by R. R. Banks
“Dammit,” I said. “We ran to him.”
“He doesn’t know that,” Hunter said. “He has no idea this cavern is here. We’re safe as long as we stay here.”
“We can’t stay here,” Snow said. “We have to find the pilot. If nothing else but to stop Virgil from hurting him, but if we don’t find him, we’re not leaving. That helicopter isn’t moving without a pilot.”
As if the words were a queue, the sound of a helicopter swirled through the air. We looked at each other and ran out of the cavern. I looked up and saw another copter coming toward the island. It didn’t take long to realize that it wasn’t the same one that we had left sitting on the beach.
What the hell is happening right now?
* * *
Hunter
The second helicopter was coming ominously low and I grabbed onto Eleanor to pull her back into the cavern. The others followed us and we were just inside, Eleanor curled against my chest so I could hold her protectively, when the sound of the blades became deafening and I saw pieces of trees and plants flying through the air in front of the entrance.
The damn thing had landed in the jungle.
We ran out of the cavern again and saw the aircraft a few hundred yards away, the once beautiful jungle tattered and broken around it. Eleanor stayed close to my side, her body trembling. The door to the helicopter opened and a familiar, lithe formed stepped out. I felt my stomach turn and I looked at Snow. Her eyes were locked on the door and she, too, had noticed who was stalking toward us.
“What the hell is she doing here?” she growled.
“Who is that?” Eleanor asked.
“Lucille Verne,” Snow said.
“Lucille Royal. We might have gotten divorced, but he’s not taking the power that name holds away from me. Hello, Snow,” Lucille said as she approached. “You know, they say that things always balance out. I didn’t really believe that, but now I’m starting to see it. I set out just to find precious Eleanor over there. Imagine my surprise to find out that you were already here waiting for me. And your darling husband, too.” She turned and sneered at Noah. “How are you Noah?”
“What are you doing here, Lucille?” he asked. “You know that you aren’t allowed anywhere near either of us.”
Lucille scoffed.
“What? The protective order? Do you really think that a piece of paper and a glaring old judge is going to affect me at all? I’m disappointed in you, Snow. You really underestimate me. I thought that you knew well enough by now that I will do what I want, when I want, and I won’t stop until I get what I want, no matter what it takes.”
“Like burning down my house?” Snow asked.
“It was barely singed,” Lucille spat. “Sweet, beloved little Snow got rescued by the fire department before any real damage was done.”
“So, what now? What are you doing here?”
Lucille reached into her pocket and withdrew a gun.
I didn’t even have a second to think. I tightened my hold on Eleanor and dragged her back toward the cavern. The sound of a bullet cut through the air and I pulled her so hard she nearly lost her footing. I could hear footsteps behind me and I hoped that the rest of the group had gotten out of the way.
“Shitballs! Bitch is packing! NRA! NRA! Gun control! Gun control!”
Robin was fine.
Eleanor and I pressed against the wall waiting for Noah’s flashlight and then we ran the rest of the way through the cavern and back up to the rocks.
“Get down,” I shouted. “Get down off the rocks. She’s going to be chasing us and we don’t want to be up here when she stumbles her way through there.”
We ran down toward the shelter that Eleanor and I had built. She glared at me when we got there and ducked under the branches.
“Do you want to explain to me what’s happening?” she demanded. “Who is that woman?”
“Remember when I told you about Mr. Royal’s wife?” Noah said. Eleanor nodded. “That’s her.”
“So, what does she want with me?”
“Me,” Snow said. “She wants me.”
Before I could ask what that had to do with Eleanor, I saw Lucille coming down the beach toward us and from behind me I heard what could only be Virgil and the men crashing through the trees and undergrowth onto the sand.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Eleanor
I’m done. I’m so fucking done.
I climbed out of Hunter’s arms and scrambled out of the shelter. I could feel his fingers grasping at me and hear the rest of the group protest, but I didn’t care. Everyone has their breaking point, and I had reached mine.
Lucille seemed shocked when she saw me walking down the sand toward her, not hesitating, not cowering from her. She lifted her gun, but I didn’t flinch.
“Get Snow out here,” she demanded.
I shook my head.
“No,” I said.
“Get her out here, now.”
“No,” I said again. “You said that you came here for me. I’m here. What are you going to do now?”
“I know what I’m going to do,” Virgil’s voice growled from behind me.
I turned and saw him coming toward me, his eyes the familiar fiery embers, but now I wasn’t afraid. There wasn’t any more than he could do to me. I had found the person that I had been before he destroyed me and she wasn’t going to let him hurt her again. He lunged toward me, but out of the corner of my eye I saw Hunter run past me and jump onto Virgil, tackling him to the ground. They grappled in the sand, sending up grains that stung on my skin. I backed up and felt myself hit a person behind me and something hard and cold digging into my back.
“You should have cooperated with me,” Lucille hissed into my ear. “I was just going to hold on to you for a little while so that Noah and Snow could worry about you, then send a simple ransom note.”
“For what?” I asked. “Money? All of this is worth a little bit of money to you?”
