Iwake up with my hands zip-tied and my wrists bound to my ankles, folded into one painfully cramped position. Hailey and Lila are both slumped nearby, either asleep or unconscious again, and the van is standing still.
It’s even darker than before. Dead of night, I’m guessing. And I feel just as dead.
“Hailey,” I whisper, as quietly as I can. “Lila.”
Nothing. Neither of them so much as twitches.
I let my head drop and force myself to think through the haze. This is the worst possible scenario. I can’t believe it got this bad. Why the hell did I take those goddamn pills? Then again, it’s not like I really had a choice. Somebody should change the motto of my life already, because at this rate I’m going to be an eternal prisoner.
“Deep breath in, Skye,” I tell myself out loud. “It’s all good.”
I don’t believe it, not for a second. My heart is packed with panic so tight it’s almost dizzying, leaving no room for logic to settle. And maybe that’s exactly why, when something shifts onthe opposite side of me, I let out the loudest shriek my lungs can manage and jerk so hard a sharp pain snaps through my neck.
“Jesus,” someone sighs. “Relax. You’d think I was a wraith with a scream like that.”
I clamp my mouth shut and suck in a shaky breath, cradling my head as the ache flares. My neck hurts like hell, but fear shoves the pain aside and orders me to look. I have to see who the hell is talking to me right now.
It isn’t the girls.
Fuck. The girls didn’t even react to my scream.
And when I realize who it is, a cold little part of me wishes I hadn’t looked at all.
“Rhea,” I mutter. “What the hell are you doing here?”
My nemesis, the girl in love with my man, the one who nudged me onto this neat little death trip, floats down like she has all the time in the world. She lands lightly, then settles against the far wall, crossing her arms and cocking a brow at me like I’m the one who doesn’t belong.
“Why,” she says, voice dry with amusement, “I thought you could use a friend. There aren’t many people around for you to chat with right now.”
“And whose fault is that?” I snap. Between the panic still crawling under my skin and the pain radiating through my body, she is the last thing I want to deal with.
“It’s not me who fucked up the plan.”
“Yeah, you just gave us a mission made for a fucking royal-caliber hitman.” I blow the hair off my face, but one particular, very annoying strand drops right back where it was before. I glare at her. “What do you want?”
She doesn’t answer. She just blinks at me, slow and unbothered. It lasts a second, maybe two, and then it hits me. She isn’t ignoring me. She’s waiting me out, giving me the space to look past my rage and actually think.
Rhea, the Grim Reaper, is here. She knows where I am. Which means she just became my one real, tangible chance to get the hell out.
“What do you want?” I ask again, and this time the words come without the venom.
They’re the same words, but they don’t mean the same thing. Before, I might as well have told her to fuck off. Now I’m asking what her terms are, because she has to have them. People like her don’t just appear out of the goodness of their free will, and I don’t trust her to start now.
“You really think that badly of me, don’t you?” she asks instead.
I mean… what am I supposed to say to that?
She’s not exactly a nun.
Before I can force out anything that isn’t a smart remark, she leans toward one of the girls and reaches for the zip-ties. Her fingers pass straight through the plastic. She tries again, like she’s testing the boundary, and gets the same result. Then she shifts closer to me, and every instinct in my body tightens, ready to recoil.
I don’t trust her. A nasty part of me wonders if what I saw before was her good side, if she’d offered me a sliver of mercy while being an utter bitch only because she wanted to look good in Talon’s eyes. Talon isn’t here now to watch her perform, and if she wants to unleash hell on me, nothing’s stopping her.
But she doesn’t.
She comes in close, calm as anything, and hooks a finger under the plastic at my wrist. The zip-tie shifts. It actually tugs.
“Huh,” she mutters. “Seems like you’re in luck. You being half-alive, half-dead means I can touch you. Your possessions seem to count, too.”
