Chapter 28

C HAPTER 28

"There's no one on this island," Theo says in disbelief. All the color has drained from his face.

In front of us, the black ocean stretches into eternity. Behind us, the volcano is still spewing ash. We're trapped, we're injured, we're sick, and we're no closer to being rescued.

"Look at the bright side, Your Majesty," Henry says, and even I can tell that he has nothing positive to say.

Theo stares blankly at his brother.

"Never mind," Henry mumbles.

"Say it," Theo challenges.

"You'll get to skive off your coronation." Henry runs a hand through his curls. "Sorry, bad joke. I was just trying to lighten the mood."

"Is the fact that we're stuck on a deserted island too depressing for you?" Victoria says, but it doesn't have her usual bite. She stumbles sideways.

"Whoa." I grab her arm. She shakes me off before walking several paces away. She wobbles again, then sinks to her knees in the sand while she throws up all the water she's consumed today. "No one look at me! I'm disgusting." She tucks her head between her knees and presses her shaking fists into the sand, the broken handcuff still hanging from her wrist. I close my eyes and force myself to think. We can still fix this.

There has to be a way to buy her more time.

"She needs to eat," I say finally. It's not groundbreaking, but it's true. Theo lost the backpack at some point during the cave-in/rescue/volcanic eruption, and none of us have eaten in hours.

"I'll look for food," Henry says. "You three split up and walk along the shore. Reggie was confident about our location. We can't give up yet."

"Not to be a downer, but Reggie didn't know shit," Brooke says.

"Henry's right. We'll split up." I'm surprised to hear myself agree with him, but we don't have any other choice. We either keep looking, or we give up, and Theo and I promised each other we wouldn't do that.

"You two go north, I'll go south," Brooke says, and the false optimism in her voice makes me nauseous.

"I'll stay with Tor and build a fire," Henry tells the rest of us. Theo tosses him the lighter from his pocket. "Look for the flames to find your way back to us."

Theo kneels in front of Victoria. "In case I don't get a chance to say it—"

She pushes him away. "Abso-bloody-lutely not. Get up."

Theo sputters, but Victoria doesn't have time for him. She motions between Brooke and me. "Uh-uh, break it up."

Brooke freezes, halfway toward hugging me.

" Step. Away, " Victoria orders. Brooke drops her arms. "We are not saying goodbye, and we are not crying." She turns to Theo. "This isn't a funeral; I turn eighteen in a few weeks, and I intend to be alive to celebrate. Do you understand?"

Silence. Awkward, uncomfortable silence.

"I said, do you understand ?" She fixes me with her best glare.

"Yes, Your Highness," I say as I dip into an unplanned curtsy.

Victoria grins triumphantly. "Good. Now leave and don't come back without help, food, or a plan to get us rescued." She checks an imaginary watch. "You have one hour."

Theo and I hurry off before she can give more orders. We walk to the edge of the water, where we both slip off our shoes and walk in the soft, wet sand, the tide coming up over our toes, sinking a little with every step.

Theo throws me a sidelong glance, his eyes dancing with delight. "I cannot believe you curtsied to my little sister."

"I don't know what happened! It's like I was possessed by the spirit of your ancestors!"

He bites back a laugh and shakes his head. "I don't even know who you are anymore. You used to be so idealistic." He sighs wistfully.

"I wasn't so much anti-royalty as I was pro-getting-under-your-skin," I tease as I kick water into his face.

He tackles me in a bear hug, soaking us both in cold water, and before guilt or worry or fear can set back in, Theo gently tugs me into his side and wraps his arm around my shoulders. "Pretend with me."

"Pretend what?" I ask, though I already know I'll say yes.

He plants a kiss on my temple. "That we met on your senior trip to London, and I asked you on a date."

I close my eyes, letting the false memory wash over me. "What did we do?"

"We went to an animal shelter and signed up as dog walkers for the afternoon. We took them to the private palace gardens, along with a picnic basket filled with pie that I made specifically to impress you."

