Page 50 of Cruel Dreams

She presses her face to my collarbone. “He has. Us.”

“No. We’ll get out of this. Somehow.”

She starts to cry, and to distract her, I ask about her mom and dad. She says her name is Carly, and she comes from a Midwestern middle- to upper-class family. Her mother is a former beauty pageant winner, and she encouraged Carly to compete too. Her father’s a banker, and her little brother is in the Boy Scouts.

I would have done anything to grow up in a family like that, and Carly ran away.

“I was tired of all the pageants. All my mom could talk about was hairstyles and makeup, and she would get crabby if I didn’t win.”

I want to push her away, scream at her she’s getting what she deserves for being an ungrateful little brat, but I think after all this, she knows. Quinn and I tell her stories about our time infoster care, hoping for a family as wonderful as hers wanting to adopt us, only, no one did.

Several other girls are listening, and they chime in and share their stories, too. Women falling into drugs, or relationships with abusive boyfriends. One young girl left her baby with her mother because she couldn’t properly take care of him, and she starts sobbing. She thinks she’ll never see her little boy again.

Without a way to count the minutes and hours as they pass, we lose track of time. It’s difficult to discern if we’re still moving, though there’s no reason why we would stop.

“How can we reach the ocean from Minnesota?” I ask, baffled.

Tana laughs, but it’s bitter and disillusioned. “I flunked Geography, too, hon, but we’ll travel the Great Lakes Waterway, then through the Saint Lawrence Gateway. That empties out into the Atlantic. We can get anywhere from there.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah. Can’t say how long a trip like that will take.”

I sigh against Quinn. My wrist hurts like hell. “How’s your shoulder?” She hasn’t complained about her gunshot wound, but I know she was helping us before she was ready.

“I need a bottle of whiskey and some painkiller. They could have given a girl some warning before throwing us in here.”

“I’m sorry I got you into this.”

“Don’t be. I’d do anything for you, Stella.”

“I don’t need you dying for me.”

Carly shifts next to me. “You think we’re going to die?”

“No. All the love stories you heard about Zane and Stella are true. He’ll find her,” Quinn says.

“Quinn,” I say sharply. I don’t want anyone getting their hopes up.

Even if Zane discovers us missing, who can he go to? Who will he call? Who can he trust who won’t run to Ash or his father?

“What? Hewillcome for you, Stella. I don’t believe for one minute this ship will reach the Saint Lawrence Whatever, much less to the ocean. I’m surprised we got this far.”

“This ship looks like all the others,” I argue. “What are they going to do? Search every ship on the Renegade?”

“If they have to, yes. Zane won’t let you disappear again.”

I don’t say anything. I love Zane with all my heart, but he’s not a miracle worker.

He’s given up on you before, a mean little voice taunts, but I swat it back. Zane isn’t the same person he was five years ago, and now he knows how evil Clayton and Ash are.

There’s nothing to do but sit in the dark and brood.

The air smells like feces and rotting fish, and I wish I could do something to help the woman who has morning sickness. Listening to her wretch, I want to do the same. Her birth control shot failed and one of her jobs knocked her up, Tana said. Ash told her to get rid of it, but she said no and he got rid of her instead. She’s curled in the corner, whimpering, the distressing sound pinging against the metal walls.

Ash dumped us in here in about three o’clock in the morning. By now the sun has risen, and it has set. We’ve been trapped in this container for almost twenty-four hours. How fast can a cargo ship go? That’s measured in knots, I guess, but I don’t know the miles-per-hour equivalent. I try to imagine the Great Lakes Waterway Tana described, but all I come up with is a wider picture of the Renegade.

I have no idea where we are, and I use strength I don’t have not to dissolve into a blubbering ball of tears. I hold my wrist to my chest and try to draw in comfort from Quinn. She was always better at handling the bad times than I am.

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