Fourth a Lie (Goddess Isles, #4)

by Winters, Pepper

  How was that possible in this day and age?

  Dragging my hands through my hair, I sniffed up tattered determination and grabbed my phone again. Sully had guests fly in and out. He released goddesses, for God’s sake.

  There had to be some mention of him.

  I’ll try Facebook.

  Logging on, I went to put in Calico’s real name, Sonya Teo, but my inbox caught my eye, habit making me click on that first.

  Scott Martin’s message bubble popped up from the night of my abduction. If I thought he cared about me, and that we were building a meaningful connection, I’d been a stupid idiot.

  Scott Martin: El, where the hell are you? It’s late, and I’m drunk from those damn Irish and their super livers. I’m crashing on the bottom bunk tonight. When you get in, take the top. I’ll see you in the morning.

  Scott Martin: What the fuck, El? Did you sleep somewhere else last night? I saw that English twat flirting with you before you went into the kitchen to cook us dinner. You better not have been with him while I was too drunk to notice.

  Scott Martin: This is getting rude. I’ve had to check out of the backpackers as we’re catching the flight tonight for the bachelor party. I have your stuff...you coming or what?

  Scott Martin: I’m at the airport. I’ve left your bag at reception of the backpackers. Poor form, Eleanor. If you wanted to end it because I refused to go to Asia with you, the least you could’ve done is tell it to my face.

  Scott Martin: Look, I’m sorry. You okay? I’m getting a little worried. Just message me instead of giving me the cold shoulder. You’re still welcome to come to the party. Message me when you get these, and we’ll work something out. Let me know you’re alright at least.

  Scott Martin: Okay, I know this is a dick move, but...your profile is still showing active, so I know you’re okay. Look, this isn’t working. I have no interest in going to Asia. Ever. I’ve enjoyed getting to know you, Eleanor, but...feel free to chase your own destination from this point on. See ya.

  Wow.

  How could I ever have felt guilty when I’d fought my attraction for Sully out of loyalty to that asshole? How could I ever, ever compare what I felt for Sully to the minuscule blip that Scott had been?

  I wanted to feel something.

  Rage. Injustice. Pissed off.

  But all I felt was...nothing.

  He was nothing.

  His lack of concern while I’d been kidnapped and sold only added more panic to my desire to return to Sully.

  Sully would never treat me that way. He would never forget about me so heartlessly.

  He sent you away, remember?

  Only to keep me safe!

  My heart rabbited.

  He’d sent me away to keep me safe.

  He’d given me no option to return so he knew I would continue to be safe.

  But what about him!?

  He’d held me and kissed me, and I’d felt his love, his regret, his pain.

  He’d known something bad would happen.

  He’d protected me by giving me up.

  He’d sacrificed us because he loved me.

  God, I can’t do this anymore!!!

  Regardless of safety or sanity. Despite the impossible task.

  I need to go back.

  He would’ve come for me by now. He would’ve appeared at the end of the street or pulled me into an alley if he’d won against his brother—because if he felt a tenth of the pain caused by our separation that I did...nothing would’ve kept him from chasing after me.

  That wasn’t ego.

  That was inevitability.

  The only reason he hadn’t was...he’s hurt.

  Sully!

  Launching from my chair of crates, I opened a tracking app and installed it on my phone. While I sped down the dock, I called my father.

  It went straight to voicemail.

  It didn’t matter.

  I only wanted to update my insurance policy.

  The answer machine beeped, and I rushed, “Dad, the man I mentioned, Sullivan Sinclair? He’s in trouble. I’m travelling to a set of islands that isn’t on any map. There’s no airport code or address. All I can give you is this phone number and a tracker app that I’ve installed. Trace the call, Dad. Give my location to the police. I don’t know how I’m going to find my way there, but I will. I have no choice—”

  I slammed to a stop as a pallet loader drove past, cutting off my race down the dock.

  I went to travel around him.

  I opened my mouth to give more details to my father.

  But then, I froze.

  Fate.

  Glorious, mercurial fate.

