The Last She, page 23
Can’t say the same, Gabriel. His clothes were tidy, his hair long enough to cover the gaping hole where his ear should have been. And there was a gun strapped to his waist.
“We were worried about you,” he said as he came closer. “You’ll be happy to hear Addison is fine. Adjusting to life at the clan well. She misses you.”
I didn’t fall for the guilt trip. Instead, I took a step back, keeping space between us. “Are Sam, Issac, and Kaden all at the clan?”
“Why do you ask?”
“I’m here to negotiate for their release.” I glanced to where the trees framed the edge of the park. I’d hoped the somewhat open layout would keep me safe, but now I wondered if it even mattered.
“What are you offering in this negotiation?”
“Me.”
His eyes showed no emotion, just cold calculation. “What are your terms?”
“Issac, Sam, and Kaden all go free,” I said without hesitation.
“I can’t promise all of that.”
“Why not?” Anger crept into my voice. I’d felt peaceful before, watching the squirrels play, but now I wondered if that time might have been better spent making a weapon.
“Issac is loyal to the clan. If he wishes to leave, then he is free to.”
“And Kaden and Sam?”
He took a hesitant step forward, as if he wanted to comfort me, but I stepped back, holding on to the space between us. “What about Kaden and Sam?” I said again.
He sighed. “Kaden is fine. For now. He’s being held.”
“And Sam?”
This time he didn’t try to reach out to comfort me. He just looked me in the eye, and said, steady and quiet, “Sam is dead. There’s nothing I could have done, his horse threw him.”
His words should have ripped through me like a bullet. Instead I felt blank, disbelieving. Sam couldn’t be dead. I could still hear his voice. His note was still folded in my pocket. He was misinformed, or lying, because Sam couldn’t just be gone.
“When will Kaden be released?” I said, refusing to accept Sam was dead.
“He won’t, Ara. His men killed many of ours. Kaden is going to be executed.”
I tried taking deep breaths, but my lungs felt suddenly shallow and tight. It was like the moment my father left, the moment I saw my sister’s eyes weeping blood. Too late. I’d come back to save them, but they were already dead.
No. Kaden wasn’t dead. Not yet. I took a deep, shuddering breath, pushing away everything but the fact I could save Kaden. “You can stop it.”
“It’s done, Ara.”
“Let him go, let him live, and I’ll be yours. In whatever way you want.”
His eyes hid some emotion I couldn’t decipher. My legs felt weak, heavy with despair at the thought of what would happen if he said no. I held my breath, finally exhaling when he said, “The men won’t like it; you as a prisoner, after what happened with Sam and Kaden.”
“Then make them believe I want to be there. Make everyone believe.”
“How?”
“I’ll marry you before the clan.” I forced the words out. “A wedding that shows I choose to be with you. If you promise you’ll let him go.”
“He’s already stood trial,” he held up a hand, stopping me before I could interject, “but the execution isn’t for another week. A wedding would cause a lot of attention. One of the guards might forget to lock the door to his cell. He could slip away in the festivities.”
I felt numb, so much so that it felt like another person stepping forward, holding out her hand, and saying, in a steady but distant voice. “Then we have an agreement?”
He shook my hand. I barely felt it.
“We do.”
Thirty—Kaden
Days passed.
If I thought the cell was hell before, it was nothing compared to now. The heat suffocated me during the day, and the cold tormented me through the night. They’d added a bucket for waste, but besides that, the shed was bare. I’d used my shirt to bandage my hand as best I could and managed to at least stop the bleeding. Still, it ached with a dull, constant throb and was swollen and warm to the touch. I couldn’t bend my fingers, much less grip a knife.
Worse than the pain was the silence. I found myself hoping Colborn would return, if only for company. I entertained dreams of moments long forgotten: Sam and I playing on a baseball diamond; Red and I galloping across green hills; Ara, smiling in my arms, laughing as I whispered in her ear.
