He smirked, his shields dropping, showing me the fate he had planned. “You always were too smart, baby brother. But smarts will get you killed. I’ve always told you that.”
Snapping his fingers, he rounded up his mercenaries. “Gentlemen, I believe we have a flight to catch. Let’s go.”
Chapter Thirty-Four
AS A GUN BIT into my lower back, ushering me down the bamboo jetty to a red helicopter manned by Drake’s pilots and not Sully’s, my instincts hissed a sinister warning.
The warning became louder with every step, evolving from a hive of bees to a swarm of plague-driven locusts.
As Sully winced and did his best not to limp on a harpoon massacred leg, he climbed regally into the cabin and a sixth sense bombarded me with pictures I hoped would never come to pass.
Sully shot.
Me dead.
Drake victorious with elixir.
My heart threw itself against my ribs, so convinced, so sure that if we flew with Drake, we would die with Drake.
I tasted the inevitability. I heard the bullet before it’d even been fired.
I didn’t need puddles or masks removed in Euphoria for another kind of premonition. The kind that iced my blood and froze my bones. The kind that set my heart pumping in entirely new ways, seizing my muscles so I would not meet my end.
The mercenary behind me grunted when I refused to climb the steps into the aircraft.
Sully winced as the man wrapped his hands around my waist and tossed me into the cabin.
I fell on my knees, the bare floor cutting with its metal grippy covering.
Sully bent and gathered me tenderly, pulling me upright and placing me beside him. He didn’t speak. He just stared. His sea-glass, waterfall gaze held mine, and I knew I wasn’t wrong in my fears.
Violent sickness rushed up my throat.
The leather seats squeaked with promise as Drake and his men sat down.
The squeal of the engines and the growl of the rotors all added to the shivery sensation of dismay.
Drake will kill us.
The moment Sully gave him what he wanted…he would kill us, destroy our story, and end our love before we’d even had a chance to fully unfurl it.
No.
I shook my head as Sully cupped my cheek and ran his thumb over my lips.
Still he didn’t speak even as the helicopter swooped into the dusky sky, sliced through ribbons of peach and gilded sunset and added power to the rotors to cut across the ocean in search of yet another island.
I understood Sully’s unwillingness to talk with his brother sandwiching me between the two Sinclairs. I appreciated his desire to keep our bond as hidden as possible.
But he couldn’t stop the crackle of connection between us.
He couldn’t stop the tingle or tangle between our souls.
And he couldn’t lie to me.
He could only nod and narrow his eyes, trying to convince me he had a plan to avoid death. I tried to trust him. To believe he had some mystical way to win.
But I wasn’t convinced.
We were running on fatigue and the dregs of bad health. Sully had the added disadvantage of dealing with constant pain. Whatever he attempted probably wouldn’t be rationally thought out. It would be instigated by sheer stubbornness and worry over my own survival rather than his.
I wanted to tell him not to put himself in harm’s way.
To make him listen and agree not to be stupid.
But he let me go and stared out the window, looking far below where his islands were tiny gemstones and the jewellery thief was here to steal them.
The mercenary who’d clambered into the cabin last hadn’t closed the door. Wind whipped into the space, cooler up here than down below. My aches from elixir and my bruises from palpitations all ratcheted up my rapidly climbing worries.
Something is coming.
I could feel it.
Could feel the cloak of fate. Hear the inching disaster.
I just couldn’t tell who would be the survivors—us or Drake.
My jumping thoughts collided around my head.
I leapt a mile as Drake planted his hand on my knee, squeezing cruelly from his seat across the cabin.
Sully instantly snatched his touch away, leaving Drake’s fingernails burning tracks in my skin. “Don’t fucking touch her.” Sully’s nostrils flared, and his entire presence bellowed in the cabin, seething with challenge. “Our truce will be over if you do.”
There was nothing weak about him. Nothing more terrifying than a beast backed into a corner.
I’d never been more afraid of him or more proud.
His attention hadn’t been on the vista outside, after all. His mind turned inward, problem-solving our predicament.
Drake sneered over the din of rotor blades.
The aura of anticipation and the sick taste of prophecy continued filling the small space. A trickle, a torrent, a gush of tense calamity. The lashing wind only made the waiting worse. It howled and clawed, my hair turned into live vines, slipping around my shoulders and dancing in the space above me. My skin erupted with goosebumps. My yellow shirt flapped around my body.