  It’d just given me a way back to Sully.

  A blatant clue that’d driven directly into my path.

  The boxes stacked high on the pallet loader held a distinguished, solemn SSG.

  Sully’s logo.

  Sinclair and Sinclair Group.

  And the boat they were being loaded onto?

  My chariot back to him.

  Chapter Seventeen

  “ARE YOU QUITE DONE?” Drake snapped as my rage petered out thanks to fever, agony, and nausea.

  Eleanor!

  Stay the fuck away from here!

  I couldn’t catch a proper breath. My leg drained me of every awareness and energy. My mind fixated on Jinx. On the horror that I couldn’t fucking protect her. That I’d failed her. I’d failed fucking everyone!

  Drake snapped his fingers, summoning two mercenaries as the ringing of my handcuffs fell silent. “Let’s get started. Don’t have all fucking night.”

  My hate reached critical levels, blistering through me and feeding me false power.

  I glowered as a man dressed all in black brought over a foldable table, and another man deposited a box on top. The weak glow of the light above created shadows and sinister promises.

  I stopped fighting.

  My eyes locked onto the box and the contents that I was highly intimate with.

  Fresh agony swamped me. My back arched as metal bars bit into me. Blood trickled once again down my thigh. If I kept struggling, would I eventually get free or would I fail Eleanor faster than I already was?

  Breathing hard, covered in pain-sweat, I growled, “Crawling over my island and helping yourself to my Euphoria supplies, brother?”

  Drake nodded, his hands diving into the cardboard and placing the smaller packages in a line up on the table. Each one had a purple orchid stencilled on the top.

  A big fuck-off hint what the main ingredient was.

  A cocky decision on my end, yet my witless brother hadn’t realised the clue staring him in the goddamn face.

  “Found your playroom. Couldn’t figure out how to load a fantasy, though, so that’s another thing you’ll have to divulge, along with telling me how this stuff works.” He ran his fingertip over the lids. “Seeing as we have time while waiting for Eleanor Grace to arrive, how about we do an experiment?”

  I held his stare. “I’ve already tested and perfected the sensors. They don’t need further experiments.”

  “Oh, these do.” He picked up the oil, sloshing glittery liquid in its bottle. An oil specially crafted to distort the sense of touch while in the virtual reality hallucination. “Let’s just say, I’ve tweaked them. Made them better.”

  I didn’t ask what he’d done.

  I wasn’t an idiot.

  Whatever he’d done would guarantee pain.

  That was his MO.

  Torture, then torture some more, keep torturing until death.

  “I helped myself to your supplies while you took a nap, but I couldn’t find your stash of elixir. Where is it?”

  I bared my teeth, cursing the rush of sickness originating from my harpooned leg. “Don’t have any left.”

  My patience was a big fat fucking zero.

  The wire beneath me, the handcuffs biting me, the threat of Eleanor’s life? It’d put me in a right shit. The only thing stopping me from killing hi
m was a cage and these handcuffs. My injuries wouldn’t matter the second I got close enough to slaughter him.

  His temper flared, his forehead trying to furrow but struggling thanks to Botox. “Bullshit, where do you keep it?”

  “It’s true. My supplies are gone.”

  It was bullshit.

  Kind of.

  I had three vials left in my apothecary cabinet in my office.

  But that didn’t include the entire box that’d just finished cooking in my lab on Monyet—another island named in Indonesian for monkey. An ode to all the primates that’d died in the quest for useable drugs. An island that was my most heavily fortified, hidden, and priceless jewel in my empire.

  “Still a terrible liar, Sullivan.”

  I smiled savagely. “What can I say? I detest thieves.”

  “A thief? Me?” He chuckled. “Just taking what’s rightfully mine.”

  “And I’ll take your life for this.”

  He clucked his tongue. “You’ve created a fantasy, and now, you’re believing in one.” Unboxing the rest of my VR sensors, he lifted out eye lenses, fingerprint deceptors, nasal stick, taste scrambler, and earplugs. Unlike my carefully designed stock, these had been tampered with. The contents were different. The colours all wrong.

