They all know that I think she’s still alive, and no one has the heart to tell me differently.
“He’s on a yacht.” She doesn’t say it excitedly. There’s something she’s not telling me.
“Where?” I move closer to her, getting in her face trying to read her mind and hesitation.
“Here. The yacht is less than ten miles away. He stole one of our ships and has been moving it around the Pacific Ocean, getting close occasionally, but not so close that we would suspect him. Until now.”
“It’s a trap?”
She nods. “He wants us to find him. That’s what’s changed.”
Shit.
I stare out into the ocean. I can’t see any yachts except for Kai and Enzo’s, but he’s here. He’s been taunting us this entire time with how close he is—something’s changed.
“What do we do?” she asks.
“We go kill him.” And we find Liesel alive.
23
Liesel
“Bishop to the second white square from the right,” I say.
“That’s bishop to F5,” Corbin sighs, exacerbated with me for once again not using the actual names of the squares. In the months we’ve been playing chess with each other in our heads, I’ve learned what the squares are called, but I like annoying him.
“It doesn’t matter what the name of the square is; that’s check,” I say.
“Actually, that’s checkmate,” Maxwell says, throwing a ball he made out of aluminum foil and catching it.
“It’s not. It can’t be,” Corbin goes through the position of all my pieces in his head, trying to figure a way out of it. I don’t think there is a way. My queen and bishop are positioned perfectly, and I have his king stuck in a corner. I think I’ve won.
“Dammit,” Corbin finally curses. “You win again.”
I grin as I lay on my cold mattress with my arms behind my head, staring up at the ceiling.
“Your turn to play me, Max.”
“Nope, I’m not playing chess with you. You know how much I hate using my brain that much.”
“We could play checkers?”
“No.”
“Tic-tac-toe?”
“No.”
“Fine, push-up or pull-up challenge?”
“Push-ups,” Max grins.
Corbin and I roll my eyes. While Corbin prefers to work his brain, Maxwell prefers to be entertained with games of physical strength.
We all roll off our mattresses to the floor. We get in position to start our push-ups, and then Maxwell shouts, “Go!”
We don’t have a timer or any sort of clock to measure how many we can do in a set time. Instead, we just go until one of us can’t anymore, then we count. In the months we’ve been doing this, I’ve only won the pushup contest once. And that was only because Maxwell was sick with a cold, and Corbin let me win.
I don’t expect to win, but it is fun to watch the two brothers compete.
I move quickly, doing as many push-ups I can before I exhaust my arms. I love how it feels to have my blood pump fast, and my lungs burn with exertion.
I get lost in how my body feels. I forget my pain, how I’ve failed to kill my father. I forget about everything. If I’m honest, I think doing the physical games take my mind away from everything better than the mental games with Corbin. But I wouldn’t ever tell Corbin that. Both brothers are trying their best to take care of me and distract me.
My arms continue to push my body up off the floor before lowering myself back down—again and again and again.
Finally, I collapse. My arms no longer have the strength to lift again.
The boys notice and stop their push-ups.
“One hundred and five,” Corbin says.
“One hundred and thirteen,” Maxwell says and then looks to me. “Liesel? Are you alright?”
I can tell by his voice that I don’t look good. I’m sure my face is pale, my breathing shallow and erratic. “I’ve been waiting for death for a long time; it never comes. I’m not going to die because I did too many push-ups.”
“Still, you should take it easy,” Maxwell says.
“This is why we should play mental games, not physical ones,” Corbin says.
I sit up to prove that I feel fine. “I’m fine. See, perfectly fine.”
I feel my stomach twisting, and I suspect I’ll be sick soon. I take a couple of slow breaths, trying to ease my queasiness. I try to hide how I feel from them, but they notice.
“Come here,” Corbin says.
I inch myself closer to the bars on his side. He wets a cloth and presses it to my forehead before lifting a bottle of water to my lips.
“Drink.”
I take a couple of small