“Oh yeah,” Kai said over his shoulder as he scrambled eggs in a pan, “turns out all we did was make her prickly.”
I wanted to laugh, but fake-Danny wouldn’t find this very funny. Not at all. So I slammed my coffee cup down on the counter and rose out of my seat. “Is this funny to you? I’m so glad my terror and imprisonment provides you with so much goddamn entertainment, you jacked up meathead. What kind of sick fuck—” I cut myself off, shaking my head in disbelief. “You know what? Fuck you. Both of you. I think I’d rather starve to death than sit here and pretend what you’ve done to me is in any way okay .”
Although it pained me more than I would ever admit, I backhanded my half-full coffee off the counter. It smashed on the floor, splashing dark liquid all over the cupboards, but I forced my feet to take me out of the kitchen, completing my tantrum.
I took the door to the outside, the one I’d taken before dawn when I’d “tried to escape.” My feet were still bare, and the day was cool, but I continued back down the path to the jetty once more. I’d have liked to explore the island a little more, but angry and scared Danny wouldn’t be in an exploring kinda mood. She would just sit on the end of the dock and cry.
“Fucking hell,” I muttered under my breath as I strode down the wooden jetty. “I’m going to run out of tears before I get off this island.”
Heaving a sigh, I sat my butt down and stared out at the horizon to summon up the waterworks. It wasn’t enough to just shed a few tears while someone was staring right at me, I needed to look like I’d been sitting out here sobbing my eyes out. They needed to be red and puffy.
It didn’t take long to trigger the right part of my brain to let the tears build up and start spilling over. I separated myself from the tiny, painful part of my mind that gave me that ability. Instead, I thought about Stanley and wondered if Jude had visited him to give him some water. Poor guy.
Then my thoughts wandered to Leon. Someone who’d featured far too prominently in my head for the time I’d spent in captivity. It sounded like he’d gone after them back in Shadow Grove when I’d been taken. But that seemed super risky for a hacker who probably hadn’t been involved in an active firefight since graduating the Guild training. His expertise was in computers. Tech. Data.
Unless there was more to Leon than he’d shown me so far.
For some reason, I kept coming back to that job we’d done in New York. Because I still hadn’t worked out how he’d made it down to the courtyard so damn fast when Ted the creep had hit me.
Footsteps vibrated the jetty boards beneath me, and I huddled in on myself to seem more distraught. Briefly I wondered if it might be Eli who had followed me out, but of course it was Kai himself. I was his prisoner, and he was making it crystal clear that he owned me by becoming glued to my ass tighter than a shadow.
He said nothing, though. Just sat down beside me and dangled his feet off the dock. His legs were so much longer than mine that his feet swished in the water, and I watched the blue green water swirl around his tanned feet.
“I don’t know what to do with you, Danielle,” he admitted after several minutes of sitting there beside me.
I sniffed dramatically, swiping my hand over my cheeks to wipe tears away. “Let me go.”
He shook his head, still staring at the water. “It’s not an option. For your own safety as much as ours. If I let you go…” He trailed off with a heavy sigh. “You’d be dead within a week. Or worse.”
So, he wasn’t worried about me going to any kind of law enforcement and screaming about my abduction, but more concerned that one of his enemies would squeeze me for the location of his top secret hide out. Even the biggest villain was vulnerable when they were asleep.
“Stop calling me Danielle,” I muttered. “My name is Danny.”
In truth, I had no idea what Danny was short for. But there was a very real employee of the Cloudcroft Bank named Danielle, so I’d assumed her identity. For as long as I could remember, I’d only ever been Danny DeLuna. Nothing more.
Kai tipped his head, giving me a side-eye look. “I like Danielle. It’s more delicate.”
I scoffed. “Is that what you think of me? That I’m delicate ?”
A grin flashed across his face, but he didn’t answer my question. Instead, he turned his gaze to the water once more.
“I love the ocean,” he confessed after a moment of silence. “When I was a kid, I used to run away from home. Moana would always find me at the beach, tossing stones into the waves. Even though she’s the one named after the ocean, I was the one always drawn to the water. Our beach was a dangerous one, too. Massive undertow right there from the shore that had dragged kids out and drowned them before. Beautiful, but deadly.”
He turned his head slightly to stare at me, but I pretended not to notice. “Why did you run away from home?” I asked instead.
Kai ran a hand over his close-cropped hair, like he was thinking how much to tell me. Maybe how much to fabricate.
“My mum was a shit human,” he admitted. “She was beautiful, though. Or so my kuia —my grandmother—used to tell us. But kids were a commitment she didn’t want, so when I was born, and Mo was only eighteen months, we got dumped on our grandmother’s doorstep. Mum never came back for us, and when our kuia died, we were handed over to our father.”
This part of his file had been vague at best, so I was curious to hear the story from Kai himself. Call me bored or something. I had to build trust between us somehow .
“I get the feeling your dad was an even bigger piece of trash than your mom was?” I leaned back on my hands, watching Kai from under my lashes.
He nodded. “Yeah. Understatement.” A long silence fell, and Kai seemed lost in his own memories for a minute. Part of his file had given a cursory mention of domestic violence in Kai’s paternal home, largely based on the fact that his father was an ultra-conservative, married, white man who’d had two biracial children with his secret lover.
Kai drew a sharp breath and looked over at me. “Were your parents any better?”
I swallowed hard, pushing aside the unfamiliar feeling of guilt as I prepared my story. “Uh, I didn’t know them. They both died in a car crash when I was two. My grandmother raised me, too. So I guess we kind of have that in common. She’s the one who gave me the watch Jae took when I woke up here. On her deathbed. It’s all I have left of her.”
It was a lie, of course. The real Danielle—whose life I’d adopted for this cover story—had lost her parents in a crash and been raised by her grandmother who died peacefully at age ninety-three, so I had to stick to the “truth” in case Kai had looked into “me” already.
“So you have no family left?” he asked in a quiet, thoughtful voice. “What about friends?”
I hadn’t delved that deep into my cover identity, not thinking I would need that much detail. So I had to wing it from here and hope that he was just trying to foster a connection rather than catch me in a lie.
“I have two best friends,” I told him, thinking fondly of Jude and Sabine. “Janet and Sarah. We all met at boarding school when we were twelve and stayed friends ever since. I don’t see them very often, because we live a long way apart and work gets in the way. But when we do see each other, it’s like no time has passed at all.”