Page 98 of Entangled

Wrong, wrong, wrong.

Even a clean death would be better than this.

Mateo glares at me, his eyes like coals in the night.

Before I even know what I’m doing, I’m kneeling in front of Alastair. I pull a fresh cloth from my bag and soak it in the antiseptic Jasper gave me from his med kit, then dab at a particularly vicious cut on Alastair’s forehead. His eyelids part, and he watches me like an injured dragon.

“Why bother?” Mateo brushes his cheek against Alastair’s hair. “Your friend will only make him hurt again tomorrow.”

My hand pauses in its treatment. I know he’s right.

“I’m sorry,” I whisper.

Mateo leans forward. “Don’t be sorry,gatita.Stop this.”

“Ican’t,” I hiss back, helpless. “I’m sorry, Mateo, but I can’t. They won’t listen to me.”

“So make them listen.”

My chest tightens, and it becomes hard to breathe.

When I had words with Dom about it, he shrugged me off uncomfortably, muttering something about how this was Heather’s fight.

Only it’s no kind of fight at all.

And while Heather has been trying to talk to me about anything and everything else under the sun, insistently trying to draw me back into our friendship, if I bring up Alastair, she stalks off like I singed her tail.

Every. Single. Time.

She won’t hear it.

I fall back onto my heels. “I shouldn’t have come. I’m sorry.”

A tattooed hand snatches my wrist, faster than my breath can strangle in my throat. Alastair’s grip is surprisingly strong, despite his weakened state—and fear turns me to ice.

Rope binds his wrists, and they strain against his grasp on me.

“Free us.”

His voice is a rasp. A whisper.

It chills me to the bone.

“No.”

The grip tightens. “One hundred and twenty-four.”

“What?” I resist the urge to yank my wrist out of his hand. It’s punishingly strong.

“One hundred and twenty-four women and children are being held at the Den,” he says softly, and so slowly. His cunning curls through the words. “Three hundred and twelve men keep them there. Using them. Treating them as slaves. Trading them. They use the children to keep the women in line, you know.”

“Stop talking.” I do try to yank back now, but his grip tightens over my hardly healed skin, and I whimper.

“Eighty of those men are mine. Many more are on the verge of joining me.” He’s calm and steady, but there are eddies and undercurrents in his voice. So many dangerous things, just beneath the surface. “It all falls apart if we die here. Those children will never be saved.”

I squeeze my eyes closed, Sam’s speech back at the camp ringing in my ears. My pulse is rampaging—he must feel it at my wrist.

He’s right. I know he’s right.

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