a try.”
“There’s a tray of food and water,” I say, pointing to the corner.
Langston tries to get up, but I put a hand on his chest. “I got it.” I walk over and pick up the tray before setting it down on the floor next to us.
Langston looks up, like he can’t believe food was lowered without us waking and noticing. I can’t believe it either.
Both of our stomachs growl, though, so any discussion of how we slept through the food being lowered will have to wait until we’ve finished eating.
There’s a couple of pieces of dry toast, peanut butter, and bananas. We eat everything on the plate and drink all of the water.
“We need a plan,” I say before I finish the last drop of water. We won’t survive much longer like this. We are getting fed, yes, but not enough to sustain us. We’ve both already lost a couple of pounds. Our injuries aren’t life-threatening so far, but that doesn’t mean it will remain that way for long.
“Do you have any ideas?”
“Yes, actually.”
He grins. “My huntress is always the best at coming up with the plans.”
“I suspect that we will once again be darted. That seems to be our captor’s MO. He doesn’t want us to know who he is. I don’t know if we can avoid being hit entirely by the darts, but we can pull them out as soon as it hits us, so that hopefully we don’t get a full dose, and we can remember more about our torture. Our goal after we are darted and raised should be to gather as much information as we can.”
“Your goal should be to run if you can. If you get an opportunity to get out, you take it. Don’t worry about me.”
I won’t agree to that, not unless I think I can get help to rescue Langston.
“I doubt we will have that opportunity unless we can avoid getting hit entirely by the darts. If we are even partially drugged, it will make it hard to run.”
“I don’t intend for you to be hit with another dart,” he says.
I shake my head. “You aren’t going to be able to prevent a flying dart from hitting me.”
“You vastly underestimate my abilities, huntress.”
I smile, sadly. “That’s because I’ve overestimated your abilities before and you failed me.”
His face looks crushed. He couldn’t prevent me from getting raped. He couldn’t keep me safe. From that point on, my life was different.
Langston reaches out and grabs the back of my neck as his thumb strokes my cheek. “There is no reason you should trust me in this. All I can do is apologize for failing you. I was young and stupid and cocky. I’m grown up now and have experienced the world. I won’t fail you. If I make a promise to you, I’m going to keep it. Even if it kills me.”
Everything inside me wishes I could believe him, but everything is screaming not to trust him.
17
Langston
Liesel doesn’t believe that I’ll do anything to protect her, and she shouldn’t. But it’s a vow I’ll keep all the same.
“Maybe we should tell each other everything on our half of the letter? Stop hiding secrets from each other, so we have all the information we need to steer our interrogators astray? Or at least if only one of us survives, we can have the information we need to go after the treasure ourselves,” she says, suddenly, completely out of character for her.
“You’re willing to give me the information that I’ve been begging for and threatening your life over, just like that?”
She stills and then blinks. “Yes.”
“And how would I trust that anything you said was the truth?”
“You’d know, just like I’d know if you were telling a lie.”
I don’t know her true motives for wanting to discuss what we know. But even if she wants to tell the truth, it can’t happen here.
“First of all, no one is going to die. I won’t let that happen.”
She sighs. “You aren’t God; you can’t control everything.”
“I can.”
She shakes her head with a smile. “Pompous asshole.”
“That’s me, but we can’t talk about the truth of what we know about the treasure. Whoever is holding us might be listening, and no one but the two of us can ever know the truth.”
She narrows her eyes, trying to understand what I’m not saying. She still doesn’t know the truth of why I want the treasure, why I’m pressing the issue so much, and she’ll probably never know.
“You’re right. I