“I’ll have to go back for Tom.”
“Forget him,” Cate said. “Please, Morrow. You’ve seen what those men are like—” She reached for my hand, held on so tightly it almost hurt, and I understood that she was transmitting something to me that went beyond just our survival. But I had to focus on getting us out of here.
“We can take them on. We just have to find the Tom and get the keys—”
“If he’s even alive,” Isabelle said calmly.
“Morrow—please. We have to look out for ourselves. We told him not to call anyone, but he did what he wanted, and now look—”
Before I could answer, the crunch of footsteps approached from the side of the house. Two forms emerged from the shadows, one loping casually, the other hunched and bent. Tom. As they stepped into the light from the windows, I saw that Tom’s face was bruised and swollen, a starburst of blood against one eye. His hands were tied behind his back with thin yellow ropes. The man behind him held a gun to the back of his neck. Tom’s role as a betrayer flickered. So they’d hurt him too. I softened.
His captor was tall, his lower face obscured with a heavy beard. The stranger stopped, said something too low to hear, and Tom fell to his knees. I realized, with a strange shock, that Tom was the most defenseless of the four of us right now. While the stranger was distracted, I gestured to Cate, frantic, holding out my hand at hip-height: she understood, passing me the gun, the soft click letting me know she’d undone the safety again. I stepped into the light. I held out the gun, faking my certainty, letting the confidence I felt in my own power extend into this weapon.
It took Tom a moment to catch on to my presence and look up. His face tightened with panic—I watched him begin to frantically mouth, Get away, run, but I ignored him. Instead I looked directly into the stranger’s eyes, catching his gaze as he looked up. I pushed myself through into his skull, settled in there. As easily as winding my fingers through strands of hair and tugging. “Drop the gun,” I said. “Untie him.”
The bearded man’s face loosened into blankness. He dropped the gun; maintaining eye contact, I stooped to retrieve it, kicking it backward toward Cate and Isabelle. The man began to fumble with the knots that were holding Tom’s hands behind his back. “Go faster,” I said sharply, and the man hurried, fingers slipping.
“Let me drive,” Isabelle called behind me.
“I don’t understand this,” Tom said. “Why is he listening to you, Josie? What is this? Is it—” His ropes slid loose, slithering to the gravel. Still training the gun on the stranger, I started backing away. Tom looked at his hands like he wasn’t sure they were his anymore. His wrists were embedded with ligature marks, thick and red. “What are you doing?” Tom asked.
I didn’t have time to explain. I looked Tom in the eyes, and for just a second before his face went blank, I saw a twitch of betrayal. Hurt. Like he could sense what was happening to him, could sense my influence behind it, and he hated it. “Give the keys to Isabelle,” I said. “Get inside the car.”
He stared at me before he broke away, obeying.
As Tom moved toward the Volvo, the man glared at me, furious now. “What’d you do to me, you creepy bitch?” he asked, low.
Inside the house, shadows and movement. Fuck. Orange Shirt must’ve gotten loose, my power over him waning, my makeshift handcuffs not strong enough. Or maybe it was the stranger who’d been shot in the leg—and they were going to find Black Shoes soon—
I backed away from Tom’s captor, the gun aimed at his chest. “Stay there,” I said. “Stay there and don’t move. We’re getting out of here.”
But it wouldn’t help. That was what I knew at the back of my mind. Delilah. What they’d done to her body. Forcing men back into the gene pool, violently, cruelly. I’d recognized the frank anger in Black Shoes’s eyes when he’d said that, but there’d been something else beneath it, thin and bitter. Fear. This wasn’t a lone incident—it was the beginning of something bigger. Ricky Peters, innocent or not, had known this would happen. That when he’d landed in prison he would still be connected to a hatred that he’d only briefly dipped his fingers into. We weren’t safe. Even after we left Kithira, we wouldn’t be safe.
The Volvo’s headlights punched on, catching me in the illumination. The engine rattled to life. When I glanced back, I saw that the others were in the car already. Cate pounded the windows, shouting something at me, her face unrecognizable in its urgency. I heard shouts—noise—coming from inside the house, a sudden turmoil. I ran for the car. The noise didn’t matter. Just dispatches from a different world. We were free now. Free.