AllFreeNovel
Share Us
In the corner there was no camera. Conor had taken it down. Which meant… it meant that we were really going to do this.
Santana was holding the syringe, so as my hands were free, it made sense for me to be the one to open the big double doors—and they weren’t locked. They squeaked a little as I pulled them aside, the runners crunching with sand, but neither Conor nor Zana stirred as we stepped across the threshold, holding our breaths.
Inside, the sound of the waves was muffled, and we could hear only Conor’s gentle snores, and a muffled whimper from Zana as though she was having a bad dream. Silently, I moved to Conor’s head, not touching him, but ready to try to hold him down if he woke and struck back at Santana. If the person who woke was Zana… well, we didn’t really have a plan for that. We’d have to cross that bridge if we came to it.
Gently, very gently, Santana pulled back the sheet, exposing Conor’s long tanned thigh, dappled with blond hair. I remembered her saying that you were supposed to inject insulin into fatty tissue—and Conor’s thigh looked more like a slab of pure muscle. But then, he’d been as lean and hard as they came two weeks ago, and all of us had lost weight since. There wasn’t an ounce of fat on him anywhere. His thigh would have to do.
She took a deep breath, holding the syringe up, and I could see that her hand was shaking. It occurred to me that although this was routine for her in a way it wasn’t for most people, it was still probably the first time she’d ever done it to someone else.
We had talked about it in the bathroom before we left. In and out, as fast as you can—like administering an EpiPen. Stab it in, press, and run.
“Ready?” she mouthed, and I nodded. “Three.” She was staring intently down at Conor’s thigh, her lips moving soundlessly. “Two.”
On one, she stabbed the syringe into his thigh.
What happened next was too fast for me to see, too fast for me to react, too fast to make out whether Santana had had time to press the piston.
I heard Conor let out a great bellow, like a wounded boar, and saw him rear up from the bed. Before I could move, let alone restrain him, he struck Santana full across the face, sending her flying backwards onto the tiled floor, where her head hit with a sickening sound. Still, she got up, blood pouring out of a wound on her temple, and began staggering for the door, but Conor was faster. He scrambled off the bed, on all fours like an animal, and grabbed her around one ankle. She went down, slipping on her own blood, and he hit her again, punching her in the back so that she crashed to the floor with a moan of pain. As she lay there, unconscious, he laced his hand into her hair, lifted up her head, and then with a calculated violence, he smacked it deliberately into the floor.
Santana lay still.
For the first couple of seconds, I had been too frozen with surprise to move. But with that last, horrible smack, my limbs seemed to unlock and I launched myself across the room to grab Conor from behind, my arm around his throat.
It was a stupid move. I should have gone for his eyes, or his balls. But I’d never studied self-defense and I suppose I was mimicking what I’d seen in the movies. Conor, on the other hand, was a fighter, a trained one, and my attempt at holding him back didn’t give him more than a few seconds’ pause. Reaching back over his shoulder, he grabbed hold of my hair and then flipped me, bodily, over his shoulder to crash to the floor, half-in and half-out of the water villa.
For a moment I couldn’t move, I couldn’t even breathe. I was so badly shocked and winded it was all I could do to lie there, choking, trying to catch my breath as Conor hauled himself to his feet, kicked Santana in the head, and pulled the syringe out of his thigh. He gave a snarl of fury, then began staggering towards me.
I couldn’t seem to inhale. I couldn’t get any air into my lungs, but somehow, with a huge effort, I rolled over onto my stomach, pulled myself to face the sea, and began dragging myself across the veranda, away from the villa. I’m not sure what I was trying to do, or where I was going. There was no way I could have managed to cross the jetty to the mainland on my hands and knees. I only knew that Conor was going to kill me, kill us both, and I had to get away—even if that meant drowning, I had to get away.
“San—” I managed, my voice strange and strangled. “Santa… you…”
Are you okay, was what I was trying to ask. I was too winded to complete the sentence, but even just a whimper from her would have told me whether she was alive, whether it was worth my while trying to get her out, or whether I could only save myself now.
“Santa—” I tried again.
But before I could get any more words out, I felt Conor’s hand close on my leg.
Desperately, I dug my fingers into the edge of the veranda, trying to pull myself away from him, haul myself to standing, but it was hopeless. I hadn’t even got a knee under myself when he flipped me over and straddled me, one arm crushing my windpipe.
“You little cunt,” he snarled. He was holding the syringe in his free hand, brandishing it close to my face. “What is this? What have you bitches done to me?”
I couldn’t answer. I could only gasp helplessly. His weight was immense, unbearable. It felt like my ribs might crack, my heart was hammering helplessly, hopelessly, desperately trying to get oxygen to my brain, but Conor’s thighs were squeezing all the breath out of lungs, and his forearm was pinning the arteries in my throat so that even if I had been able to breathe, no blood would have been able to make it past.
I could feel my limbs going numb as my body fought to survive, fought to pull back every atom of oxygen to the only thing that mattered—my brain. My vision was splintering into shards of light and dark.
“San—” I tried again. “Sa—”
Was she alive? Or had she already bled out on the villa floor, her body as limp as mine was fast becoming?
Because I was dying. I knew that, with absolute certainty. My thrashing limbs were barely twitching now. My vision was a mist of firework fragments and blurred darkness.
And then, through the scattered motes of blackness, I saw it, over Conor’s shoulder. The dark shape of someone staggering towards him. It was a woman, her arms raised, with something in them. It took me a moment to make out what it was—a water bottle—a big five-liter water bottle, that she was brandishing like a weapon.
“Sa…” I managed, and it came out like a death rattle, like the last gasp of someone with nothing else to give.
But it was only as she swung the bottle down towards us that I realized who was holding it. It wasn’t Santana. It was Zana.
CHAPTER 32
