“You must boil water for drinking, and you may not leave camp without permission and an escort. If you fail to follow orders, I will start cutting off bits of you to send to your loved ones.” Silvana wiggles her left pinkie finger in an absurd threat. “Now go to sleep.” She points at the closest of the fire pits, assigning it to the hostages.
We stake out spots on the leaves and grass mats around our pit, and while everyone else rolls out sleeping bags, Ibegin picking up all the twigs and broken branches I can find in the clearing. Gathering firewood is just an excuse to eavesdrop, but the only thing I learn from what I overhear is that several of the men working for Silvana and Sebastián are, in fact, American.
I lay the scraps of wood on the ground, and start arranging them in the stone-lined pit.
“Wait. Start with this.” Indiana kneels next to me and drops a handful of crunchy greenish-brown material in the bottom of the pit.
“Dried moss?”
He nods. “Theaggressivelymalodorous gentleman guarding the supplies was kind enough to give us some tinder.” His hand brushes mine as he takes several twigs from me. “Most people go with a lean-to or teepee construction, but a pyramid design makes the longest-lasting campfire.”
I lift one brow at him. “Then why are you making a log cabin fire?”
He frowns. “I’m not—”
“Give me those.” I take the twigs and arrange them in a large square around the tinder, then begin stacking that square with progressively smaller ones.
“You’re pretty good at this,” Indiana whispers as he watches. “Tell me the truth—have you been taken hostage before?”
I laugh. “Only by a father determined to escape everything but nature, at least twice a year.”
When the pyramid is ready, Indiana lights an extra twigat one of the other pits and uses it to start our campfire. I settle onto a mat with my back to the jungle and watch light flicker on his face while he stokes the blaze.
Somehow, two days’ stubble has made Holden look tired and ragged, yet Indiana looks rugged and strong.
He sits back on his mat and even when he catches me staring, I can’t look away. So we watch each other next to the fire, and though we’re surrounded by both our captors and our fellow hostages, this moment feels somehow private.
Somehow ... ours.
“What’s your real name?” I whisper, staring into eyes that look more brown than green in the firelight.
“I’ll tell you when we get out of here,” he says so softly I can hardly hear him. “I promise.”
“What if we don’t get out of here?”
“Oh, I think you’re pretty motivated.” His smile is crooked. And totally hot.
Suddenly I’m aware that there’s mud on my cheek and moss beneath my nails. “I’m wearing half the jungle,” I say as I scrub my face.
He takes my hand, then holds it. “It works. You lookfierce.”
I can’t resist a smile.
Indiana spreads out his sleeping bag next to mine, and as our captors settle in for the night—except a couple of armed men on patrol—I realize that beneath the normal jungle noises, I hear a steady pulsing sound I’ve known all my life.
I grab Indiana’s arm. “Do you hear that?”
He closes his eyes, listening. “The ocean.”
“Yeah,” I whisper. “I think the beach is just down that footpath.”
Indiana opens his eyes, and he looks as hopeful as I feel.
Where there’s coastline, there will be boats, and where there are boats, there’s a way to escape.
MADDIE
I wake up screaming in the middle of the night.
