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“He’s the one who asked me to keep an eye on her,” the man grumbles, narrowing his eyes at me. “Should’ve known he was just setting me up. I bet he thinks Violet calling in is my fault.”
Gwen rolls her eyes. “As much as you love playing the victim, Vinny, I doubt he thinks you had anything to do with Violet not showing up. That’s just the way seasonal hires work. He knows that; you can’t own half the island and be unaware of how business is.”
Kal owns half the island?
A heaviness descends on my bones with the realization that I don’t actually know this man at all.
The man I’ve watched and admired from afar since I was a kid, who inspired a love of poetry and nature and life in me despite being the embodiment of the very opposite, seems to be entirely different from the one who forced me to come here.
I’m not exactly sure how to reconcile the two.
Finally straightening, Vinny drops his hands, stretching his lips in a circular motion. He makes eye contact with me just as I turn to leave again, a strangled sound ripping from the back of his throat.
“Seriously... woman. You can’t leave. Kal will skin me alive if I don’t keep an eye on you like I promised.”
I raise my eyebrows, nodding my chin at the bruise spreading up the bridge of his nose. “If you try to touch me again, I’ll wear your skin. Kallum isn’t the boss of me, nor do I need a babysitter.”
“What you need is cash,” Gwen mutters, sliding down the bar to tend to a customer with a big, purple sun hat.
Vinny sighs, taking a step toward me. “Please don’t make this harder than it needs to be.”
His hand slips into the pocket of his cargo shorts, and I have a momentary flashback to the recurrent nightmare I kept having in the weeks following my one night with Kal—how they always started out so tame, with me reading or writing in a beautiful meadow, connecting with the earth in the most primal way.
How Mateo’s presence always seemed to ruin them, and they’d end with me being accosted with a chemically-laced cloth until I passed out.
The image lashes against my brain so quickly, I see a quick burst of white light. Then it’s shifting, molding from my imagination to something more concrete, something real.
A memory, not just a dream.
Kal approaching me on my balcony back home, removing a syringe from his coat pocket. Me giving in immediately, just because I didn’t feel like fighting it.
What was the point, when he’d find me regardless?
For only the second time I could recall, I’d been given a choice. A shitty choice, but a choice nonetheless: marry Kal or watch him slaughter my loved ones. And after, probably me.
I knew he could do it.
Even worse, I knew he would.
That’s the problem when you associate with men like him; the kind who ooze power, know how to wield it, and know what to do to keep it. The kind who will spit in your face, then offer a handkerchief to wipe it off, so you end up owing him something instead.
The kind with very little to lose.
I haven’t had one of those nightmares since I’ve been on the island. Maybe that’s because the nightmare manifested.
Whatever the reason, when I see Vinny pull out a similarly shaped object, uncapping it with his thumb, my instincts kick into overdrive for the first time since all of this began.
“Uh...” Gwen says, moving back down the bar toward us, eyeing the needle in Vinny’s hand. “Did he tell you to drug her?”
Vinny scoffs. “He said to keep an eye on her. I can’t very well fuckin’ do that if she isn’t here, now can I?”
“This is definitely not going to end well for you,” she mutters, shaking her head.
But she doesn’t stop him.
He pounces like a hunter zeroing in on its prey, hands vying for my neck, and I lean into the movement.
He’s stocky, but it’s clear the second I grab his wrists that he’s only concerned with glamor muscles; he loses his grip easily, the syringe falling from his fist and clattering to the floor. He bends to get it, shoving his elbow in my face. It connects with my eye, and I stumble back from the sudden brunt force, pain lancing across my forehead.
