33. Isla

33

ISLA

I sat wrapped in the tree skirt as IKE continued to pound at the door. So many hours had passed. A few of the tea lights had flickered out, but overall, we still had decent lighting compared to when I woke up in complete darkness.

My stomach growled loudly, protesting the lack of food. I had to stop decorating, partly because I was running out of things to put up, but mostly because all the work was making me thirsty. I couldn’t remember a time that I had ever been so parched. No, that wasn’t the right word. My body was aching for water. I could feel it in my muscles and in my eyes. It was amazing how something as simple as lack of water could make you feel like your whole body was taking a siesta.

Then again, wasn’t the limit a person could survive without water just three days?

I shuddered, not wanting to think about that. Every bit of me was cold. My toes were going numb, and the only reason my fingers were still moving was because I kept tucking them inside IKE’s jacket.

The banging against the door was growing weaker and farther between hits. I knew IKE was getting tired, but I’d already told him to give it a rest three times. Something had changed when I showed him that picture. He stalked away, determined to break us out of here, though I wasn’t sure how that was going to happen. Unless he suddenly became MacGyver and figured out how to break us out with a Christmas tree, I didn’t see us escaping anytime soon.

He hit the wall one last time and practically collapsed on the ground, heaving hard. In the dim light, it was difficult to see his facial features, but I had to assume it was something like guilt or defeat that showed on his face.

“Come sit down with me,” I said, my voice cracking from lack of water. I patted the cardboard I’d torn apart to act as a buffer between the cold floor and my skin. It wasn’t much, but it was better than nothing.

After a minute, he stumbled over to me and sat down, his heart beating erratically after pounding away at that damn door for hours. “What is this?” he muttered.

“A tree skirt.”

Grunting, he tugged me closer. I willingly snuggled against him, my body wracked with chills as the temperature dropped in the container.

“It must be night,” I whispered.

“Probably,” he sighed.

“How long do you think we’ve been here?” My voice seemed to echo around the container, giving an eerie feel with the lights casting a soft glow.

“Twelve hours. Maybe more. It depends on how long we were out.”

I sighed and pressed my face against his chest. His skin was cold through his shirt, but the beat of his heart against my cheek calmed me. “I’m cold.”

He tugged me closer until I was practically wrapped around his body. His hands rubbed my body, trying to work the heat back in, but I wasn’t sure anything would ever make me warm again. He scooted until we were laying flat on the cardboard, me resting on top of his body. I wanted to protest and tell him this couldn’t be comfortable for him, but when I started to shift off him, he held me firmly in place.

Sighing, I rested my head on his chest and listened to the sound of his breaths slowly rising and falling. “How come you’ve never had a tree?”

His hands slowed their movement, settling on my back in a loose hug. “When you have no money, you don’t need things like Christmas trees. There wouldn’t have been anything under it.”

“Where did you grow up?”

He didn’t answer at first, and I thought he would be just like Kavanaugh, refusing to answer any personal questions. But he surprised me.

“Louisiana.”

“You don’t sound like you’re from the south.”

“I worked very hard to lose the accent,” he admitted.

“Do you ever go back and visit?”

I felt him move and assumed he shook his head. “There’s no one to visit. The town died a long time ago.”

That made me swivel my head to face him. “What about your family?”

“Dead.”

“I’m sorry,” I murmured.

“Don’t be. They wouldn’t want anyone crying over them.”

I stayed silent for a long time after that. I didn’t know what to say, but all these questions were burning in my mind. IKE had this hard exterior, but something told me he was kind of a softy. Maybe I was wrong, but I chose to believe it.

“Where was Kavanaugh?” he asked out of the blue.

I almost forgot that he didn’t remember the night we were taken. I had purposely left out the fact that he kissed me, though he might have guessed it. I figured it would be easier to get through this if we weren’t worrying about the awkwardness of talking about that kiss. Or the second one. Everything about that night was lost to him, but I still remembered every second of it. How his lips felt pressed against mine, how my body reacted to his, and the feeling of guilt that washed over me as I realized I liked his lips on mine.

I hadn’t meant for the kiss to happen, but that didn’t mean I could forget about it. What would I tell Kavanaugh if we got out of here? Would I tell him what happened or keep it to myself? It would only cause more problems between us, and further his paranoia that IKE was someone he had to worry about. But if I didn’t tell him, I was doing the very thing I was so angry at him for. Lying.

“Isla?”

“Hmm?”

“Where was Kavanaugh?”

“He left. We got into a fight and I was going to leave. But he did instead.”