Footsteps crunched on the gravel outside.
I opened my eyes, leaving behind a field of grass and Ara’s smile. The doors opened, and I was blinded by the sudden influx of sunlight. A tall, lean man stood in front of me.
“Issac.” My voice was a croak. “Took you long enough.”
He stepped inside, bringing a cool breeze in behind him. The two guards left the door open and moved a short distance away. I couldn’t find the strength to stand, but he folded himself onto the metal floor beside me.
“Here. Drink.” He lifted a bottle of water from the bag he carried. Water ran down my chin as I guzzled the bottle, not even caring how weak I must look; my skin sallow, my hand wrapped in a bloody bandage of a shirt.
“Any food in that bag?” My voice was a croak. Instead of answering, he pulled out two more bottles of water and then a book. I recognized the leather cover and many leaf-thin pages, and tried not to grimace. A bible. Not sure God can help me now, Issac.
“They searched it before I came in. This was all they allowed.” He dropped his voice a notch, “There’re antibiotics in the water.”
Tears pricked my eyes as the cool liquid slid down my throat. How could I ever have doubted Issac? It had taken him time to come, but it was all for a reason. He’d kept up the careful act of being on Gabriel’s side. And now he’d found medicine I desperately needed.
More than that. He sat beside me now, even when it was far better for him not to be here.
“How you doin’, Issac?” I said when the bottle was empty.
He looked sideways at me, a small smile on his face. “Better than you.”
I laughed at his low, smooth voice. Never one for talk, our Issac. We sat in silence together.
“I went looking for Sam’s body,” he said suddenly, unexpectedly, and the pain hit me again, like a crushing blow.
“And?”
“The graves were unmarked. I’m sorry.” I heard his unspoken words: I’m sorry you didn’t get to say good-bye. I’m sorry I wasn’t there. I’m sorry he’s gone. He reached out to me and laid his hand on my shoulder. The touch was fatherly, and made me feel like a child, like I was reliving the moment I buried Kia. He stayed silent as I cried.
“There is no peace in this world,” I said bitterly, still choking to find breath.
“There is only the peace we find,” he said, slow and calm. He picked up the bible, holding it out to me, but I refused to take it.
“How can you still believe in God when He has taken everything from you? First your family, then Sam, soon me?” I didn’t expect him to respond, and when he did his voice was calm and deep, like the ocean after a storm.
“Because He gave everything to me,” he said simply.
“And so it’s His to take back, just like that? Some cruel kid playing with us? I won’t blindly follow a god like that.” Issac didn’t respond, and the anger in me grew. “You think He has given you these things? Well He has given me nothing, only what I have taken for myself, and He’s taking even that.”
Issac continued to look into the light. His hands were old and callused, and wrinkles lined his face. Still, it was impossible to think of him as an old man, just as it was hard to imagine a tree as old. He shrugged, as if to say, I was never a man of many words. Then he reached into his pocket and revealed an old leather wallet. He pulled out a tattered photograph and showed it to me. Issac sat beside a woman with bright eyes, and between them was a little girl throwing a white bow onto the ground.
“They’re gone, Issac.” The words were cruel, and I regretted them as soon as I said them, but I couldn’t take them back.
“Only from this Earth. I will see them again.”
“You really believe that?”
“Yes.”
Despite our differences, I was glad Issac sat there with me, the silence and friendship of family between us.
“Time’s up, let’s go, Issac,” one of the guards announced, looking back at us through the door as he stood and stretched. A sudden terror seized me.
“Issac, don’t go.” I couldn’t face death bravely. Not alone.
Issac leaned over and placed his hands on both sides of my face. I stared up at him, looking into the face of the man I had grown to love. The first guard finished stretching and started to make his way over to us.
“I will see you again,” he said. And for the first time in my life, Issac’s words made me afraid. As the guards pulled him away, slamming the door and once more casting me into darkness, I wondered if Issac was saying his final good-bye. In the darkness, I held to the faith and strength in his eyes.
