Page 29 of Entangled

I frown. “I don’t think she’s going to?—”

Jaykob shoulders past me, but the move lacks its usual aggression. “What are you standing around for? We’re wasting time.”

Considering his back, I follow him, and Jasper falls in behind me, a new energy to our steps.

We’re in for another big night, and our task is still daunting. Borderline suicidal. But for the first time in days, we have a lead. For the first time in days, it feels like we’re in this together.

For the first time since I saw Bristlebrook burn, I havehope.

We’re coming, pet.

Chapter9

Eden

Survival tip #192

The greatest friends are those

who stand with you against the dark.

Protect them at all costs.

The darkness is closing in around me again.

Tonight, Madison and I are both tied to the tree again, where Mateo silently secured us after our pitiful, failed escape attempt. Mercifully, that’s all he did. For some reason, he didn’t say a word to the other Sinners.

After exhausting herself working at her ropes and shouting insults at the men around us, Madison eventually drifted off to a restless sleep.

But, yet again, sleep doesn’t have the grace to take me as well.

My hands make fists in the thin, coarse blanket, and I’m silent as I shake. I’ve come to dread nightfall. Every time the sun drops away, my poor vision fails—and when that unforgiving black stretches out like a starless galaxy, it begins to fill me. Drip by slow, inexorable drip.

I have ample reason to be afraid, of course, with Sinners all around me. Except they aren’t why, night after night, terror takes me by the throat. I’m not frightened of what lies in the darkness.

I’m frightened of what isn’t.

Because all around me, every night, is nothing. That inky wasteland is empty of feeling, of a future, of life. My brutes don’t exist in this barren void of a world, and despite the breaths and rustles that tell me Sinners surround me, I can’t help but feel like they don’t exist either.

That I don’t.

That, whether it’s tonight, tomorrow, or some day weeks from now, I am going to die, and this emptiness will be all I know. Just this horrible, silent abyss that’s vacant of anything that matters. Impossibly forever, beyond thought or imagination, just... nothing.

Or worse... maybe I’ll live.

And I hate it, I hate myself for even thinking it, because all my life, survival has been it. The goal.

But I know what that life is like. It doesn’t matter that I lived it for four years, all those days and nights by myself, clawing at the earth to give me its fruit and sinking into pages so I could pretend I wasn’t alone. It doesn’t matter that for all of those years, the darkness didn’t frighten me.

Because back then, I didn’t know.

Bristlebrook was like sinking my teeth into some kind of nectarous fruit. Like I studied sunlight and worked out how to make it slide through my veins. There, I remembered how to laugh, and fight, and bleed, and ache, and fuck, and feel.

No, I wasn’t afraid of the night before. You can only be frightened of emptiness after you know what it is to be full.

No matter how careful my schemes, and how hard I fight for another day, even in the best of all scenarios where I survive, for the first time, I wonder . . . what is the point?

The night will always come for me.

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