With another crack, the tape splits fully and Ethan rips it away with one long, sharp yank.
“Finally. Jesus.” I thrust my arms up, groaning at the thick tide of lactic acid that churns through my muscles. My pits feel rancid and waxy, but fuck it. I’m almost free. “Do the cuffs.”
He drops to one knee, chewing his bottom lip in worry. “Boss, I can’t…I can’t cut though a chain. Not with these knives.” With a frustrated curse, he bangs his fist against the floorboards. “Shit. Shit!”
“Not the chains,” I snap. “You need to carve the chair legs—see?” I jab my finger down. “Carve the legs and I can get away. Fuck the fucking cuffs.”
He stares up at me. This instruction does not compute.
“Put me back on my side and just carve. You’ll be able to snap them half way through.”
“Okay.” He takes a deep breath, flexes his fingers, and does as he’s told. Thank God for that.
“What was he doing to Leo?” I ask, though I’m not sure I want to hear the answer.
“I…I didn’t see. We were too far.”
I swallow. “So you don’t know if she’s still alive…?”
“There…there were noises,” he mumbles.
“Right.”
How long does it fucking take to carve through two chair legs? “Will he come back here?”
“I don’t know. I’m hurrying—shit, sorry.” He slips and grazes into my ankle; a sting permeates, warm and wet.
“Just get on with it.”
“I am. I don’t want to—okay.” He bleats and hums to himself, some weird tune with no discernible rhythm, and I try to float away from myself. To get rid of the throbbing pain in my head.
When he finishes with the cuffs, I need to be able to move, and fast—at this rate, I’ll be rolling on the floor with vertigo instead.
Finally, the second chair leg comes off with a sinuous snap, and Ethan scrapes each chunk of wood from between the links of chain. With my feet free, he lowers the chair back down. I lunge forward, hauling myself up only to hiss at the wobble of my ankles.
“You okay?” He stares at me with watery, wide eyes. “Aeron?”
“I’m fine.” My legs are made of lead and tiny bombs are exploding in my temples, but aside from that, I’m just dandy. “Come on. No time.”
“Hassan’s waiting with the boat. He’s hidden—for now, anyway.” He gathers up the bottle, shoves it into the rucksack, and then hands me the other knife. It’s shaped for carving meat, its blade flat and wide. “We’re gonna kill him,” he whispers, “aren’t we?”
I set my mouth in a grim line. “We’re gonna kill him.”
“Right.” He gulps. “Let’s get out of here.”
Since the moment I woke up in this hell hole, I’ve been desperate for open space. Now it seems like as much of a curse as my bindings—the light’s too bright, the fading sun too hot, the decrepit decking burning the soles of my feet. Running knocks the shit out of my shaking knees, but there’s no time to get acclimatized; the deck shudders with our footsteps, and then we’re fleeing through overgrown woodland, ferns grating on our exposed skin.
“Ethan, where the fuck are we?”
“A couple hours from Ravahli. Hassan says there are islands like this all over the place since the tsunami a few years back—they just never got fixed up.” He guides me on to a clearer area that once, maybe, was a path. “The beach is down this way.” Then he stalls. “Aeron…how the fuck do we—I mean, I’ve never killed anyone, I—” His shoulders heave with a badly stifled sob. “I am so not that guy.”
“Keep moving.” I shove him forward, falling into step behind him again. “You just do what you have to do. There’ll be no question.”
“But—”
“Move!”
Never mind that I just admitted killing before to Ethan, more or less. The boy’s so mind-fucked that he doesn’t appear to have noticed.
“Up ahead.” He stalls again by a clearing, where the sinking red sun cuts through the thick green palms. “I…shit. They’re right there.”