helping you?” she demanded. “What incentive does he have?”
“I’ve asked him the same question many times—he never answers.”
The guard yelled across the clearing. “What’s taking so long?”
I quickly turned and carried the first box to the table, feeling much better than I had yesterday after all that food I’d scarfed down. I set it down then returned to the table to prepare the next one.
Bethany met me at the same time.
“I need your help with something.”
“What?” she whispered.
“I need to figure out where my sister’s cabin is. Do you know?”
“No idea. I could ask Cindy, but she’s not going to know either.”
I glanced over my shoulder to look at where my sister sat. Cindy was nowhere nearby, seated much farther down the line. I would ask Beth to ask Cindy to ask Melanie during the workday, but that didn’t seem possible either.
“Are you lying to me?”
I stilled at the question and turned slightly toward her. “What?”
“Are you lying to me?” she repeated. “Because a guard wouldn’t stop a Red Snow like that unless there was something going on. There’s nothing to be embarrassed about. If I could have a guard to watch my back, I’d do it too.”
I opened the next box and got it ready. “I’m really not lying.”
“Then he must want to sleep with you.”
“He hasn’t asked. He hasn’t tried.”
“What will you do if he does?” she whispered.
“I…I don’t know.” I didn’t want to give in to any man’s demand, but Magnus was powerful, and if he wanted something from me, I wasn’t sure how I could turn him down. But he didn’t seem like someone who would only do nice things in exchange for sex, because he’d had weeks to make the demand and he hadn’t.
“What does he look like?”
“He’s got brown hair and brown eyes. Looks like he could be part French and part Italian.”
“Is he attractive?”
I’d never really considered it because attractiveness was out of context here. How could there be any form of desire when every single day was horrific? “He’s not bad to look at.”
An uneventful week passed.
Magnus escorted the woman to bring me dinner at night, and while he usually brought me hot cocoa and some other surprise, he never stuck around to talk. For a man willing to risk his neck to help me, it didn’t seem as though he liked me very much.
Or maybe he knew if he stuck around, I would just pester him to help me.
Magnus came to collect me one morning, and instead of escorting me to the clearing, he took me away from the camp.
I already knew where we were going. “Is there a drop today?”
He walked ahead of me, moving effortlessly through the short mounds of snow. “Sounds like you already know the answer.” He escorted me to where the girls were waiting with the men and the wagons. Once he had me in sight of the guards, he turned away. “Don’t do anything stupid.” Then he walked back.
Beth and Cindy were both there, and they immediately walked over to me once Magnus turned away.
I instantly asked the question on my mind. “Cindy, do you have any idea which cabin my sister is in?”
She crossed her arms over her chest to fight off the cold. “No. They don’t tell us stuff like that.”
“At the end of the workday, do you ever see which direction she goes in?”
She shook her head. “I’m sorry.”
The last girls were escorted to the meeting point, and then we moved farther into the plains in front of the camp. A layer of snow from the last storm still lingered, but it had slowly melted to a smaller size because of the clear weather we’d had. It was sunny and clear today, so I took advantage of the conditions to look into the distance, to see if I could spot a landmark, some sign of human civilization.
There was none.
Like last time, the plane approached. It appeared from the Alps and came our way, the engine getting louder and louder. Then the crates fell from the sky, landing on the powder below. They dropped it as they continued to fly past, leaving a trail of cocaine-filled breadcrumbs.
Then the plane left.
“Move it,” one of the guards barked.
We seemed to be out here at the same time as last time, so I hoped to hear that church bell again, that a priest rang it at the same time every day.
We moved to the crates and started to put everything in the wagons. I wasn’t as