Chapter 25

C HAPTER 25

DAYS ON THE ISLAND: THREE

He's going to be insufferable when he wakes up."

A voice floats on the periphery of my consciousness. I snuggle deeper into my warm cocoon.

"Only if you keep purposely trying to get his knickers in a twist," says a second voice.

"I'm going to wake them up," says a third, more familiar voice.

If I pretend not to hear them, maybe they'll go away.

"Not yet; they're knackered."

"Knackered" is such a perfect word. I feel completely knackered, and I refuse to wake up.

A sprinkle of water falls across my cheeks.

When I open my eyes to find Brooke staring down at me, the watery early sunlight framing her body, I'm certain I only fell asleep seconds ago. "Not yet," I mumble. Theo and I are tangled together, his legs and arms like weights over mine. I couldn't move if I wanted to. (I don't want to.)

"Victoria's vision is blurring. We don't have time to waste."

I quickly sit up as I feel renewed guilt for dropping Victoria's purse in the water. I watch as Victoria douses the hot embers left over from last night's fire. Beads of sweat roll down her sallow skin. "You shouldn't be working if your vision is blurry," I tell her.

"I'm fine. I just wanted you two to get up."

I have no idea if I should believe her or not. "Are you really?"

She smirks. "Guess you'll never know."

Brooke continues. "I'm hoping to go around the side of the volcano and back down again by tonight. You and your boyfriend—sorry, husband —need to wake up." She nudges our feet apart with hers, and Theo finally stirs.

"Is it time to go?" His early morning rasp scratches an itch in my brain. If we'd been alone last night, our hot spring make-out session would have been much steamier than it was, but because we both had family members sleeping nearby, we just talked and kissed. Now, though, seeing his sleep-mussed hair and soft lips, my body aches with want. Where Theo is concerned, I never stop wanting. Even if we had forever, I don't think I'd ever get enough of him.

He presses a sleepy kiss against my shoulder, and I cover my wince so he doesn't realize how tender my arm is. While everyone (including an overjoyed Comet) eats blueberries for breakfast (poison-tested by Brooke), I sneak into the trees to inspect my stitches. Streaks of red radiate out and away from the wound. I sway a little on my feet and arrange my shirt so no one else will see them.

Once our pockets are packed with fresh fruit and our bottles refilled from the stream, we continue our trek, my calves and hamstrings burning as the rocky ground gets steeper. Theo and I hang at the back of the group, Comet practically glued to my side, and Victoria glances over her shoulder at us every few minutes with a scowl on her face.

"Didn't you once tell me that royals are supposed to keep a stiff upper lip? Because your siblings have the opposite of that," I tell Theo as he trails his fingers along the hem of my shirt, grazing the skin of my lower back; it completely scrambles my brain.

"We're also not supposed to engage in PDA. We're all screwing up the job since we crashed." He tips my chin up until my mouth meets his and kisses me. The morning passes in a haze of brief touches and stolen kisses. Since our days together are numbered, we're going to make them count.

After a couple of hours, we stop for a rest. I double over with my hands on my knees, wheezing as I inhale a jagged breath and choke on a cloud of mosquitoes. Brooke, Henry, and I compare bite counts (Brooke wins with thirty-seven) while Theo checks on an uncharacteristically quiet Victoria.

When he rejoins us, he chucks his backpack to the ground as he sits next to me and leans back against a banana tree whose fruit is depressingly out of reach. The mist from yesterday has lingered, and everything is slightly damp.

Judging by his stormy expression, "checking on Victoria" didn't go well. "How is she?" I ask.

"Heads-up!" Henry shouts as he throws a rock up into the tree to knock loose the bananas. He misses by a mile and the rock falls to the ground with a thump.

Theo shakes his head, scrubbing his hands through his hair with a frustrated groan. "I don't know, that's the problem. She won't answer me."

"She doesn't want you to worry."

He picks up a stick and stabs it into the wet dirt. "Too late for that. I've been worried about her since the moment the plane crashed." He tosses the stick into the brush. "If I'd just found her purse—" He cuts himself off with a groan.

Guilt on guilt on guilt.

As if sensing my distress, Comet places his head in my lap. I run my fingers over the soft edges of his floppy ears. "I wish I could help."

"Maybe she needs to talk to someone other than her protective older brother. Will you try?" he asks.

"She hates me! And I'm scared of her!"

"She's harmless," he says.

My eyebrows skyrocket.

"Mostly harmless."

I cross my arms.

"She means well." He helps me up and then puts his hand on the small of my back and pushes me toward his sister. "Good luck," he whispers, giving me a quick kiss on the cheek. He picks up a rock and chucks it into the tree that Henry is trying to shake with his bare hands. "Ten quid says I can get one down first."

"Uh, hey!" I say as I approach the princess. She's lying flat on her back in the soft dirt, and it worries me how pale she is.

"I'm fine," she replies automatically in a flat voice.

"Tell that to your face."

She scowls at me. "That was rude."

"Yeah, well, so are you." I blow out a breath. "I know you don't like me, and I'm sorry that my coming to Canada caused us to get on that plane, but your brother is really worried about you, and he would feel a lot better if you'd be honest about any symptoms you're having. Tell him when you need to slow down, or take a break, or eat."