I had none of my own left.
Thirty-One—Ara
“Who are the flowers from?” I pointed to the blush of color in the storage room that had been converted into a bedroom for me and Addison. The vase overflowed with blue, pink, and yellow flowers; a waste, really, to use plants for decoration and not food. But I suppose everything was blooming outside these walls, why not be wasteful? The scents of rain and earth taunted me on our daily walk outside. I should have been on my way home with Kaden; instead, my heart tightened every time we came back into the stench of unwashed bodies and lingering smoke of the clan.
“Addison . . . who are those from?” I repeated as I pulled my muddy shoes off.
“Find out for yourself.” She danced away from me. For a moment I considered forgetting the entire thing. The only peace I’d had from her was when I’d first arrived and she’d given me the cold shoulder, angry at my abandonment. The silence hadn’t lasted long. An hour in she burst into tears, wrapped me in a hug, and it was back to the unending dialogue. Then I thought of Issac—I’d been waiting for a message from him. So instead I made my way to the vase and pulled a slip of paper from beneath. It was written in elegant, bold cursive.
“The brightness of her cheek would shame those stars as daylight doth a lamp; her eyes in heaven would through the airy region stream so bright that birds would sing and think it were not night.”
I stiffened when I read the signature. Gabriel.
Addison giggled and it took all my self-control not to tip the vase off the nightstand. What the hell did he think he was playing at? I’d agreed to a marriage—not love. And definitely not some twisted attempt at romance.
But then I saw it, written below Gabriel’s note, two words written from a different hand.
Almost ready.
I forced myself not to react and laid down on the bed. There was only one man in the clan who could quote Romeo and Juliet from heart, and it wasn’t Gabriel. It was a clever ruse for bringing me the note, and a reminder: we walked a dangerous path.
Outside the door, two armed guards stood. Everything we did at the clan was supervised by a team of men that rotated and didn’t speak to us. I didn’t even know their names. This separation didn’t bother Addison, but it bothered me. I hadn’t realized it before, but when I’d come to the clan at first, I’d helped the same as any other man. Now we contributed nothing, wasting manpower for guards and eating food we hadn’t earned. The way the men watched us . . . it no longer felt friendly.
Maybe I was being paranoid, but keeping the two of us separate felt like a mistake. Kaden had thrown me into the fold, forced the men to see me as a person. Now those same men with whom I had laughed and joked either wouldn’t look me in the eye, or watched Addison and me with a sort of coldness that drove into my bones. In their mind, I had betrayed Kaden. I was going to marry Gabriel, while Kaden rotted in a cell. I would hate me too.
But maybe the biggest reason for the change was Colborn’s presence at the clan. The moment I’d seen him, standing in the clan, it felt like my world had inverted. I’d made a deal with Gabriel to live here, but not to coexist with a maggot like Colborn. Every time I saw him from across the building, my skin crawled, both wanting to run away and to find a weapon and finish what Kaden had started. Whenever he saw me, he leered at me, talking about how strange it was that Gabriel had been hiding a female all along, and what else was he hiding? Gabriel had made a deal with the devil. But so had I.
“Maybe we could go outside again today,” I said to Addison. I wanted to try talking the guards into letting us walk past the quarantine sheds in the back, where I’d overheard someone say Kaden was being kept. Yesterday, I’d asked to see Sam’s grave and say good-bye. Sam . . . I pushed the thought—and sudden piercing pain—away. They’d said no, and maybe it was just as well. I couldn’t think about Sam, or Kaden, or everything I’d given up. All I could do was hold on, pretend Gabriel didn’t make me sick, and ignore the ball of ice that now lived inside me.
“I’ll have to ask Gabriel,” Addison said without looking at me. Ask Gabriel, my ass. He would say no for sure. “Besides, I already have a full day of activities planned for us.”
