41. Cole

CHAPTER 41

COLE

“ I don’t know where she is, I swear.”

“Don’t lie to me.”

If only Bella hadn’t stood up on the rooftop and shouted. If only she’d hidden until these crazies did whatever they needed to do and left. Cole knew his life was over, but hers didn’t have to be.

Who were these men? Why were they on Skeleton Cay? Cole didn’t recognise any of them, and he didn’t recall seeing the boat before either. It was a nice one. A Mako, expensive and very fast. It would easily outrun the Crosswind , but it sure wasn’t comfortable for long journeys. A tiny outdoor kitchen and a head under the console were the only luxuries. Cole knew that because one of his neighbours had a similar boat. A former stockbroker. After making his fortune in New York, he’d retired to Emerald Shores at the grand old age of forty-two.

The guy walking behind prodded Cole with the barrel of his handgun. Jeron. Cole had heard one of the others call him Jeron. He was a wiry white guy in his early thirties, and the odour of sweat and stale cigarette smoke seeped from his pores. His accent said he was a local .

“Keep walking.”

“Where are we going?”

“To the prison.”

“It’s locked.”

“Then I will unlock it.”

Well, shit. Was this guy an official? No, no, he couldn’t be. He would have identified himself and arrested Cole, not aimed a pistol at him. Whoever these men were, they were on Skeleton Cay illegally.

“Who are you? Why are you here?”

“That isn’t your concern.” Jeron poked Cole with the gun again, harder this time. “Faster.”

They were nearly at the courtyard when a muffled gunshot rang out. At least, Cole thought it was a gunshot. It wasn’t as if he’d had much experience with these things. On instinct, he jumped for the undergrowth, but his captor grabbed him by the shoulder and laughed.

“Relax. They’re not shooting at us.”

Icy fear ran up Cole’s spine. If nobody was shooting at him, then that shot had been for Bella. Which meant that they weren’t looking for hostages. They were simply eliminating witnesses. But the shooter might have missed; Cole needed to believe that. Fuck, they had to have missed.

If Bella was dead, Cole would soon follow because he wasn’t dumb—he knew these men were only keeping him alive until they found her. They’d stand him in the courtyard with a gun to his head and threaten to shoot him unless she came out of hiding.

His captor made him kneel six feet away while he worked on the padlock, and the outer gate of the sally port soon swung open with a creak that reminded Cole of fingernails on a blackboard.

Suddenly, life at the Galaxy Hotel and Casino didn’t seem all that bad.

“Up.” The man motioned with his gun. “Inside. ”

Only the outside gate was locked, and Cole opened each door in turn—five of them—until they arrived in an echoing two-storey cellblock. Jeron marched him through the gloom to a storeroom that housed a new-looking generator with an exhaust pipe running through a broken, barred window and turned on the power. These men spent enough time here that they maintained the electrics? Damn. Out in the cellblock, overhead lights blinked into life, shining like tiny suns from the ceiling high above.

“Walk,” Jeron ordered.

Spartan six-by-eight cells faced each other across a stone aisle that might have been part of the bedrock itself. The second tier didn’t have a solid floor, just narrow walkways outside the cells and a sheet of wire mesh stretched between them, presumably to stop prisoners up there from hurling shit at the inmates below.

The place gave Cole chills, not just because of the temperature—although he was only wearing swim shorts—but also due to the vibes. How many men had breathed their last here? The cellblock felt like hell itself, minus the fires. And it smelled like death. When Cole was eight and growing up in California, a cat had passed in the crawl space under his house. He and his mom didn’t know at first that the cat had died—it had chosen the most inaccessible corner as its final resting place—and for weeks, the house had stunk like the prison on Skeleton Cay.

Were there cats on Skeleton Cay?

Cole glanced left and right into cells as his captor herded him toward the rear of the building. Like the barracks, they looked to have been abandoned in a hurry. Narrow, metal-framed beds butted up against the walls, complete with thin mattresses and even thinner pillows. No flush toilets, only buckets in the corner. Some cells had a metal desk and chair; others didn’t.

One cell had a jumbled lump on the bed, and as Cole squinted into the shadows, he realised with ever-increasing horror what he was looking at.

Putrefied flesh.

Bones.

A person, or they had been once.

His stomach heaved, and he turned to the side and vomited.

“Nobody should come to Skeleton Cay,” Jeron said. “There are enough warnings, but still people try.”

“I didn’t come here by choice,” Cole choked out.

Jeron merely shrugged. “Then you were unlucky.”

“Why are you doing this?”

“It’s nothing personal. You’re just in the wrong place at the wrong time. Walk.”

“What are you doing in this place that’s worth killing for?”