“He just left you in another state?” he asked incredulously.

Men. They were all the same. “I’m not helpless. I’m capable of booking my own ticket and getting on a plane without a man’s assistance.”

“You were kidnapped,” he snapped.

“So were you,” I shot back. “I’m not sure how having a man around would have helped me out of our current predicament.”

He grunted in response because he had no argument to fall back on. “What did you fight about?”

“Does it really matter?” I asked, sighing heavily. “Same thing as always. Secrets,” I whispered, not wanting to elaborate.

I shivered again and he pulled me tighter to him. As I was shifting to get more comfortable, I ended up brushing my face against his, and for a moment, both of us stopped moving. Our lips were so close. I could almost feel them against mine. My eyes slipped closed as I remembered what he tasted like, but I quickly banished those thoughts from my mind.

Instead, I went for things that would actually help. Facts. “How long can we last like this?”

“Three days,” he said, no bullshit anywhere in sight. “Given that we were taken and left here for at least a few hours, I would say we’re nearing the end of the first day.”

“Two days to live,” I murmured.

“Of course, I’ll live longer because I was in the military. I was trained for this sort of thing.”

My lips formed a smile at his words. “I didn’t realize the military trained your body to go without water.”

“It’s one of the first things they teach you,” he continued. “See, the trick is in making your body think you have water.”

“And how do you do that?”

“Well, you talk to yourself a lot. You believe you have water. You pretend like the urge to suck the blood from another human just to have liquid in your throat is all in your head.”

I shifted to look at him again. “You want to drink my blood?”

He shrugged. “There’s nothing else to drink.”

“What about pee?”

“That’s just disgusting,” he grimaced. “No, blood would at least be nutritious.”

“And they teach you all this in the military,” I teased.

“Like I said, I’ll live longer than you.”

Chuckling to myself, I closed my eyes and let out a deep breath. I was so cold and tired. I couldn’t remember a time I’d ever felt so rundown. The hunger was bad, but the dryness in my throat was almost worse than the cold.

“When we get out of here, I’m getting one of those beds that has heating pads around the feet.”

“You could just turn the heat really high.”

“I don’t ever want to have cold feet again.”

I was suddenly upright as he put me on the cold floor. I was about to protest when I saw him slipping his shoes off and then his socks. “What are you doing?”

“Here,” he said, grabbing my foot to slip his sock onto my foot. Then he surprised me even more by putting his extra-large shoes on my feet.

“What about you?”

“We’ll take turns,” he said, pulling me back against him. “Besides, you have less clothing on.”

I wiggled my toes slightly. It wasn’t super warm, but there was a definite difference. “Thank you.”

“Get some sleep,” he grunted, his voice gruff.

I pulled the tree skirt tighter around me and pressed my body to his. “IKE?”

“Hmm?”

“What if we don’t get out of here?”

He didn’t answer, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to hear what he would say. Would it be painful? Would I feel my stomach slowly eating me as the hunger pains took over? Or maybe dehydration would kill me first? Would anyone ever find us?

“It’ll be like going to sleep,” he finally said.

“What if I don’t wake up?” I asked, the fear creeping into my voice.

“I’ll make sure you wake up.”

I knew he couldn’t promise that, but soon, I drifted off to sleep, trusting that he would help keep me alive for as long as possible.

?

I was alone and freezing, but it wasn’t the cold that woke me up. I rolled over and squinted into the dark. IKE was by the door, going at it again with that piece of wood, slamming it against the metal. From the looks of it, he’d been doing it for a while. How had I slept through that?

I pushed to a sitting position, finding it harder to do than I ever thought possible. It was slightly warmer, but not by much. Getting to my feet, I kept the tree skirt wrapped around my body and shuffled in IKE’s large shoes over to where he stood, staring at the damn door.

“How long was I asleep?”

He sighed, squeezing his hand shut before gripping the wood again. “A while.”

That was clear as mud. “Do you want me to give it a try?”

He turned and quirked a smile at me. “Sure. Give it a whack.”

I didn’t care much for the teasing in his tone. I dropped the tree skirt and pulled up the sleeves on the jacket, then grabbed the wood in both hands. As I swung back and slammed it into the metal, I cried out as vibrations tore through my limbs in the most uncomfortable way.

“Holy crap. How could you do that more than once?”

He snagged it from my grip and rested it against the wall. Even in the darkness, I could make out the tiredness lining his face. Had he slept at all? Or had he stayed awake like he said he would?

I took his hand in mine and walked back to the cardboard, pulling him down with me. “Warm me up.”

