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He looks amused. “We’re not escaping a villain, Sydney. ATVs are slow and would be a last resort. Hell,Mithrandiris the last resort if we can’t charter a plane in time.”

But that’s where he’s wrong. He’s so close to it that he doesn’t even see it.

There is a villain here.

And its name is the Madrona Foundation.

CHAPTER 26

The restof the day is uneventful as the storm continues to roll in. I’m too embarrassed to face my friends, so I go back to Kincaid’s boat with him. My brain keeps on wanting to think about Clayton, to talk about Clayton. I want to talk about the animals in the woods. I want to know if Madrona picked me for a purpose. All of the questions are on the tip of my tongue, threatening to spill, but I decide to deal with it the way I’ve been dealing with everything else. I put it in a box, put a bow on it, and shove it in the back of my head. Once I’m out of here, once I’m free from this goddamn fog and this fucking lodge, then I’ll take all the boxes out and face them. Unwrap the bows and deal with them head-on.

But for now, in order to survive these next few days, I have to focus on the present. If I start opening those boxes now, I will crumble and be of no use to anyone.

Kincaid takes care of me, which makes it easier to concentrate on him. He cooks for me, we have sex, and then I play the role of shrink.

I make him talk.

“Where were you born?” I ask him as we lie beside each other in bed. Above us, rain pelts the hatches, the sound soothing. The only sunshine of the entire day slanted down on us a couple hours ago, a peculiar, deep yellow light from a break in the storms, but the showers have picked up again.

He picks up my wrist and kisses the underside where the belt cut into me earlier when he had me tied up on the floor.

“Vancouver,” he says. “The real one, not the fake one in Washington.”

“What year?”

He pauses. “Are you going to judge me for being old?”

I laugh. “No. I like older men.”

“Fair enough. I was born in 1985.”

“So you’re thirty-seven.”

“Yes.” He hesitates. “Does that count as old?”

“Sure does,” I say playfully. “At least you’re not forty.”

“Heaven forbid,” he says, hand at his chest in a dramatic fashion.

“And where were your parents from?”

“Scotland,” he says. “Aberdeen. When I was younger, I had a Scottish accent because they taught me how to talk. I went to kindergarten sounding like Mike Meyers inSo I Married An Axe Murderer.You know, ‘Head! Move! Now!’” He says this in a pitch-perfect brogue, even though I have no idea what movie he’s talking about.

“Bah,” he says, giving my shoulder a tap. “I forgot that you youngins don’t know what good movies are.”

“Sounds like I’ll have to watch it,” I say. “As soon as we get out of here, unless you’re allowed to break the rules and show me a movie right now. Is the satellite still running? Maybe we can pull it up on Netflix.” I look at him with puppy dog eyes, dying for a distraction. “I’ll beg.”

He growls at me. “You know I can’t say no to you begging, sweetheart.” Then he gets up. “Alright. Stay here. We’ll watch it.”

“Are you for real?”

“I am for real, Syd,” he says with a grin as he disappears into the boat.

My stomach flutters with excitement, at the fact I’m going to actually watch a movie after I’ve been deprived of media for so long, but then my heart starts to flutter too. Like there are butterflies unleashed in my chest.

I’m not in love with Kincaid, despite what the butterflies are trying to tell me, but he must be feeling something if he’s willing to do all of this for me. And I don’t just mean showing me a forbidden Mike Meyers’ movie. I mean willing to quit his job to make sure that I get out of here, that I’ll have a life to return to. I know Everly was being sarcastic, but perhaps this could be the start of a precious love story.

Or maybe I need to rein it in and take this one day at a time.