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My mind reeled as I struggled to process the words that had just been spoken to me.
Captured.
Surrender.
Encampment.
War.
Termination.
I was dreaming. I had to be. That was the only rational explanation.
“Ten.”
But I wasn’t waking up.
“Nine.”
Why wasn’t I waking up?
“Eight.”
My eyes darted all over the wreckage, now illuminated by the spotlight, and the nightmare morphed into a horror film. In the light, I could see that the rubble I’d been digging through was splattered with blood. Everywhere I looked, I saw pulpy chunks of flesh, clumps of hair, severed fingers, splintered bone.
And I was kneeling in it.
My gaze landed on Sheila’s hand again—my father’s key ring still looped over her knuckle—and a voice inside of me screamed, Take it!
Shoving my hand into the pile of plaster and wood in front of me, I held my breath as my fingers brushed Sheila’s. A wave of nausea swelled in my throat at how real it felt. How cold and rubbery and limp.
“Seven.”
I slid the key ring off her finger and scrambled over the debris toward the area where I thought Oliver’s van was parked. It was hard to tell where I was with all the smoke and rubble. Nothing looked familiar. Nothing but the keys in my hand. The drone and its spotlight followed me effortlessly, lighting my way.
“Six.”
Butterflies of elation took flight in my belly as soon as the van came into view, but they quickly died, along with any hope I had of escape, when I realized that the driver’s side of the vehicle had been completely crushed under our chimney.
“Five.”
I stopped and stared at that wreckage as if I were staring into my own freshly dug grave. That van had been my only chance. I couldn’t outrun a drone, not for long. But I couldn’t force myself to lift my hands and surrender either. I watched the news. I knew what happened to female prisoners of war.
“Four.”
That was it then. I’d made my choice. Maybe there would be an afterlife and I’d get to see my family again, or maybe there’d be nothing but an endless black abyss. Either way, my suffering would be over in …
“Three.”
I held my breath and closed my eyelids, waiting to see my short, miserable life flash behind them. But it wasn’t my life I saw at all. It was him.
Steely-gray eyes shone up at me as I sat, perched on the branch of an oak tree. The fairy prince was shirtless and shoulder deep in the lake where we used to play—the one deep in the forest that was surrounded by blackberry bushes. The sky above him churned like a witch’s cauldron. The mist on the water rose toward it in curling tendrils. But there, in the center, was the eye of the storm. Calm. Powerful. Focused solely on me. The boy had become a man, and the sight of him twisted a knife of longing in my belly. The pain was sharp and deep as I gazed upon his hardened features. His cut hair. His square jaw, held high. A face that had once blushed bashfully under soft curls now gazed upon me with cold, masculine confidence.
“Jump,” he commanded, extending his sculpted, muscular arms toward me.
I’d never heard his voice before. The sound of it was so velvety and hypnotic that it took me an extra second to register what he’d said.
An extra second that I didn’t have.