I groaned and buried my head under a pillow. Life with Addison was like struggling through the mud and looking sideways only to realize the person next to you was playing in it.
“And it took the boys all night to get them here, so I expect you to be excited.”
I flopped my arms a bit. Addison ripped off the pillow and hit me with it.
“All right, all right.” I jumped up off the bed, holding my hands over my head to shield myself. “What is this activity?” I hoped it was something violent—archery, knife throwing, lighting stuff on fire . . .
Addison grinned at my sudden interest and backed up to the full closet where she kept her clothes. Mine were still in a backpack; I barely had anything, so I hadn’t bothered unpacking.
She threw open the closet, and I froze.
Wedding dresses.
A closet full of terrifying white wedding dresses.
I couldn’t have been more horrified if the closet had held corpses. She turned to rifle through them. I used the moment to compose myself.
“Addison, I don’t think . . .” But she heard none of my protests. She dragged me closer to show me each one.
“Please don’t say I have to wear one of these,” I whispered. The closet looked like a fairy tale princess had thrown up over a winter wonderland. And not just that. I’d imagined myself someday wearing a beautiful dress and walking down the aisle, but toward a man I loved. Not a monster.
“They got every single dress left they could find!” She stomped her foot then started rifling through them again.
“Isn’t there anything that isn’t so—” absurd was the word I wanted “—white?”
“Most brides wear white,” she said as if I were a child. I cringed at the word bride.
“How about this one?” I pulled out a green dress that had somehow slipped into the fold—bless the fashion ignorance of men. It was shorter, maybe for bridesmaids, and green like the forest. Or Kaden’s eyes.
Addison raised her eyebrows. “It’s green.”
“I like it,” I said, favoring it all the more because she didn’t. I held it up to my chest and twirled. Maybe if I was wearing this it wouldn’t seem as real.
“Ara, you are impossible.” But she hid a smile as she said it.
“Thank you.”
“Fine, try it on and show me.” She rifled through the dresses again as I put on the green dress. The space was easily the most decorated and livable room I’d seen for the last three years. They’d brought furniture, rugs, mirrors, clothes, and an actual mattress that we slept on together. I looked over at the lavender bedspread, a feeling of uneasiness sweeping through me.
Soon I would sleep in Gabriel’s room. Soon I would be his wife, and he would take more than just my freedom.
I turned to the mirror. A young woman gazed back at me. Her hair was long and auburn, eyes wild and cheekbones sharp. She looked older than I remembered. Harder. The dress was beautiful. Just the color of Kaden’s eyes. And suddenly I couldn’t stand to wear it a moment longer. I tore it off, yanking as it caught in my hair and nearly shrieking when it took a clump of hair with it. I threw it on the ground and stood over it, my chest heaving, Addison watched me wide-eyed from the corner.
“You’re right, Addison.” I heard my voice from a distance. “Green is wrong. Give me a white one.”
She pretended as if the moment hadn’t happened and went on to dress me like a doll. I agreed with everything she said, nodding at all the right moments, holding onto a smile like a drowning man clutches a lifeline. She finally settled on a dress with an open back and delicate lace off the shoulders. As I wore it, I gave one last look at the green dress pooled on the ground. I pictured myself wearing it beneath a full sun, walking down an aisle through a field of wildflowers. My friends and family were watching me, but none of that mattered. All that mattered was that there, at the end of the aisle, sunlight highlighting his rakish grin, was Kaden. He waited for me, looking at me as if there was nothing in life he needed but me.
And I finally realized it.
I loved Kaden. I loved him with a pain that physically hurt.
And I could never have him.
Thirty-Two—Kaden
The door screeched open. I sat up, alarmed.
No. It wasn’t time yet. I wouldn’t face Colborn until tomorrow morning.
But right away I could tell something was off. Three men stood in the doorway. I backed up against the wall. My knees shook at the effort it took to stand.