“Oh, it wouldn’t have been a little bit, but that’s not the point. I want Snow to feel the same desperation that I have always felt. I’ve always been a step behind. No matter what I did. No matter how hard I worked, I was always behind her. She could make anyone do anything, even when she didn’t deserve it, and I wanted, for the rest of her life, to have that feeling in the back of her mind.”
“You’re sick.”
“You have no idea,” Lucille said.
She started to drag me backwards, but I wasn’t having any of it. I clenched my fist and rammed my elbow backwards into her gut. Lucille let out a grunt and doubled over enough that I was able to get out of her arms. She was straightening and lifting her arm to point the gun at me again when I heard the sound of another engine coming toward us. Lucille and I both looked up just as Snow and Noah rushed up beside me. We watched as a small seaplane approached and came down to skid across the waves toward the shore.
“We’re going to have to start a fucking airport,” I muttered.
Who now? Who else wanted to line up to try to kill me?”
The plane stopped and the doors flung open. I saw a man jump out of one and start running toward me, and then another man climb slowly out and start up the sand at a slightly creaking pace. Behind me I heard a grunt and turned to see Noah now caught in a rabid fight with one of the men that Virgil had brought with him. The other was holding the pilot from the helicopter, while Hunter and Virgil continued to throttle each other in the sand.
This was going spectacularly.
I turned back and saw the face of the first man running up the sand.
“Gavin!” I gasped.
Lucille’s eyes lifted in response to the name and I saw her turn to face him.
* * *
Gavin
I could hear Edwin’s ragged breathing behind me, but I was only faintly worried that the run up the beach was going to be too much for the old man. After forty years on the other island and the stories that he had regaled me with over another pot of the poten
t tea, I had my doubts that something as simple as a Baywatching it into the middle of a fight was going to do anything to wipe him out.
It turns out that you have to be very specific with Edwin and Sophie. They hadn’t been lying when they told me that they didn’t have a boat. They didn’t. Sophie said they had spent too much time floating around in boats before they moved to the island and she didn’t have any interest in keeping one around, especially considering how bad the storms were around here. One of those storms could just suck a boat right on down into the ocean.
Didn’t I know it.
What they hadn’t told me was that they kept a seaplane tucked up in the jungle so they could make their yearly supply runs to the mainland and for emergencies. Such as when somebody gets stranded on a nearby island and needs them to get him back to another island to kick a couple of people’s asses and save a woman who he didn’t particularly like but didn’t deserve to get taken out by a psychopath. As you do.
So, Edwin and I had piled into the plane and set off on a somewhat tilty flight back to this island. Now I was running up the beach toward Lucille, my eyes locked on the gun that she was holding in her hand. Behind her I could see Hunter wrestling a man and noticed several other people who hadn’t been there before swarming the beach. A huge man was holding another, but seemed distracted by my approach and loosened his arms, resulting in the man he was holding getting out of his grip and punching him, knocking him out cold in one hit.
What the hell was going on here?
Lucille’s eyes cut into me across the sand and I had to force myself to slow down as I approached.
“Put down the gun,” I demanded.
Lucille lifted her arm, directing the barrel at me.
“No,” she said.
“Lucille, I’ve done a lot of things and I’m sure that there are plenty of others that I’m going to do, but please don’t tempt me. I’d like to think that I’m above hitting a woman.”
There was a creaking sound, a loud Carol Burnette-style Tarzan yell, and something came swinging out of the tree line. I saw a man kick Lucille in the back, flattening her to her belly on the sand. The man jumped down from the vine that he had been swinging on to land beside her and glared down at Lucille with his hands planted on his hips.
“I’m not,” he said.
“Me, either.”
A dark-haired woman around Hunter’s age leapt into the air and landed over Lucille, pinning her to the ground. The man who had kicked her flung himself over the woman. Edwin had made it up to us and toppled over forward, stretching himself across the man’s back.
“Does that count as a geodesic dome?” Eleanor asked.
I looked over my shoulder and saw the man that Hunter had been fighting lying flat on his face. He wasn’t moving, but I could see his back rising and falling with breaths so I knew that he wasn’t dead. Hunter stepped up beside Eleanor and wrapped an arm around her waist, cuddling her close.
“I’ll count it.”
“We need to get her somewhere secure until we can turn her over to the police,” I said.
“You can’t do that,” Lucille said, her voice strained by the weight of the people still laying on her. “If you hand me over to the police, then you’re going down, too.”
“Gavin?” Eleanor said.
I turned to look at her and Hunter and saw them staring back at me with questions in their eyes. There was nothing that I could say. I wanted to. I wanted to defend myself, but I knew that I couldn’t. What Lucille said was right. Making sure that she got what she deserved meant having to tell them what I had done, but right then it seemed worth it. Just as I had told Lucille, I didn’t want to be a part of this anymore. Any of it. It was time that I put this part of my career behind me, and if that meant answering for what I had done, then that was what I was going to have to do.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t know you. It was just a job.”
“So, we made it easy for you,” Hunter spat.
I shook my head.