Another shrug, and they stopped in front of the second-to-last cell in the row. “This one is yours.”

When Cole hesitated, Jeron pushed him toward the open door. “Get in, or I’ll shoot you right here.”

Would that really be worse than dying huddled on the bed the way some other poor soul had done? No. But if Frankie raised the alarm, if someone came looking for him… Perhaps they’d die too. And what about Bella? There was a chance she’d survived. She might have run deep into the jungle, and a team could search in there for days and never find a person. What would happen then? Would these psychos give up and go home? Or would they stay and hunt?

“Do you really want to add to the stench?” Cole asked Jeron. “Wouldn’t it be easier to toss me into the ocean?”

Outside, there might be a chance to run, to dart into the trees and hide. The chances of survival were slim, but anything was better than dying in this hellhole surrounded by the remains of other souls who’d made the ultimate mistake. Cole should have tried fleeing before, he knew that now, but hindsight was a wonderful thing.

“No fun in that, boy. We keep you like a pet, see how long it takes you to die. Ain’t got much of a sense of smell anyway.”

Again, Jeron jabbed Cole with the gun barrel, and with little choice but to obey, he walked into the cell. The door clanged shut behind him.

“Maybe I give you a choice.” Jeron aimed the gun at Cole and laughed. “Maybe before I leave, I ask you again. Do you want to die quick, or do you want to die slow?”

How could Cole answer that? He didn’t want to die at all. Well, he wanted to die quickly, but sixty years from now, having lived a long, happy life. With Bella. Fuck, where was she?

When Cole didn’t answer, Jeron just chuckled, and no doubt about it, the man was nuts.

“Me, I want to die quick,” he said. “No rotting away in a prison cell, no?—”

The shots were deafening. Jeron’s gun flew out of his hand and skittered across the floor, but Cole barely noticed that as the man’s head disintegrated in front of him. Adrenaline exploded into his veins as he unfroze and dove to the floor, not that there was anywhere to hide. The desk was bolted to the wall. He couldn’t even use it as a shield. If whoever just killed Jeron wanted Cole dead as well, this would be over in a few seconds.

Cole strained to listen for footsteps, his ears ringing, but the only sound came from his thumping heart.

“Well, this is awkward.”

His head snapped up at the sound of Bella’s voice. She skirted the pool of blood, an evil-looking rifle at her side, the cast gone, a Bond girl come to life. Fuck, she was bleeding.

“You…you killed him? ”

The question sounded preposterous, but she was the one holding the gun.

“Yes, but he said he wanted to die quick. Think of me as his fairy godmother. Or is it the genie? Which one grants the wishes?”

“The genie.”

“Right, then I’m the genie.”

It was Bella, but it wasn’t. Gone was the sweetness that had begun to show over the past few weeks; this was the woman who’d walked up to him in the Black Diamond and bet him a blow job they could sneak into a party. But much, much darker.

“You just shot a man.”

She held up her fingers in a V. “Two men, actually. Are you injured?”

Who is this woman?

“I’m not hurt. You’re covered in blood.”

“Chill, it isn’t mine.” She wasn’t looking at him. No, she was scanning her surroundings. The cells, the hallway, the ceiling above. “I did break a nail though.”

“Bella, what the hell is going on?”

“At a guess? A gang of criminals is making use of a deserted prison, and they don’t want anyone else to find out.” Bella picked up the gun Jeron had dropped, grimaced, and ejected the magazine. Then she crouched and began checking the dead man’s pockets. “It isn’t safe here.”

“No fucking kidding. And when I asked what was going on, I meant with you. You’re…you’re…” So calm. Bella wasn’t scared; she was confident. And she definitely wasn’t the woman he’d gotten to know over the past month. “You’re not you anymore.”

“This is exactly who I am. And this is exactly why I don’t do relationships.” Bella slid a phone out of Jeron’s pocket and powered it on. “You need to be somewhere safer. Somewhere that you’re less of a sitting duck. ”

“Bella, you’re making me really fucking nervous.”

“You shouldn’t be scared. I won’t hurt you. But there’s another one of these assholes out there”—she poked Jeron with a toe—“and he won’t be feeling quite so benevolent.”

“There were six men on that boat. There are four men still out there.”

“No, there’s one.”

“You said you shot two.”

“Yes, I did.”

Since Uncle Mike died, Cole’s life had turned into one nightmare after another. Every time he thought he saw a chink of daylight, midnight fell again.

“Bella, what happened to the other three men?”

“I think you’d be happier not knowing the answer to that question.”

“You killed them?”

“It was them or us.” She glanced at Jeron’s phone. “Fuck, this uses facial recognition.” Suddenly, she stiffened. “Get down and stay down.”

“What? What do you mean?”

Then the gunshots came.