couldn’t see. He didn’t know where she’d gone. He probably didn’t even know she was missing yet, and when he found out … what if he thought she’d abandoned him?
What if he didn’t care?
She couldn’t forget the image of Thorne sitting at that card table with some strange girl draped over him. He hadn’t been thinking about Cress then.
Perhaps Thorne wouldn’t come for her.
Perhaps she’d been wrong about him all this time.
Perhaps he wasn’t a hero at all, but just a selfish, arrogant, womanizing—
She sobbed, her head cluttered with too much fear and anger and jealousy and horror and confusion, all of it writhing and squirming in her thoughts until she couldn’t keep her frustrated screams bottled up any longer.
She wailed, scrunching her hair in her fists until her scalp burned.
But her screams died out fast, replaced with clenched teeth as she attempted to calm herself again. She rubbed her fingers around her wrists as if she had long strands of hair to wrap around them. She swallowed hard in an attempt to gulp down the rising panic, to keep herself from hyperventilating.
Thorne would come for her. He was a hero. She was a damsel. That’s how the stories went—that’s how they always went.
With a groan, she settled into her corner and started to cry again, cried until no more tears would come.
Suddenly, she jolted awake.
There was salt dried on her cheeks and her back ached from being hunched over. Her butt and sides were bruised from the bumping of the van, which, she realized, had come to a stop.
She was instantly alert, the grogginess shaken off by a new wave of fear. There was a hint of light coming through the cracks around the doors, which meant they’d driven through the night. A door slammed and she could make out Jina’s chatter, no longer friendly and comforting. The van shook as the driver got out.
“Making good time,” Cress heard a man say. “Someone want to help me back here?”
Another man laughed. “Can’t take the little waif yourself?”
Jina’s voice cut through their boasting. “Try not to bruise her. I want top payment this time, and you know how he negotiates. Nitpicking every little thing.”
Cress gulped as the boots came closer. She steeled herself. She would lunge. She would fight. She would be ferocious. Bite and scratch and kick if she had to. She would take him by surprise.
And then she would run. Fast as a cheetah, graceful as a gazelle.
It was still early. The sand would be cool on her bare feet. Her blisters were almost healed, and while her legs still ached horribly, she could ignore them. Hopefully they would deem her not worth coming after.
Or maybe they would shoot her.
She gulped down the thought. She had to take the risk.
The lock clanked. She took in a deep breath, waited for the door to open—and pounced. A guttural scream was ripped out of her, all her anger and vulnerability swelling up and unleashing in that one vicious moment as her clawed fingers scrabbled for his eyes.
The man caught her. Two hands snapped around her pale wrists. Her momentum kept her careening outside the truck and she would have tumbled to the sand if he hadn’t held her half suspended. Her war cry was abruptly cut off.
The man started to laugh—laughing at her, at her pathetic attempts to overpower him.
“She is a tiger, I’ll give you that,” he said to the man who had teased him. He twisted Cress around so he could hold both of her wrists in one firm grip. Her body still dangled from his hold as he began marching her away from the van and into the dunes.
“Let me go!” she shrieked, kicking back at him, but he was undeterred by her flailing. “Where are you taking me? Let me go!”
“Calm down, little girl, I’m not going to hurt you. Wouldn’t be worth it.” He snorted and dropped her down the other side of the dune.
She stumbled and rolled a couple times in the sand before bolting into a crouch. She swiped hair and sand from her face. By the time she looked up at the man, he had a gun pinned on her.
Her heart sputtered.
“Try to run, I shoot. And I don’t mean to kill. But you’re smarter than that, aren’t you? You’ve got nowhere to go anyway, right?”
Cress gulped. She could still hear the voices on the other side of the dune. She hadn’t been able to tell how many caravaners were still along in the group.
“Wh-what do you want from me?”
“I suspect you have business to tend to?”
Standing, she stumbled a bit down the hill, the sand unstable beneath her. The man didn’t flinch. He jerked the barrel of the gun toward her feet. “Go on. It’ll be another few hours before we stop, so better get it out of the way now. Don’t want you losing your water in the back of that nice van. We wouldn’t get our security deposit back, and Jina hates that.”
Her lower lip trembled and she cast another glance around the desert, the wide openness of this barren landscape. She shook her head. “No, I can’t. Not with…”
“Ah, I won’t watch.” To prove his point, he spun around and scratched behind his ear with the gun. “Just make it quick.”
She spotted another man over the dune, faced away from her, and suspected he was relieving himself. Cress turned away, ashamed and embarrassed. She wanted to cry, wanted to beg the man to let her be, to just leave her here. But she knew it wouldn’t work. And she didn’t want to beg this man for anything.
Thorne would come for her, she thought as she stumbled to the base of the dune in search of what privacy she could find.
Thorne had to come for her.