42. Caro

"Come on!" I growled at the box. Just a little farther…

There were twelve boxes wedged into the cabin, three to a bed, each box roughly two feet square and a foot high. They were made from sturdy, light-coloured wood, and the lids had been nailed on securely. Mostly. I'd found one box with a couple of nails missing, and for the past several hours, I'd been wiggling the lid with my bound hands in an attempt to get it off.

At least, I thought it had been several hours. My watch had broken somewhere between the turtle sanctuary and wherever I was now, and without daylight, I'd lost track of time. Every second felt like an hour, so maybe I hadn't been here for as long as I thought. The tiny cabin had the ambience of a mausoleum. Cramped, grim, deathly. I wasn't certain why I was still alive, but I had no doubt that once I'd outlived my usefulness, I'd be dispatched to join Stacey. The man who brought my food had said as much.

Twice, he'd shown up with water and snacks, the man with the anchor on his arm. Barry. Barry the Barracuda. He'd open the door and set the bottles and packages on the floor, watching me warily. What did he think I was going to do? It wasn't as if I could run anywhere. I'd managed to unwrap the duct tape from around my legs, taking a layer of skin with it in the process, and I'd peeled the tape away from my face. It was still tangled in my hair, a sticky, messy lump hanging from the back of my head. But my hands, I couldn't free them. The knot was sealed tight, and there was nothing sharp I could use to cut it. Whoever had bound me made sure there was no give in the cord.

"Why am I here?" I'd asked him.

"Because you couldn't keep your nose out of other people's business."

"Are you going to kill me? The way you killed Stacey?"

He didn't bother to deny it, just shrugged. "He wants you alive."

A chill ran through me in the stuffy, hot room. "Who? Who's ‘he'?"

"You'll find out soon enough."

The way he said it, I really didn't want to.

The corner of the lid lifted another half inch, and I wiggled my fingertips underneath and heaved. Slowly, one at a time, the nails released their grip, and I tossed the lid to the side. The inside of the box was filled with shredded newspaper, and I scrabbled through it, searching for the true contents. What was so important that it was kept in a box on a fancy yacht? Drugs? No, those got packed in coffee grounds if the movies were to be believed, and didn't the big drugs ring in San Gallicano get busted the year before last?

I dumped paper onto the bed, then dug in again. Froze as my hands hit shell. Shell. A carapace.

A sob burst out of me as I dumped the rest of the paper and found a beautiful hawksbill, dead, dried, and stuffed into a box to be sold to some rich asshole who cared more about superstition than ecology. Worse, there were three tiny notches in the back of the shell. This was one of Franklin's turtles. Not a creature I'd helped to raise—judging by its size, around twenty inches, it was roughly six years old—but I still felt the blow personally. There were twelve boxes in this room, and I'd bet everything I owned—which wasn't much, admittedly—that they all contained dead turtles.

These men had no empathy, only greed. No understanding of the bigger picture, only the desire to make a quick buck. They killed with impunity, oblivious to the damage they were doing to the ocean.

And I was about to become their next victim.

A meal for a passing shark, if I was lucky.

A wasted pile of bones if I wasn't.

Would anyone miss me?

Knox and Franklin, if they were still alive, but nobody else. Once, I'd have said Vince, but after everything that had happened, I didn't trust him anymore. Had he ever truly been my friend? Or was he just keeping tabs on me? Making sure I stayed in line?

I had one hope—Ryder. Not that I thought he'd come for me, but if Knox had…if he'd been killed, then Ryder would alert the authorities, and Blackwood, and if Luna was still alive, she'd be screaming from the rooftops. Knox had mentioned his team, his boss too. Crazy, he'd called her. Crazy and deadly. If survival was impossible, I could hope for revenge.