“No,” I said. “I didn’t realize who Eleanor was when you climbed up on my boat. By the time that I did…”
I trailed off. There was really nothing that I could say to justify what I had done. I looked at Eleanor and saw tears trickling down her cheeks. Right then I knew that I had been completely wrong about her, and that it wasn’t that I couldn’t like her, it was that I wouldn’t allow myself to. Now I was seeing her without the perceptions that had colored me for so long, but it was too late. The damage had already been done.
“What do we do with her?” Hunter asked, gesturing at Lucille. “And with them?”
His jaw was set firmly and I could see that he was just trying to get through this, ignoring the reality of what he had just learned. I looked behind me and saw the three men still lying on the ground. One was starting to groan, but none was looking like they were ready to jump up and start fighting again any time soon. That didn’t mean, however, that they wouldn’t be eventually. We needed to make sure that they were somewhere where they wouldn’t be a danger to us until we could get the police to the island.
“Help me move them,” I said. I dangled upside down to look at the people piled on top of Lucille. “You just stay right there. We’ll be back for her.”
* * *
Eleanor
He came back.
That’s all I could think about as I helped drag Virgil’s two cronies up the rocks toward the small cavern.
He came back.
I knew that Gavin had been hired by Lucille to kidnap me and that as soon as he had the opportunity to, he abandoned Hunter and me on the island to fend for ourselves, but somehow that didn’t impact me as much as the simple fact that he had come back. He didn’t have to. He had found Edwin on the other island and had the technology that he needed to get back to the mainland and just put all of it behind him. But he hadn’t. Instead, he chose to come back to the island for us. That meant far more.
I knew what it was like to be put into a situation that seemed impossible. It occurred to me that I knew nothing about Gavin, and had put no effort into knowing anything about Gavin. I didn’t know what had happened to him in his past or what he could have been going through that would have brought him to this place in his life, yet I had judged the living hell out of him. If there was anything that I should understand, it would be the feeling of desperation knowing that your past was still completely controlling your life. I felt a sense of sympathy toward Gavin and it made my heart ache to think about what was going to happen to him when the police came for Lucille and Virgil.
We tucked the men into the cavern and started back down the rocks for Lucille and Virgil. The pile climbed off of Lucille and she immediately jumped to her feet, ready to run. Noah and Hunter grabbed onto her arms and Gavin scooped her legs up to keep control of her as they carried her up toward the cavern. The men were piled in the small space in such a way that she wouldn’t be able to climb over or around them to get to the entrance to the tunnels and even if she did, we had taken away all of her electronics, meaning that she would be trying to get through the cavern in the dark. The plan was to shove Virgil into the front of the space, effectively sandwiching her in. It had its functional benefits, but I preferred to think that it was just a little bit of torture to carry her over until she got to jail.
I watched as the men fought the wiggling Lucille up to the top of the ridge. Suddenly she kicked and Gavin lost control of one of her legs. Her flailing caused them to drop her and Lucille scrambled away from them. I rushed across the sand, ready to help, but within five steps Lucille and her shoes lost their footing and she tumbled over the edge of the rocks into the water below. There was a moment of tense silence and then I heard a scream of anger that told me she survived the fall.
A laugh had just bubbled out of my mouth when I saw movement out of the corner of my eye. I heard a gasp and turned to see Virgil get to his feet. He launched for the helicopter pilot and grabbed him, scooping Lucille�
�s cast-aside gun into his hand and pressing it to the man’s temple. He started dragging the pilot toward the helicopter and I knew that if he got to it, he would be gone. I rushed toward him, the sand shooting up behind my feet as I dug them down as hard as I could. Virgil caught sight of me and I saw him turn, the gun pointed at my chest.
“Auntie!”
I heard Noah’s scream at the same time that I heard the explosion of the gun. I felt a hot pain and my body fell to the ground without my control. Virgil shoved the pilot into the helicopter and the blades started spinning, causing air to press down on me and make it harder to breathe. The last thing I saw was them rise into the sky and Virgil reach across the pilot to grab the controls, stalling the blades and causing the copter to tumble down toward the waves. I laughed as the darkness closed in around me.
The sea monster and I are finally friends.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Hunter
Three weeks later…
I looked up at the sound of the rapping on my door, realizing that though I had been reading through the pages stacked on my desk in front of me for at least two hours, nothing had really sunk in. I dropped the page I was holding, took off my glasses, and rubbed my eyes with my fingers.
“Yeah?” I said.
The door opened and I opened my eyes. Snow was peering around the door at me, her body out of the room.
“She’s awake.”
I got to my feet and ran across my office, joining her and Noah in the hallway. We rushed through the Royal and Company office building in silence and jumped into the back of Noah’s limo. He was ordering the driver to go before the door was even closed behind me. Within minutes we were pulling into the parking lot of the small exclusive hospital where Eleanor had been in a coma since we got off the island. The nurse sitting at the front desk ushered us through the front door and we ran down the hallway and rode the elevator up to her private suite. I tried to ignore the surroundings. That wasn’t what I wanted to be thinking about. Not right now.