  Raising his eyebrow, he sighed as if he’d rather just be resting than preparing to torture his own flesh and blood. “Ah well, first things first.”

  My stomach clenched as he snapped his fingers at a mercenary who came gingerly toward my cage. Drake passed him a key, and the man swallowed as he inserted it into the lock and opened the gate.

  One imprisonment down.

  I rolled my wrists in the handcuffs, hissing as my torn skin oozed blood. Pain gathered on top of pain, but I ignored it all.

  I had to stay lucid for this.

  I had to survive this because I fucking refused to fail Eleanor again.

  Drake took the key back from the guard and replaced it with the skin oil. His blond minion wrapped his fist around the bottle.

  Drake arched his chin at me. “For the next few hours, you are my own personal guinea pig. You liberated all those animals in our labs. You feel such empathy for the rats and vermin that were born for that very fucking purpose. Therefore, you will become them. You get to feel how they did, baby brother. You get to have your skin burned, eyes blinded, and veins pumped with concoctions.”

  Reaching through the bars, he patted my head like I was some doomed beagle ready for a scientist and their syringe. “Rather poetic, no?”

  I tore my head away, snarling, “You’re a sick sonovabitch.”

  Nodding at the mercenary, he said, “Pour that oil on my brother. He won’t bite.”

  I snarled as the guy ducked to enter the door. He legitimately looked afraid about climbing into a small cage with me.

  He should.

  My arms might be restrained, but my legs weren’t—even if one had a massive hole in it.

  Drake pulled up his chair and sat as if I was his favourite brand of entertainment. “Maybe we’ll get you spouting the recipe for elixir before Eleanor arrives. If we get business out of the way, we can focus on pleasure the moment she lands.”

  I fucking hated her name on his tongue—I wanted to rip it from his godforsaken mouth for ever mentioning her.

  I had a tally.

  A tally on every infraction Drake had done to me since I was fucking born. I owed him a lifetime of torture for what he’d done to Serigala, to my animals, and to Jinx. I had an entire notebook requiring savage reciprocation, and I couldn’t fucking do a goddamn thing as the guy bent and poised over me, the bottle tipping to pour oil over my bruised and broken body.

  Drake had taken away my ability to deal with this as a man. He treated me like a creature...so I’d become a fucking creature.

  I didn’t wait to strike.

  I just did.

  Kicking out, I scissored my legs around the guard’s ankles, dropping him to the floor. The oil splashed onto my belly, burning, bubbling—a form of acid chewing through my flesh.

  I bellowed with agony as he cried out and bounced off the metal wire, then screamed as I wrapped my thighs around his throat and squeezed.

  I fucking squeezed.

  I locked my ankles and crushed his goddamn windpipe.

  “Ah, for fuck’s sake.” Drake clapped his hands in impatience, signalling for reinforcements. “All of you, it seems this is gonna be a team affair. Stop my brother from murdering your colleague and get some rope for his legs.”

  Three mercenaries jumped from the shadows. One went behind me and shoved his hand through the bars. I tried to bite him, but he managed to grab a fistful of my hair, jerking my head back.

  The guy between my legs turned blue, his eyes bugging as I shoved him closer and closer to death. He scratched at my thighs, making me bellow when he clawed at my wound.

  I squeezed harder.

  His eyelids fluttered closed.

  Two mercenaries climbed into the cramped cage with me, kicking at my guts until I couldn’t ignore the pain anymore.

  “Fuck!” I let my victim go.

  I breathed hard as the two men carted their colleague’s lifeless body from the cage and dropped him at Drake’s feet.

  They didn’t revive him.

  Instead, they entered the cosy quarters I’d found myself in and wrapped a heavy rope around each ankle. Only once they’d tied me to each side of the cage, spreading me, making me utterly defenceless did the redhead one leave to deal with the unconscious guy.

  A dark-haired one grabbed the abandoned oil bottle.

