Page 84 of Close Your Eyes and Count to 10

Tavo blew out an exhausted breath, rubbed hard at his right shoulder which she knew was injured. “Petra. She’s—I don’t know how to explain it—like a shaman, a spiritual leader.”

“With an army?” said Maverick.

“Some people call her aradical shaman, like a fighting shaman, if that makes sense. She protects the island and its people from the encroachment of outside forces.”

“What does that even mean?” asked Angeline. She thought of the old woman,small, wrinkled, and still somehow powerful. Righteous, a warrior.

“These islands were once untouched ecosystems with primeval forests, populated only by people whose ancestors had been here for a millennium. Over the centuries, people from Europe settled the islands.”

Tavo moved back toward them, went on, “In the eighties, the government allowed European companies to come in and clear-cut the land to raise cattle. We lost almost fifty percent of those ancient trees. Petra’s father, whose family descended from São Miguel, sold a huge portion of their ancestral lands, and in doing so became very, very rich. They became the wealthiest family on the islands.”

The trees. The thought of companies cutting down ancient forest made Angeline helplessly angry. How could be people be so blinded by greed?

Tavo went on, “Petra, in full rebellion of her father, became an environmental activist. She organized locals to make life very difficult for the cattle companies—staging sit-ins on land that was scheduled to be clear-cut, encouraging locals not to work in the slaughterhouses, lobbying the government not to allow foreign workers to be imported. She made life very difficult for the companies destroying the islands. One by one, they left. Now, her father dead, Petra uses her family’s wealth to control the islands and keep them safe from—”

“People like us,” said Angeline, feeling a squeeze on her heart.

Tavo offered a reluctant nod. “She and her team managed to eject the European companies, reclaim the land, and force the government to legislate against excessive tourism, any cattle ranching, blocking big corporations from building resorts and hotels, and resisting ports for cruise ships.”

“That’s nuts,” said Mav. “Don’t they want money? Look at this place. It could be a tourist mecca. Instead, it’s a ghost town.”

A ghost town. That’s what Mav saw when he looked at this pristine and beautiful place. A reflection of his own emptiness.

“Not everyone is motivated only by wealth,” said Tavo, voice low and cold.

“I haven’t heard you complaining,” said Mav. “You’ve never turned down your paycheck.”

She didn’t like the look on Gustavo’s face. Nose wrinkled like he was smelling something bad, eyes narrow. It was pure disgust.

“Look,” said Angeline. “We have like twenty huge, unsolvable problems right now. And if we’re going to survive them and get off this island, we have to work together. Can we do that?”

The silence grew heavier, electric with all their dark thoughts and raging emotions.

Angeline’s stomach bottomed out, a horrible sinking sensation. Nothing was ever going to be the same again. Before the last challenge, before Chloe, before she’d started sleeping with Tavo, they’d had a big anniversary party at Mav’s place. They brought in servers, bartenders, a chef. There was a jazz singer, an endless well of booze and food. At one point late in the evening, she’d stood on the balcony with Mav, looking inside at the party. Alex and Lucia were dancing slow, madly in love. Hector was laughing uproariously about something. Tavo was hitting on one of the waitresses.

“We built this,” Maverick had said. “From nothing.”

“Youdid,” she said.

“Nah,” he demurred. “All of us. The guys have been here since the beginning. You gave us a soul, a mission. We’re a family. And Extreme is the thing we all made together. We play hard, we give back. It’s good, right? Like really, really good?”

“Yes,” she said. “It is. Truly.”

And she’d believed that.

“I love you,” he whispered in her ear. He’d said it before, but he didn’t say it often. “Thank you for making me a better man.”

She loved him so much in that moment, his boyishness, his passion for Extreme,his willingness to give credit to his friends, when everyone knew that there was no Extreme without Mav. That he needed her.

“I love you, too,” she answered. She’d meant that, too, then.

And she remembered thinking that everything was so right, how could it ever go wrong? How could something so big, so powerful ever be anything less?

Now in the trailer, company teetering on the brink, Alex gone, what they’d done. There was a mercenary army guarding their exit. Maybe a killer or at least a saboteur stalking them. A challenge they had to get off the ground or lose everything. She didn’t even want to look at social.

All the men—the boys—were looking at her.

“What are we going to do?” asked Hector. The wind was wild now. The first raindrops started to fall.

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