She rolls her eyes. "Why do you care if I don't like you? Just because you're hooking up with my brother again doesn't mean we have to be bezzies who braid each other's hair."

Why do I care? If there's really no future for Theo and me, it shouldn't matter.

I press the issue anyway. "I think there's a world where we could have been friends."

"There's not."

"Only because you're determined to hate me. You never gave me a chance." It feels like she decided to hate me before we even met, and definitely before the story of the wedding blew up on the internet.

A horrible thought dawns on me, and my brain screeches to a halt.

"Did you leak the story of our wedding?" I ask.

Hurt flashes in her eyes, and I realize immediately that I've made a really stupid mistake. She stands up, smoothing her torn skirt.

"Wait! Come back!" I follow her as she turns on her heel and stalks away from me.

She stumbles, grabbing on to a tree for support. Theo reaches out to her, but she shrugs off his touch. "Keep your girlfriend away from me." She takes off again, surprising me with how quickly she scales over mossy logs and slippery rocks.

"Bollocks." Theo sighs heavily and follows his sister into the mist.

"What happened?" Brooke asks.

"It's my fault," I say miserably. "How far do you think she'll get?"

"She's fast," Henry says.

Awesome. It feels like every decision I've made since the crash is the wrong one, but this is something I can still fix. "I need Winston's supplies from Theo's backpack."

"Is she hurt?" Brooke asks.

"Not yet, but she will be if she runs herself sick." I unzip the kit, grab what I'm looking for, and chase after Theo.

I catch up to them on a steep, rocky stretch of ground. Victoria is on her hands and knees, her entire body shaking.

"You can't do that again," Theo says, lying next to her on his back, breathing like his lungs have collapsed. He throws a passion fruit at her. It bounces off her forehead and rolls away.

"Watch me." Victoria pushes herself up on shaky legs and manages a single step before tripping and falling, scraping up her palms and shins. She swears loudly.

I kneel next to her and slap one of Winston's handcuffs around her wrist, locking the other cuff around my own. "Howdy, Princess."

"What the bloody hell are you doing?" She tugs her arm away from me. Mine follows.

"The key is in my pocket, and I'll uncuff you as soon as you promise you're not going to run away again."

She looks me dead in the eye. "I promise."

I raise an eyebrow at Theo. "Do you believe her?"

"Give me a couple of minutes to catch my breath. If she bolts again, I need to be able to keep up with her."

"Okay." I sit, pulling Victoria down to the ground with me, and unearth two passion fruits from my pocket. "While we wait, I'm sorry for accusing you of selling our marriage certificate to the tabloids."

"You did what?" Theo rasps. He lifts his head and stares at me in disbelief.

"Shut up!" Victoria snaps.

"I don't know why I said it! I shouldn't have."

"I said, be quiet!" she shrieks. "Do you hear that?" She looks up.

"What?"

"An airplane." She leaps to her feet, tugging me up with her. I stumble, but then I hear it. The unmistakable drone of an airplane; the sound of hope.

We all scream in unison.

The plane comes into view, thousands and thousands of feet up. Still, we have to try.

"HELP!!!" We scream and jump and wave our arms in the air, mine and Victoria's cuffed wrists frantically slamming into each other.

"HELP!" I scream the word over and over until my throat is raw, but it's no use. The plane disappears into a cloud, leaving nothing but a contrail and utter devastation in its wake.

Brooke and Henry join us, their eyes wide with hope, but Victoria fills them in on the bad news. Except in her words, it's not so bad. "It's going to turn around," she says confidently.

Brooke and I exchange an uneasy glance. The plane was so high up, and was going so fast, that I'm not confident of anything.

We sit on the rocky side of the volcano in shocked silence. Now that we're out of the forest, the mist has burned away. The sun beats hard on the back of my neck, and the only sound that breaks the silence is the continuous swatting of mosquitoes against skin. If things were bad before, they feel worse now. It's hard not to think of that plane as our last hope, and now that it's gone, it feels more and more like we'll be on this island for longer than any of us thought. And with each passing hour, Victoria is getting sicker. Not to mention Winston's broken leg and Naomi's blistered foot. I drop my head into my hands.

Victoria stands up suddenly. "Look for a boat," she says. But when I look at the ocean, it melts into the horizon on all sides, making it feel like we're the last people on earth. Something about the view nags at the back of my mind—it's wrong, somehow, but I'm too tired and hungry to figure out why.

"There's no one out there," I tell her.

"Then we need to pick up the pace," Victoria shoots back. She takes off at a jog, and thanks to the handcuffs, drags me behind her. Only Comet can keep up.

"I thought you said you were done running!" I gasp. Metal bites painfully into my skin. "Please, wait! I'm going to fall."

"Don't threaten me with a good time," she says.

"If I fall, you fall!"

"Play stupid games, win stupid prizes!"

"Stop quoting Taylor Swift!"

She stops abruptly and I slam into her back. "Ow!"

"I need to sit down. I don't feel good." She bends over to catch her breath. Comet sniffs around our feet, whining frantically.

"What's wrong, boy?" He clamps the leg of my pants between his teeth and pulls hard. "What are you—"

The ground underneath our feet collapses.