  He gave me a nasty smile and squatted between my spread legs, pulling out a knife from his commando boot. “Not so scary now, are ya?” With our eyes locked, he tipped the oil down my chest, rivering over silver scars courtesy of a younger Drake, dripping into fresh scratches from our beach battle, stripping flesh from my bones with corrosive and caustic agony.

  My vision went red.

  My back arched.

  I howled.

  The last thing I heard as I tripped into deeper hell was my brother muttering, “Put in the lenses. Let’s see how he likes being blind.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  I STOOD ON THE bow of my chariot.

  I clung to the railing as the sun rose in all its tangerine and golden glory, shining its glow on the cluster of islands on the horizon. Sun spiels painted heavenly spotlights on Goddess Isles.

  Islands that were invisible to the outside world.

  Islands that housed a man I adored.

  I’m home.

  Tears sprang to my eyes as the small cargo ship chugged its way closer and closer. I swayed with the waves beneath the hull. I fought the urge to fall asleep while standing.

  I’d never been so exhausted. So drained. So fraught.

  Not even when I’d been sold.

  When I’d been kidnapped, my worry had only been about me. My fear nursed around my heart for my own mortality. This time, my worry had extended outward. A thousand strands of concern all straining to find Sully, all failing until fate had decided I was worthy of going back.

  I turned and looked at the ratty boat that’d sailed me throughout the night and the mismatch crew who’d been my champions.

  Intan, the teenager who’d been driving the pallet loader, had been my ticket home. I’d chased him all the way to the boat tether where he deposited the boxes with Sully’s logo onboard.

  He hadn’t seen me.

  I’d pulled out a fist of money, ready to bribe and cajole, only to freeze beneath the stare of a sea-weathered captain as he popped out from the tiny cabin above.

  Our eyes had locked.

  Something sinister slithered down my spine.

  A harbour breeze sprang up and danced in my dress with warning.

  If it’d just been him on that boat, I would’ve heeded the ominous sinking in my belly and admitted that not everything was fate’s design. But a girl appeared and kissed his whiskered ch
eek.

  A granddaughter perhaps?

  A girl dressed in the subtle olive uniform of the gardeners on Lebah.

  It was another sign. Sully’s staff and his supplies. If I didn’t grasp this opportunity, I might never get another.

  Something had happened to Sully.

  I knew that in my bones.

  I was past the rational stage of what I could do to help.

  I gave up believing I was some Amazonian warrior with talents to free him.

  I was just a simple goddess in love, willingly putting her life on the line because Sully had done the same for her.

  Intan smiled and came toward me, holding out my phone. His young, tanned face was the epitome of innocence while the salt-cragged captain still set my teeth on edge. “Here. Charged.”

  “Thank you.” Taking it, I checked the connection. No bars. No service. Would my dad be able to track me without cellular towers to guide his way?

  I was walking into danger, but I had an army coming...I hope.

  “Grandfather say dock no big. We get closer. You swim.”

  I looked past Intan to the old man in his cabin. A man who’d never taken his gaze off me the entire journey. Every now and again, I’d catch guilt in his black stare, followed by pissed-off acceptance.

  Something wasn’t right about him.

  I wasn’t an idiot. I knew I should heed the vibe he gave, whispering harsh with warning. But his grandkids had been a buffer between us, and my priorities overshadowed my concern.

  Besides, Intan had been nothing but sweet to me, sharing his packed dinner of rice and watermelon, charging my phone when it died an hour into the cruise, staying up with me to stargaze—even though exhaustion made my words slur and my heart skip with nervousness. He’d kept me awake, chattering in a hiccupping blend of English and Indonesian.

  He’d been the one I’d approached first. After he’d deposited the pallets onboard the tatty boat that waited like an old family pet—a pet that probably had arthritis and kidney issues—I’d ignored the old man above and stepped in front of Intan, holding out two thousand dollars. “I know where you’re going, and I know who those boxes are destined for. I want to come with you.”

  He’d turned off his loader and tiptoed toward me as if the money would suddenly vanish. His mouth had fallen open, his cheeks covered in pimples and his chin cute with a dimple. “You want go Lebah?”