Page 106

Eden

The tightrope between despair and hope can become a safety line

or a noose.

The next day, the Sinners are still suspiciously quiet.

As the rain continues to pour, I watch the trees from the porch outside, Lucky’s arms around my waist, but I only catch glimpses of the Sinners.

Occasionally, Dom sends Jayk, Jasper, or Lucky up to the moat for a better look, but an immediate storm of bullets is always quick to warn them back.

Occasionally, a Sinner creeps forward—from the front, the sides, sometimes fast, sometimes slow, sometimes one after the other, and sometimes with long dragging waits in between. Each time, Dom sends his own bullet-storm back.

It keeps everyone tense and on their toes—and between that and the wounded groaning through the house, the rain soaking cold into our bones, and the awful moment we hit the last of the raided supplies from the Reapers...

Bristlebrook feels like a tomb.

Two days after the attack on Bristlebrook, we lock ourselves into the surveillance room, deciding to watch the Sinners through the few remaining cameras instead.

My brutes gather around to watch the screens, their shoulders and matching intensity feeling too large for the small room. Not even Lucky makes a quip when I slide onto Jasper’s lap, and his arm slips around my waist with warm reassurance.

Leaning us forward, Jasper skips through footage from the attack, then slows it.

Through the blurry drops that mar the camera lenses, we see Alastair directing a strictly regimented camp into life that rolls with so many neatly ordered tents, we can only get a partial view.

We see the heavy-set bald man from the fight shouting in the face of a distinguished-looking older man who cleans his glasses in disgust when he walks off.

We see Mateo overseeing a dozen men as they chop down trees, and Dom curses.

When I glance back at him, his face is grim.

“To span the moat,” he explains, and my stomach turns.

Jayk grimaces, crossing his arms over his chest as he leans against the wall. “It was never going to slow them long.”

I went to bed with him last night in Dom’s room, though at some point he traded out for Jasper, and I somehow woke up with neither—Lucky and Beau stirred me awake with kisses and small jokes before Dom stuck his head in and told us to get dressed.

Now, Lucky’s eyes are cold on the screens. “We still have the C-4. Frags. I want to see them try.”

Jasper taps through a few more images and the recording shifts to another angle.

And we see Heather.

My breath catches in shock.

“Oh, no. No, not that. Better to beat her.” Beau’s distress crashes into my own, and I slip off Jasper’s lap to step in close to one of the screens.

“She’s lucky they didn’t kill her. Those explosives are invaluable,” Jasper mutters, but he sounds equally unhappy.

Deliberately, through the muck and the mud and fighting every step, Heather is being hauled along behind Alastair by a leash.

A dog’s leash.

Heather is shackled and collared like a dog.

Jayk mutters a curse as another Sinner spits on her face, and rows of the filthy men are lined up to do the same. They trip her and shove her back when she staggers, and I search her for any sign of injury. It’s not much relief when I don’t find any.

I’m not sure Heather has it in her to cry, but I might for her.

At one point, she rushes Alastair’s back, crashing into him, and he twists the leash, dropping her to her knees under him. In the rain, they glare at each other as the Sinners shout from the sidelines, and my palms sweat as I touch the glass like I might be able to change the outcome.

Bentley tries to shove forward out of the crowd toward Heather, but he’s shackled, if not leashed, and Mateo kicks the backs of his legs out from under him.

Behind Alastair, the bald man stalks up, his eyes on Heather, until the distinguished man from earlier intercepts him with a nervous expression.

Finally, Alastair drags Heather to her feet.

And she spits in his face.

Three days after the attack on Bristlebrook, a dreary sun begins to peek from the clouds—and the Sinners grow bolder.

They run forward in random bursts to fire on us, and the sound of their bullets pattering against our makeshift metal defenses replaces the rain.

Each time, the Sinners roar their approval.

And Alastair stands right on the tree line, watching with spine-chilling calm.

The Sinners are far enough away, and our defenses are thick enough, that the bullets rarely pierce through, but the fear of ricochets keep everyone’s heads low and someone from the medical team on standby.

And it doesn’t help anyone’s nerves.

Not even when Dom manages to snipe several Sinners as they retreat.

More death just means more bodies, and with the new sun, our moat is beginning to reek.