My chest burns. I can picture it so easily. It strikes me that even in his perfect reality, he's still him, a royal by birth, and I'm still me, an eighteen-year-old American who loves to play with dogs. But with a slight change in circumstances, we might have had a chance.

"You really pulled out all the stops."

"I didn't have much time to impress you, I had to do everything I could."

"What happened next?"

"The world was never ending, and we fell in love the way most people get to, without the threat of complete annihilation hanging over our heads."

I sigh. "Sounds too easy."

"You flew back home at the end of the week, but you were proper obsessed with me—"

"Bloody unlikely!" I tease, pulling out my dreadful British accent.

His mouth hitches up in an easy smile. "Fine, I was obsessed with you. You were all I thought about. But when I missed you so much that I thought I'd go mad, I picked up the phone, and I called you. When I scrolled through your social media, I commented on every single picture. I didn't haunt the palace hallways in the dead of night because I was crawling out of my own skin thinking about you."

"You didn't?"

"Not in this timeline. And when my mum died, you're the first person I called."

He has no idea how much I wish that's what happened. "I hated the thought of you going through that alone."

"That's the thing, though. I never really felt alone, even with you on the other side of the pond. In this scenario, we never went more than an hour without texting each other. Our friends took the piss out of us, but it didn't matter, because we were happy."

"Sounds delightfully uncomplicated for a long-distance relationship with a reigning monarch."

"It was, until you were about to start university, and I went mad with jealousy. I imagined you in a new place, surrounded by hundreds of smart and interesting blokes from all over the world. Guys who could walk you to class without bodyguards and take you on a date without the tabloids stalking you—"

"I thought we were pretending away the bad stuff."

He shakes his head. "You're right. Sorry. You were about to start school, so I invited you on vacation before you got swamped in your studies. A week on a tropical island in Portugal."

"Does Victoria hate me in this timeline, too?"

He laughs. "To retain some semblance of reality, I'll say she's skeptical of you. But my siblings didn't come, obviously, and neither did Brooke. They'd be at home, where they would be safe and healthy and not intruding on our romantic holiday."

His voice cracks at the mention of Victoria's health, and guilt burns my stomach like acid.

"Do you want to turn around and stay with her? I can keep going on my own," I say.

He furiously blinks back his tears. "No. No. We're avoiding reality by pretending everything is fine. Help me out here, Wheeler. I learned from the best."

I squeeze his hand in mine. "What happened when we saw each other again? In Portugal?"

He clears his throat. "Right. Our reunion. I was so bloody nervous. What if things were different?"

"And were they?"

He tilts his head back to the sky, considering this. I'm not sure if he's pondering a real answer or a fake one. "I'd started to wonder if I'd made you up. Like maybe in my head, you were a little bit prettier, quicker, funnier. I'd imagined that moment hundreds of times, and by the time it arrived, I was worried reality wouldn't live up to the you in my head, because how could it."

I slant him a look. "It's impossible to overestimate how funny I am."

Theo laughs. "True. But my imagination sucks arse, because it forgot the way your nose scrunches when you're pretending to be mad at me, and the way your eyes light up when I say your name, and the way I'm happiest when I'm with you, even when comets or airplanes are literally falling out of the sky."

My heart is beating too fast. This was supposed to be a game of pretend, but it's gotten way too real. He doesn't know that I let Victoria's purse sink because of a stupid grudge, and the sweeter he is, the guiltier I feel.

A strong wave sweeps over our legs, and I realize we've drifted deeper into the ocean than I thought. I stop in my tracks.

Theo rubs a hand over the back of his neck. "Was that too much?"

A breeze rolls through the trees and scatters goose bumps along my arms, and I can't pretend for another second.

"We have to go back and be with Victoria."

He furrows his brow. "We're looking for help."

"You know there's no help out here." I throw my arms wide in the black. "This is all there is. Either rescue comes or it doesn't, but either way, we need to be with your sister. She's putting on a brave face, but she's not okay."

He freezes for one heart-stopping second, and then he takes my hand. "You're right. Let's go be with her."

