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“Like what?”
“Like you. And your brother.”
The guilt dropped onto my chest like a rock. “Axel said not to approach Wil now. He told me to let him come to me.”
“I think Axel’s wrong,” he said. “I think you should find him and talk to him.”
I turned onto my side to face him. His hand slid down, smoothed over to my hip.
“You think my brother will talk to me?” I asked. “He didn’t seem to want to. He hasn’t tried to make contact.”
“You should let him know you still care,” he said. “Whether or not he comes back home with you, that’s up to him. Axel believes if someone really wants to be around you, they’ll come to you. Your brother might not know he can come to you for help, if he needs to.”
It had been so long since I’d seen Wil. I constantly wondered if I’d said something wrong, done something to him. Had I teased him too much? Was there any reason he’d stay away from me?
Raven’s hand slid up to my shoulder, and he massaged the muscle. “The longer you go without seeing him, the harder it’ll be.”
“I should find him,” I said. He was probably right. Maybe in a way, my brother was more like me than the others realized. He needed to be shown someone cared, that he could trust me if he was in trouble.
My arms were up over my head, against the wall. Raven slid his hands up, reaching for mine. He nudged them a little, massaging my wrists. “I’ll help you find him. Axel will, too, if you believe you should. I’m not going to tell you what to do, but there is a choice here.”
Maybe he was right. “What happens if I find him? Can he come stay? If he needs to?”
“You know he can,” he said. “He can always stay with us.”
I was glad for that. “Maybe he can help us do…whatever we’ve been doing. I thought I was helping that nonprofit teen foster home before, and helping save jobs for people. Can we still do that?”
“Happens every day,” he said, and he leaned in, kissing my forehead. “We’re not alone, little thief. You don’t have to fight the world alone. You just have to learn your limits. We don’t tread into things that the police or the FBI should be taking care of.”
“Blake was going to do it.”
“Blake assumed this game was going to be like hide-and-find. Find the info. Faster and easier than legal ways. Technically, he might have pulled it off, if he’d done it right.”
“We messed up, calling me the investor,” I said.
“It got dangerous fast. Too close, too quickly, you get burned. Right now, we’re all worthless. We can’t touch Colt and he knows our faces.”
“But now we can tell a…detective or something? About what he was doing?”
He smirked. “We’ll put the right people in touch with Ethan.”
Still, this was so depressing. I’d pictured getting the money, getting it back, and destroying all the bad guys. We were just going to walk away?
I buried my face in the pillow. We bulldozed our way into this, and now we were running away. Perhaps Raven was right, though. When they’d gone after Blake in the first place—back when they’d recruited me—they were working on something the police couldn’t touch, but which needed to be dealt with.
The Academy might teeter on some lines to help people, but they stayed on the right side of the law.
There was a scrape of plastic against wood. Raven moved my wrists slightly, keeping them together over my head.
I stayed put, curious but tired, too. I thought he was just adjusting himself, trying to get more comfortable.
He slowly moved from the bed, getting up.
I forced myself to open an eye. He headed to the door.
Had he heard a knock? “Where are you…?” I tugged my arms and couldn’t move them. My knuckles knocked against the wood. I looked up.
My wrists were tied with a single plastic zip tie, connecting me with the metal frame of the bed.
Oh my God. He did not. “What are you doing?” I called to him, jerking my arms as if that would get me free.
“Doing what I promised you, little thief.”
“What do you mean?”
He turned to the door, opening it. “Finding Blake.”
“We’ll go together.”
“Not now,” he said. “You need to stay for when people come back. I think I might know where he is.”
Anger flared through me, waking me. I groaned, twisting my wrists, trying to pull them free. I kicked at the bed. “Let me go. I’ll stay.”
“No, you wouldn’t.” He walked out, closing the door.
I leaned my body against the metal frame, trying to get my limbs out of the tie. I twisted and tugged, but I wasn’t going to get it off without cutting off my thumb.
He needed a good punch in the nose again. He couldn’t have just told me to stay?
I probably wouldn’t have listened, but he could have at least asked. Brute.
I dropped my head onto the pillow, blowing out a puff of air. Fighting my restraint had made me dizzy.
I was so tired, but I was too angry to sleep while waiting on someone to come free me.
How embarrassing.
There was a pen on the side table. I twisted, reaching with my feet. I wasn’t sure what I could use it for, but it was better than just helplessly waiting.
I stretched my leg out but knocked the table on the way, and everything on it slid the other direction, the pen rolling to the floor.
So much for saving myself.
Footsteps sounded outside. The door opened.
Marc poked his head in and spotted me on the bed. “Hey,” he said.
I grunted, still embarrassed. I twisted my wrists against the tie. “Come here, get me out of this.”
His eyes finally locked on my wrists and the tie and he stepped inside quickly, locking the door before coming to the bed. “Whoa,” he said and looked over my body before reaching for my wrists, touching the tie. “Did someone hurt you? Who did this?”
“Raven,” I said. At least Marc was alone. “He wanted to leave without me following.”
“Oh,” he said and rolled his eyes. “Sounds like him. Does this a lot to me…sometimes Corey, when he wants to go rogue.” He pulled a pocketknife out and snapped it open. “Stay still. I don’t want to cut you.”
I groaned and strained against the tie. “Just hurry. Maybe we can still find him. And then I can shoot him. In the face.”
“Maybe not the face,” he said. “But I’ll hold him down once we get out of here and let you take a few jabs.” He pressed the knife blade to the tie, cutting it.
It broke quickly. I pulled my wrists down, sitting up on the bed, checking the purple lines on my wrists.
Marc put his knife away and caught one of my wrists, inspecting it. “You haven’t been here that long,” he said, tracing a thumb over one of the purple dents in my skin. “But long enough for him to get anywhere on this ship. Where was he going?”
“To find Blake, or that’s what he said.” I wanted to go hunting for him, but at the same time, I was so annoyed, so flustered. “Which we should be doing, too. We should find everyone and go.”
“I thought that was the plan. That’s why I’m here. But what happened? I didn’t get the details.”
I went over making the deal with Sam, finding out about Colt, and then our suspicions that Sam might be up to something by asking us to stay on board.
“I think it’s enough that we should leave,” I said. I showed him the phone we had gotten back from Sam. “This is Colt’s phone. We could give it to the right people. Raven said it’s time to give it up and get out of here.”
“I agree with you both,” Marc said. He checked the porthole window. “We’ve got about an hour before sunset still. We can wait here until it’s time, and we’ll have to get word to everyone about leaving. This having communication down is a pain in the ass.”
“Sam might not be happy
to see us leave early,” I said. “He claims to want Colt out of his hair.”
“I don’t know about that. He’s got enough security to watch his back. I wouldn’t trust him at this point. We should leave, but I’ll worry about Avery and Ethan if we all go.”
I was glad I wasn’t the only one worried about who we left behind. “Maybe someone should stay?” I asked.
“We can bring in replacements,” he said. “New faces. We don’t have to tell Avery and Ethan who they are, just that they won’t be alone.”
“So we just need to find the others, and get this all happening. We need to find Blake and Raven.”
He turned his gaze away. “Bambi…”
I adjusted how I was sitting on the bed to put a foot on his butt and fake-kick him.