“Mantlets,” Arthur offers with a wan smile as I pour him out a cup of pale orange slop. “You made mantlets.”

He’s sitting on the porch amid dozens of other Reapers and civilians and his own people who are all mixed together. Despite the carnage and the fear, despite everyone keeping one eye on the trees, there’s a low roll of friendly chatter over the group.

The good living alongside the bad.

I smile softly.

There’s far too much banality in a siege to spend the entire time fretting.

“Jayk did it,” I tell Arthur proudly, and he nods as he drinks my slop.

He doesn’t even flinch, still staring, and I follow his gaze. He’s looking out over the battlefield.

No, not the battlefield, I realize. He’s looking at the moat.

“The rats will come here next,” he tells me in a low, sure voice. “We need to talk to Alastair.”

Rats .

I stare at him, stricken, then look back. There’s a Sinner corpse half-hanging into the moat, and it takes a moment of watching before I see it... move .

The rats are eating him.

Arthur begins murmuring, describing deterrents for rats, but I can’t look away from the twitching body in the distance.

There are two Reapers close to death in the med bay, and Cole is fighting a vicious infection from his leg wound. If they die... what are we going to do with the bodies?

I know now Beau almost lost his life dragging the man he lost into the moat.

It takes me another long moment before I can swallow and move on. We don’t need to borrow trouble.

There’s enough already here.

This time, as I move over the porch, people hold up their cups and take the ladled slop with tired smiles and quiet murmurs of “thanks, Eden” and “appreciate it, ma’am.”

Sawyer pauses his debate with Jennifer when I approach, tipping his head like he’s still wearing his hat, and when I move to Jennifer, curled against his chest, he absently gestures at me to give her more.

“... I just think it would make sense to see if the Sinners are willing to negotiate. I don’t want my friends to die,” Jennifer is saying. “Madison is still there, and?—”

“They’ll do much worse than kill you if they get their hands on you,” Sawyer argues heatedly, and I feel the anxious desperation bleeding off him.

“Forget Madison, sweet one. She’s gone. Just.

.. just trust me on this. You don’t want to surrender yourself to the Sinners. There’s no talking. We need to attack.”

My hand shakes as I reluctantly pour a little more into Jennifer’s cup, silently calculating every ounce we have left.

No one pours it out or makes quips about the taste. We’re down to two scoops a day, so they only close their hands around it and drink it gratefully.

I hate that it makes me want to hoard it all for myself and my brutes.

I hate that it makes me afraid.

I’m as exhausted and hungry as they are. My brutes are exhausted and hungry. By unspoken agreement, no one is fucking anymore. Instead, we take our rest when we can get it. Where we can get it. I take it with whichever of my brutes I can when I’m not drowning in tasks.

When I finish feeding everyone, Jayk’s waiting for me at the end of the porch, and he slugs a cup of slop back without a word, those midnight eyes on my face.

He’s dirty and tired from the day, and he lets me lead him upstairs and strip him off. I wash him under Dom’s cold shower just to see him smirk at his own asshole-ish handiwork.

And then we sleep.

Four days after the attack on Bristlebrook, we gather in Jasper and Lucky’s room at my request. It’s the most comfortable place for all of us right now.

As we sip our slop, I tentatively broach the topic of the farm animals. Kasey had food dumped in their pen the night of the attack, but they haven’t had anything since. There’s nothing left to give them.

But they could feed us.

“... I think we need to try it,” I finish, trying to ignore the way Beau is absently playing with my hair. “We only have a few more days of my slop left, and if Alastair is intent on waiting us out...”

Lucky walks away when I suggest it, running a hand down his face, and my heart tugs.

He’s been fine with most of the farm animals being used as livestock, but I know he has a soft spot for a few of them. Henrietta the needy chicken. Billy and Baa-bara, his favorite goats.

My favorite goats.

They give me cheese.

“Too risky,” Dom tells me grimly. “They’re too loud. We try to get them through the side tunnel, there’s a good chance we give it away. The chickens...”

“Likely wouldn’t have survived this long. Maybe some, on insects and ... and carrion.” Jasper’s eyes are sympathetic on Lucky’s face, and Lucky grimaces as he sits on the arm of a chair.

But he nods.