Page 32 of Venom & Vanity

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

SNOW

Cinder and I walk side by side, the six guys in front of us leading the way. All of us are wearing our masks. The guys insisted they remain on the entire time we are in the open.

Her three move differently to mine. Looser. Less like men who have been ground down by two years of this island and more like men who are still learning its edges. They’re watchful but not brittle. I find that quietly reassuring and quietly heartbreaking at the same time because I can see what two years did to Doc, Prince and Bash. I hate it.

She filled me in on their plan on the walk over. How they believe this woman is the key to getting off the island. How Cinder had seen her twice now, heard her voice, felt the specific quality of her attention.

I told her I'd help however I can.

The truth is I've only seen the woman once. Cinder has the advantage here, I know it and I'm trying not to let that make me feel like I'm already behind in a race I didn't know I had entered.

Fear has had its claws in me since we left the cabin and I can't shake it loose, no matter how many times I tell myself to focus on what’s in front of me rather than what waits across the water. What if we manage to get off this island and I'm too late. What if the queen has had months more with my father and the man I go back to is already somewhere I can’t reach him. What if I walk back into that kingdom and she has built a version of me in the court's mind that I can’t dismantle.

What if I have to choose?

I can't choose that again. I chose wrong once and it cost all four of us two years. I will burn every political structure on every island to the ground before I stand in front of Doc, Prince or Bash and tell them they’re not worth the cost.

I can't do that again.

I look at the three of them moving ahead of me and something tightens in my chest that I don't have a clean name for. I knew Bash before this island. I knew his father and Prince and I will admit, freely, to myself if to no one else, that I found them both devastating in the way that certain men are devastating, the kind where you clock it immediately and spend a lot of energy pretending you haven't.

I never acted on it.

Bash has his father's build. Wide shoulders, over six feet, the same sharp jawline that looks like it was designed to make a person stupid. Doc's black hair has threads of grey through it now and I find that so unreasonably attractive that I have had to have a quiet word with myself about it more than once. Bash got the blonde and the green eyes from somewhere else, his mother I assume, and those green eyes have been doing things to my rational thinking since the moment I woke up chained to a ceiling and recognized them through a red apple mask.

Prince is built like something that was designed for a purpose and grew into that purpose completely. His brown hair is always brushed back and the length of it is exactly right for anchoring your hands in, which I know from experience now, and that information is not helping me concentrate on the walk. His brown eyes are always moving, always assessing, always a half-second ahead of the room, looking for the thing that might become a threat.

The three of them are a unit in the truest sense. Not because they chose to be, though they did, but because they have grown around each other the way trees grow around obstacles, shaped by the presence of the other two until the shape is permanent. You can’t remove one without changing the fundamental structure of what remains.

That’s what terrifies me most.

I’ve grown feelings for all three of them. I didn’t mean to and I can’t undo it. I don’t know what any of it means because what if this was never anything more than the island. What if the only reason any of this exists is because we’re all trapped here and desperation makes things feel like more than they are and the moment the gate opens it dissolves like sea foam.

I can't think about that now.

“Stop.” Prince's voice cuts through the dark and all eight of us come to a halt.

He turns and his eyes find me immediately and the intensity in them makes my spine straighten by instinct. He’s looking at me with the specific focus of a man who has been chewing on something for the length of the walk and has decided he needs an answer before we go any further.

“Why do you trust this woman?”

Not what I expected.

I turn it over for a moment, genuinely, because it deserves a real answer rather than a defensive one. How do I explain that there was a quality in her violet eyes that bypassed every instinct I have that is designed to protect me from being fooled. That she looked at me like she had been waiting for me specifically and the waiting had cost her something and she was relieved it was over.

Before I can find the words Cinder speaks beside me.

“To see her is to see a version of yourself in another life," she says. "She could have been us and we could have been her.”

“That makes no fucking sense,” Bash says flatly.

I feel the shift in the air from Cinder's three and I speak before it becomes something.

“It makes complete sense,” I hold Bash's gaze. “That woman could have been me. Could have been Cinder. Could have ended up here, the way all of us ended up here through someone else's decision about what to do with her. She didn't have to approach either of us. She owed us nothing.” A pause. “She came anyway. She said something to each of us and then she disappeared. She has been on this island her whole life and she is still choosing to reach out rather than stay hidden.” I look at Prince. “That’s not the behaviour of someone setting a trap. That’s the behaviour of someone who has been waiting a very long time for the right people to arrive.”

“If you trust her so completely,” Doc says, “then you should be prepared for the possibility that she is leading you somewhere on someone else's behalf.”