Page 22 of Flesh & Divinity

“Stop.”

Brother’s voice.

I spin and all three of them are there, emerging from the tree line at a walk now that I have nowhere left to go. They are not even breathing hard. Daddy in the middle, brother on his right, boyfriend on his left. The moonlight catches the glass of their masks and throws it back in fractured, glittering pieces, and I think with stupid, devastating clarity that I will never see anything as beautiful or as terrifying as those three men walking toward me in the dark.

“I heard you,” I say. “I found your key.”

Daddy stops walking. The others stop with him.

“You were going to swim for it.” His voice is flat.

“I was going to try.”

“You would have drowned.” Brother’s voice is quiet. “The current on the eastern side is a rip. No one has made it through that water.”

“You don’t know that.”

“We do.” He takes a step forward and I step back. My heel finds nothing and his arm shoots out and grabs mine before my weight tips past the point of no return. The scream that tears out of me is pure reflex and his grip is absolute. He yanks me forward and I crash into his chest. He doesn’t let go, both arms locking around me, and for a moment, neither of us move.

I can feel his heartbeat. It is not steady.

“You’d rather drown,” he says against the top of my head, “than stay with us.”

I press my face into his chest and breathe through the shaking in my own body and choose honesty because I am standing on a bluff in the dark and I nearly went over it. My capacity for games has temporarily abandoned me.

“I don’t know how to stop wanting out,” I admit. “Even when out might kill me.”

He doesn’t respond.

Daddy steps in close behind me and I feel him there, solid, furious, warm. Boyfriend comes to stand at my side and the four of us stay like that while the island breathes around us and the water churns below.

“You are not going to drown on this island,” Daddy says finally.

“You don’t get to decide that.”

“I just did.” His hand finds the back of my neck, not punishing, something else, something that moves through me slow and devastating and does nothing to stop the shaking. “In the morning, we are going to talk about what happens next. But you do not go near that water again.”

“Or what?”

“Or I chain you to the bed and let my brother take you apart piece by piece every time you think about running.”

Brother’s arm tightens around me. Not a threat. A promise.

I tip my head back and look up at Daddy.

The threat is real. I know it is. I also know from the look in his eyes he knows I know that the chain is not the part keeping me from moving.

“Fine,” I say.

It costs me.

They all hear exactly what it costs me.

Daddy’s hand stays at the back of my neck and he tips his head down until his mask rests against my forehead, the cool glass of it grounding me in a way I refuse to examine too closely. Brother’s arms don’t loosen. Boyfriend’s shoulder presses warm against mine.

“Good girl,” Daddy murmurs against the glass.

And the four of us stand there on the edge of the bluff until my shaking stops and the dark around us settles back into something survivable.