If possible, I feel even worse. "I'll feel so guilty if anything happens to her."

He silences me with a kiss. "I already told you not to worry about the phone call. C'mon."

He tugs us back down the beach. My calves burn from trekking through sand, but before long we find Victoria hauling an armful of firewood.

She stops to catch her breath. "Did you find anything?"

Theo shakes his head. "Nah. We're back to hang out with you."

She puts her hand on her hip and cocks it. "Why?"

"Wren was worried. Turns out she likes you, despite your best efforts." Theo unloads a handful of branches from Victoria's arms. She looks annoyed and relieved at the same time.

"He's lying," I say dryly. We can't go letting the princess know just how worried I am about her.

Theo chuckles. "Your conscience wouldn't be so guilty if you didn't like her at least a little bit."

"Guilty?" Victoria's eyes snap to mine. "You told him about my bag?"

"Told me what?" Theo frowns.

My heart sinks. "I… no… we weren't talking about that…" I say desperately.

Victoria's eyes widen as she realizes her mistake.

Theo turns to me. "What's she talking about?"

Ooops, Victoria mouths over Theo's shoulder as she backs away from us.

"Hey." Theo steps close to me. "What's wrong?"

"I found Victoria's bag and let it sink on purpose," I say in one rushed breath.

His gaze clouds as he steps away from me. "What the fuck?"

"I didn't know about the insulin, but I knew the bag was hers. I found it and brought it to shore, but then she made a joke about sharks attacking me, so I let it sink. If she—" My voice breaks off, and I can't bring myself to say the word. "If anything happens to her, it's my fault."

He shakes his head. "You told Victoria about this?"

I nod, and his face falls.

"Why didn't you tell me?"

"I didn't know how." I can barely push the words past the lump in my throat.

Theo rakes his hands through his hair, looking dazed. I step toward him, but he holds out his hand. "Please," he says. "I just need a minute to think." The flash of betrayal in his expression makes one thing crystal clear: he will never look at me the same way again.

I press my lips together as tears burn behind my eyes. "I'll find a way to fix this. I'll figure it out. I can do this," I promise as I back away from him. When my feet hit cold water, I turn and run.

"Wren—wait," he calls.

Don't follow me, I think, but I'm still devastated when he doesn't.

I run along the shore until my lungs give out, and then I walk until the sandy beach turns into volcanic rock. The rocks form a shallow tidepool, and I step over them and into the water. I shiver; this is the opposite of a hot spring, and I hate it. I pretend I'm in an ice bath, which is another thing health nuts do in the name of wellness; Gwyneth Paltrow has definitely done a cold plunge, I think . I sink until the water hits my belly button, and I know immediately that this isn't wellness. I feel violently unwell. My teeth chatter and my body spasms while I try to think of a way out of this.

I need a new plan, and this one has to be something I can do on my own. I don't have Naomi or Brooke or Theo to help me anymore.

I squint through the dark, and at first, my frozen mind has trouble separating the black sky from the black water, but then I blink, and a shape emerges that's just a little bit blacker than the sky or the water. I move toward it until I hit the volcanic rock barrier.

I squint harder, and it's small, but it's there. A big black blob in the middle of the horizon.

Land?

If rescue isn't coming for us, we'll have to get it ourselves. We need to find another island or a passing ship. Either way, we need to leave this island.

I've never felt as alone as when I finally drag myself out of the cold tidepool and up to where rocky sand meets the trees. I gather fallen shoots of bamboo and slowly pull them from the trees. My muscles are burning and my fingers blistered by the time I move on to gathering vines. The temperature must have dropped, because my feet are dry and I'm somehow colder than I was in the ice bath, and dizzy, too.

I can't remember the last time I drank water. My legs give out as I drop a heavy vine next to my collection of bamboo. I wrap it around the bamboo and tie it off. It's not going to win any awards, but I'm on the right track. I decide to take a five-minute rest, and then I'll get back to working on my raft.

Just five minutes. That's all I need, and then I'll be good as new.

I'm almost there.

I can do this.

I curl up on my side and close my eyes.