ran as quickly as my body and blinding tears allowed. He didn’t bother to run after me as I feared, but I did hear jarring noises, one after the other echoing behind me. I ran faster, terrified with the sudden notion that he was now throwing things at me. I didn’t stop to look—I only pushed my body harder, not stopping until I reached the safety of Charlie’s cabin.
After I locked the door, I pushed the crate in front of it so it was leaning against the knob. It was stupid to even be in that cabin when Charlie was probably the most dangerous person I could encounter. But I was also relatively unfamiliar with the ship and didn’t know where else to go. The terrible things he had said to me were ricocheting in my head. I detested how much sense it all made. I knew just from watching the news that horrific things happened to young women every day and I had had enough sense to worry about this earlier, so how could I have been so stupid? I wasn’t safe here. I had never been safe here. And I must have been out of my mind to have thought otherwise.
With all of my frustration and grief, I tried pushing the makeshift bed and mattress up against the door barricade, but only ended up causing further strain on my already sore ankle. Whatever kind of wooden boards were being used as support beams were much too steady for me to even budge, much less move across the room. I compromised by dragging the mattress to the barricade and sliding myself against it. In reality, however, I knew it was useless. If someone really wanted to get in here it wouldn’t be too difficult. All I had really done was maybe buy myself some time.
I tossed my head against the mattress, letting the tears flow freely. More than anything I felt like the world’s greatest idiot for simply believing him when he told me there would no longer be an Internet connection when we got to a certain point. Why hadn’t I pestered him about it further? Why didn’t I try to think of something to get the Wi-Fi card?
Because I had been stupid, that’s why. I had let myself fall and get wrapped up in something that was so far off from reality I hadn’t even realized what was really going on.
Charlie had admitted the only reason I was alive at this point was because of the awareness of my abduction in the media. In that I wanted to be grateful—I had read that the media knew who he and Ben were, and Charlie had revealed Dad was making a lot of fuss about my kidnapping. In the face of all of his lies that one held the most potential truth—Dad and Robbie would never stop looking for me, even if they thought they had to find Charlie himself.
I almost wish they wouldn’t.
I wished no one was looking for me and I would quite literally fall off the face of the planet and never be seen again. While I was far from perfect, nothing had made me feel less intelligent than trusting in Charlie. It was almost unfathomable that I could spend a lifetime relying on my intelligence as a main source of my identity when clearly I was so daft. I felt like he had taken a bulk of me away from myself, leaving the remaining pieces filled with charred holes and burned ends.
Chapter 12
I cried until my eyes burned and the walls became blurry. I started thinking of Dad and Robbie, which was a mistake because it only made me more miserable. Here I was, this selfish little girl wrapped up in my ridiculous infatuation, and I had completely forgotten the hardships my father and brother were probably going through. Only a true monster would encourage the pain they were enduring now—what we all were enduring.
The last genuine hope I had to cling to remained with the knowledge that we would arrive at port any time now. If that was still true, then Charlie, the guys, and the remaining crew only had a limited number of hours to change their mind about what to do with me. But what did I know about truth? Maybe what I had heard from Polo had been a lie to begin with. Obviously Charlie’s affections toward me had been a lie. Despair pinched my insides as I relived it again.