Page 31 of Flesh & Divinity

“Do you think he will allow that?” He holds my gaze.

“He has too.”

“You know my father. He is selfish and fucking set in his ways. I hate him and so does my brother. He doesn’t give a shit about us or what we want. I bet he was glad the day she lied and we got sent here, that meant no one was there to challenge him for his throne” He doesn't raise his voice but I can hear the hatred dripping from each word.

If we leave this island, I won’t get them. I’ll go back to being the best friend they keep at arm’s length until we’re behind closed doors. I’ll have to watch their father parade them around in front of women who fawn over them and throw themselves at their feet, all for a chance to marry one of the esteemed princes.

“Look at me.”

I turn and find understanding in his eyes and it makes me angry.

“When she lied and sent us here we lost everything,” I say, and my voice comes out steadier than I feel. “We have been surviving on this island for two years. Not living. Surviving. Now she is sleeping against my man's shoulder and I am standing here and I don't—” I stop. Press my fist against the doorframe. “I don't know what I'm doing anymore. I want to be free of this place but I’m terrified because I don’t want to lose you or Jaq.”

Gus looks at me for a long moment. He reaches out, cups my cheek and presses his forehead against mine.

“You’ll never lose us. I’ll never hide who you are to me ever again, I swear it.”

He releases me, then crosses to her and crouches down. “Time to move,” he says quietly. Not cruel. Not punishing. Just certain.

She lifts her head. Those pale blue eyes find him through the dark and I watch her take in his expression and decide something.

“Where?” she asks.

“Somewhere the scavengers won't find you.” He stands and holds out his hand. She looks at it. That calculation moves through her eyes for a second before she places her hand in his and lets him pull her to her feet.

We dress her in the dark, gather what we need, and the four of us leave the cabin together for the first time. We move through the island at night in single file toward the bluffs, toward the cave behind the waterfall that no one else on this island knows about.

Except the other four clans.

She trusts us to lead her.

CHAPTER TWENTY

CINDER

The waterfall is deafening as we descend the cliff and shuffle around the cliff’s edge.

I press through the curtain of it behind daddy. The cold spray hits my face and then we are inside where the roar becomes a wall of sound that seals everything else out completely. Brother lights the first torch and I watch the cave emerge from the dark—fur rugs, a firepit, books stacked against one wall in uneven towers, a desk covered in maps and papers, shelves carved into the rock stocked with food and folded clothes.

I take it in with the particular attention of someone who has spent a month cataloguing what people don't want found.

They built this.

They built this place. Quietly. Patiently. They have brought me here, the woman they hate, the woman they say has lied. I don't know what to do with the fact that it feels like the most intimate thing any of them have done.

Boyfriend moves the flat rock into place across the entrance and the sound of the island disappears entirely.

I turn to face them.

Three men in glass masks. The moonlight is gone in here, only torchlight, and it catches the glass differently—warmer, fractured, less like ice and more like something that has been through fire and survived it. I have been learning the language of those masks for a month. Every micro expression that the glass can't hide. Every tell in the set of a jaw or the line of a shoulder.

I know these men.

I don't know their faces.

The distinction has never felt so unbearable as it does right now in this sealed cave that they built with their own hands while they waited for a way to escape this hell.

“Take them off,” I say.