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PROLOGUE
FRIDAY NIGHT
The bass thumps from somewhere behind me, echoing the beat of the blood pulsing in my ears. I look back at the group I’ve left behind. Bodies painted in flashy greens and sickeningly sweet pinks rub against each other. Cheap beer froths out of gold and green bottles while friends sip collectively from fishbowls filled with noxious blue liquids. Farther down, a dancer swirls a hoop of fire for the acclaim of an impressed—and extremely intoxicated—crowd.
Everything suddenly seems hazy, like I’m watching it all unfold from outside my body. A neon cacophony of color set to music that’s become nothing more than one long blurred note, deep enough and loud enough to shake my chest bones. My muscles are heavy, and I need to remind myself to breathe, like my body has forgotten to engage in its normal functions. Maybe they put something in my drink to make this easier. Or maybe I’m just intoxicated with the knowledge. The awareness that time is running out.
I call back toward the group, pleading for anyone to help me. But it’s no use. The raucousness blasting from the party’s speakers sweeps down the beach like an avalanche, picking up my voice and carrying it away into the silence.
I thought I could do this myself. That I was smarter than them, that I could figure out the darkness that lives on this island and stop it from hurting anyone else.
But I was wrong.
I made a mistake. I trusted the wrong person. I should have known better after everything that happened.
I feel a palm on my lower back. It’s light, and I know what it would look like to any onlooker, even one who decided to walk this far down the beach away from the party. Two partygoers escaping the dance floor for the romantic seclusion of the moonlight. It’s so far from true it almost brings a smile to my lips, a bubbling euphoria that nearly escapes.
But it doesn’t.
Because I know what that palm signifies. And I feel what the others down the beach don’t. The thin prick of a knife digging into my lower vertebrae.
I hear a voice close to my ear, the tone hard and cold, the music doing little to muffle it.
“Move. Forward.”
I look before me, the ocean stretched out to the horizon, black waves glittering in the light from the moon—as round and full as a pregnant belly. I’ve looked at this view in awe several times since I arrived here, a beauty like nothing I’ve ever seen.
I do as I’m told and walk. What choice do I have?
The pulsing bass emanating from the bars’ speakers recedeswith each step until I’m far enough away that the music becomes nothing more than a memory. This distance from the party, the beach is bathed in darkness, the shops lining this stretch long since closed. The only light comes from the smattering of stars over my head.
As I feel the water lap against my toes, I take one more look over my shoulder. The people are only small blurs at this distance, but I can still make out their bodies grinding together, so many aching to make contact any way they can. Despite the sloppiness—the drugs and drink making them flop on to each other in lurid movements—there’s a beauty to it.
For so long, I’ve felt nothing but coldness, even with the heavy humidity of the island cloying at my skin these past few days. People always talk about rage burning, but it sat inside my stomach, as hard as ice, freezing my veins. I couldn’t think of anything besides revenge. A need to impose pain that I’ve never felt before.
But now, as the ocean water grazes my kneecaps and I watch the people down the beach from me dance in the glittering moonlight, so far removed from the rest of the world, it’s as if that ice finally melts, the brief giddiness from earlier returning.
I wonder if she felt this way before it happened to her. An appreciation for life that comes only at its end.
Before I can think about it any more, my feet stop moving, and the single palm on my back turns into two, pushing me hard, face-first into the water. I gasp for breath as I fall, my forehead striking one of the rocks that litters the ocean floor. But it’s not enough. The hands grip my neck tightly, holding my head under, legs now wrapped around my hips, pinning me down. Even though I fight back, the person barely moves. I lift my arms up, reaching foranything to grab hold of, but it feels as if I’m draped in a weighted blanket. My fingers finally grasp around wrists, and I drag my nails across flesh as hard as I can. But the water turns everything soft, and I barely make a dent.
My eyelids force open against the sting of the salt water. Small fish flick by me, deftly avoiding the bubbles erupting from my lips, seemingly unconcerned with the life seeping from my lungs.
My hands release, floating back downward as if my muscles have realized the futility of the fight before my brain. And I picture her again, as I have so many times since she left. She’s the reason why I’m here. Why I’ve sacrificed everything.
It’s her I’m thinking of when the beauty of the water fades to black.
1
CASS
FOURTEEN HOURS EARLIER
The hotel room already smells like death. I know realistically it’s too soon for that, that the body isn’t anywhere near decomposing. But still the stench filters into my nostrils, cloying and visceral. A thick, wet substance smears through the cracks in my toes, and time seems to stand still as I see the blood seeping into the carpet fibers. Each droplet holds little pieces of me that will stay long after I’m physically gone.
Suddenly, his body looms large in front of me. And then I feel the weight in my hand, the sturdiness of the knife. My eyes flick to it, the lamplight illuminating a rust-colored substance that lines its sharp edge. Blood. My blood.
I try to pause, to take stock of what’s happening, to piece it all together. But before I can, my arm plunges forward as if of its own volition, angry and desperate. And then it comes. The connection of the blade to the flesh. That satisfying feeling of contact.