“If you insist,” he teased, wrapping his body around mine. He shifted his hips suggestively and I rolled over to glare at him.

“Don’t even think about it.”

He huffed out a laugh. “Isla, you are sexy as hell, but not even if you were naked and pressed against my bare cock would I be able to get it up right now.”

Well, that made me feel slightly better. “Tell me something.”

“Like what?”

“Something you’ve never told anyone.”

“If I’ve never told anyone, why would I tell you?”

I thought the answer was pretty obvious. “Because it’s highly unlikely it’ll ever have the chance to leave my lips.”

His warm breath skimmed over my face and then I felt his lips press against my forehead as he held me tighter. I appreciated the gesture, even if his attempt at making me feel like we’d make it was nothing more than that.

“When I was a kid, I wanted to be an astronaut.”

“Every kid wants to be one. That’s not a secret.”

“Yeah, but not every kid went to the lengths I did to make it happen. I was nine, and my mom was dying. Cancer. I used to watch her on the couch every day, just struggling to sit up. My dad was always at work, trying to pay the bills, but it was never enough. There were a lot of days I didn’t even go to school because I was afraid she’d die while I was gone. And then one day, she told me I had to go to school, that the principal had called and said I was missing too many days. So, I went, and when I came home…”

I cupped a hand over my mouth as tears filled my eyes. “I’m so sorry.”

“I think she knew. Anyway, after that, everything was different. There was no one to take care of. I was home alone a lot, and I started dreaming of being someone else. I saw this flier in the paper about astronaut school for kids in Alabama. All a kid needed to do was write a paper on why they wanted to go, and they could get a scholarship. So, I wrote a five-page paper detailing all the reasons I should get the scholarship. I sent it off and waited for a response. Every single day, I ran to the mailbox to check, and every day I was disappointed.”

“You didn’t get it.”

“No.”

“So, what happened?”

“My dad died in a work accident when I was seventeen. I had no money. The house wasn’t worth a damn thing with all the bills due, and I had no family. I enlisted because at least in the military, I would have a roof over my head and three meals a day. It kept me out of trouble for a while.”

“So, how did you end up doing what you do?”

He cocked an eyebrow at me. “That’s more than one secret.”

I shrugged. “I like the sound of your voice.”

Thankfully, that earned me a chuckle. “Here’s the thing. When you have no money and don’t know what it’s like to be able to afford things, you can get hooked up with the wrong sort of crowd. And once I had a taste of it, I didn’t want to let it go. I knew the shit I was doing was wrong, but…I wasn’t that kid anymore, starving and wishing I could go to astronaut camp or have a Thanksgiving turkey.”

“And that’s why you wear the expensive suits,” I added.

He huffed out a laugh. “Such a cliché, right?”

“No.” I pulled the tree skirt tighter over both of us, thankful I wasn’t alone in this container. I wouldn’t have lasted this long without him, and I wondered now why I met him so late in life when everything was about to end.

“Your turn,” he nudged me. “Tell me a secret.”

I thought about telling him about the kiss we shared, but decided to take that to the grave with me. If we didn’t get out of here soon, what good could come from him knowing? And if we did get out, then there would be all these questions that had to be answered. So, I went with something that was equally as damning, but not related to him.

“I moved to Kansas to be with Kavanaugh, and I think it was a mistake.”

“Why?” he asked, tightening his hold on me.

“Because I knew him as a kid, but I never really considered how different he would be. We’ve both changed so much and—the attraction is there, but it all moved too fast. I’m not even divorced yet. What does that make me?”

“Someone who followed her heart. I don’t think that’s something you’ll ever regret.”

“Maybe not, but what if I lose him?”

“Better to have loved and lost than to never have loved at all,” he recited.

I started to laugh, pinching his side. “That was terrible.”

“Yes, but there’s truth to it, don’t you think?”

“Maybe,” I sighed.

It grew quiet after that. The minutes slowly ticked by, leaving us both exhausted and quickly losing hope. I kept imagining I was hearing someone outside the container, but then those noises faded and I was left here alone with IKE.

“Do you think anyone knows we’re missing?” I asked quietly.

“Yeah.” His voice was rough, but whether it was from lack of water or the unease of having to answer a question we both knew didn’t really matter, I wasn’t sure.

All I knew was that our time was running out. There were things I’d chosen not to think about because they would just make me cry, and I didn’t want to give up hope so easily, even though it weighed heavily on my mind. Neither of us spoke about the reality of the situation, but we knew it was inevitable. We were going to die in here, and the end was quickly approaching.

“I’m glad I’m here with you.”