When someone says oh fuck, fully clothed, it’s rarely a good thing.
The thought flashed unbidden through Heidi’s mind, followed by a sharper one: Unless you’re naked and enthralled with one another. But Jacques saying it in perfect, clipped English, binoculars trembling in his hands, all the charm burned clean off his face?
That was the other kind.
She didn’t need to ask what he saw. She already knew.
But that came later.
Before the darkness arrived, there was this:
Lila, leaning against the port railing in the last gold hour of the evening, a glass of something pink and irresponsible dangling from her fingers, her hair loose and wild from the ocean wind. The party pulsed behind them — music and laughter and the particular chaos of people forgetting themselves beautifully — but out here on the quieter deck, the noise softened to something almost bearable.
Heidi stood beside her.
Close enough that their arms touched.
Neither moved away.
The ocean stretched endlessly in every direction, black velvet at the edges where the light gave up, gold and copper closer in where the yacht’s lanterns caught the water. The horizon had gone that particular shade of bruised violet that only existed for about four minutes each evening and made everything feel simultaneously beautiful and borrowed.
“I didn’t think I’d ever have this,” Heidi said quietly.
Lila glanced at her. “The yacht?”
“No.” Heidi smiled faintly at the water. “Any of it. The island. The laundromat. You lot.” A pause. “Just… a life that felt like mine.”
Lila was quiet for a moment, swirling her drink.
“You know what I thought when I first saw you?” she said.
“That I was a colonizing menace with terrible taste in door colors.”
“Obviously.” Lila’s mouth curved. “But also — I thought, she’s not going to last a month. She’s going to get eaten alive by the humidity and the plumbing and the tourists and she’s going to go running back to whatever miserable office she came from.”
“Charming first impression.”
“I’m a charming person.”
“You’re a nightmare.”
“Same thing.” Lila bumped her shoulder gently. “But you stayed.”
“I stayed.”
“And the door is still turquoise.”
“The door,” Heidi said firmly, “is perfect.”
Lila laughed — that real laugh, the one that came from somewhere unguarded, head tipping back slightly, throat exposed to the evening air. Heidi watched it happen and felt something settle in her chest like the last piece of something clicking quietly into place.
She reached over and took Lila’s free hand.
Not dramatically. Not with any particular intention. Just took it, fingers threading through fingers, the way you held onto something you didn’t want to drop.
Lila looked down at their joined hands. Then back at the ocean.
“I’m glad you didn’t leave,” she said softly.
“Me too.”
A beat of silence between them. Warm and full and easy in the way only certain silences were — the ones that didn’t need filling because they already contained everything that mattered.
Then Lila squeezed her hand once.
“Hey,” she said, her voice shifting slightly, the teasing edge returning. “When this is over. When we get back to the island.” She looked at Heidi sideways, something careful and bright in her expression. “I want to take you somewhere. Just us. There’s a place up the coast, past the reef. You can only get there by boat at low tide. Nobody goes there.”
“Nobody?”
“Almost nobody.” Lila smiled. “I used to go with my dad.”
Heidi looked at her.
Lila almost never mentioned her father in the present tense of her life. Only in past tense. Only in the quiet moments when her guard came down all the way.
“I’d like that,” Heidi said carefully. “I’d really like that.”
Lila nodded once, like something had been agreed upon.
Like a promise had been made.
She turned back to the water, and the last of the sun dipped below the horizon, and the world went a shade darker all at once, and neither of them spoke for a moment because neither of them needed to.
Then Lila frowned.
Just slightly.
Her eyes narrowing at something on the water in the middle distance.
“Hey,” she said slowly. “Is that a boat?”
Everything after that moved fast.
Too fast.
Jacques with the binoculars and the color draining from his face. The throttle. The engines roaring to life. The yacht lurching forward like a frightened animal while Heidi’s hands locked onto the wheel and her pulse became something violent and unrecognizable in her throat.
Lila stumbled into the cabin minutes later, dark hair wild, eyes wide.
“What the hell is going on?” she demanded, grabbing the captain’s chair. “Why are we going so fast? Did you hit something?”
“We’re being chased,” Heidi said tightly.
“Chased?” Lila’s voice pitched up an octave. “By who?”
“Look for yourself.” Heidi nodded at the binoculars on the console.
Lila grabbed them, raised them, adjusted. Her gasp was quiet and sharp and terrible.
“Oh God,” she whispered. “They’re getting closer.”
The cabin door exploded open. Jacques, face stripped of all its usual elegant ease, thrust a revolver into Heidi’s free hand and a handgun at Lila without ceremony.
“Stay sharp,” he said. Then he was gone.
Lila stared at the gun in her hand like it had arrived from another dimension.
“This cannot be real,” she said.
“It’s real.”
“I am holding a gun, Heidi.”
“I noticed.”
“I don’t know how to use a gun.”
“Point the end with the hole at things you don’t like. That’s essentially it.”
Lila stared at her.
“Now you’re funny,” she said. “Incredible timing.”
Despite everything — despite the roaring engines and the pursuing boat and the gun in her hand and the fear climbing steadily up her spine — Heidi laughed. One short, breathless, slightly hysterical laugh that Lila matched immediately, both of them helpless for exactly two seconds in the middle of a situation that had no business being funny.
Then the engines died.
The silence that followed was the worst sound Heidi had ever heard.
The yacht went still. Just the water. Just the waves. Just the low, patient sound of something approaching that had nowhere to be and all night to get there.
“Heidi,” Lila said quietly.
Her voice had changed. The humor gone completely. Something underneath it now — something Heidi recognized from the nights Lila talked about her father. About the morning he didn’t come home.
Heidi looked at her.
Lila’s jaw was set. Her eyes bright and dark at once. The gun in her hand not shaking anymore — held with a steadiness that had nothing to do with training and everything to do with the particular resolve of a woman who had already survived one catastrophic loss and knew what it felt like when the world was about to demand more.
“Whatever happens,” Lila said. “You fight.”
“Lila—”
“I mean it.” Her voice dropped. “You don’t stop. You don’t freeze. Whatever comes through that door — you fight, Heidi. Promise me.”
The water lapped against the hull.
Outside, something moved across the deck.
Barefoot. Silent. Wrong.
Heidi looked at Lila — at this woman who had handed her back keys in the rain, who had called her the fucking American like an insult and turned it into something that sounded like home, who had kissed her in the laundromat doorway and danced barefoot in the sand and sat beside her in the dark and stayed, always stayed — and felt something in her chest crack quietly open.
“I promise,” she whispered.
Lila nodded once.
Then turned toward the cabin door.
“Right,” she said quietly, and her chin lifted, and her shoulders squared, and she looked every inch the daughter of a man who had taught her to read waves before she could read words. “Let’s see what we’re dealing with.”
The glass shattered.
One of them came through first.
Not through the door. Through the window — fist first, glass exploding inward in a glittering spray, shards catching the cabin light like broken stars before clattering across the floor. It didn’t flinch. Didn’t bleed. Just reached through the jagged frame with those long wet fingers and curled them slowly inward.
Come out.
The second one took the door.
The hinges shrieked. The wood splintered. And then it was simply gone — frame and all — and they were standing in the opening, two of them, filling the space completely, the ocean dark and endless behind them like they’d been born from it.
Barefoot. Soaking. Smiling.
The cabin felt instantly smaller. The air pressure changed. Something ancient and predatory moved in with them the way cold moves into a room — not from one direction, just suddenly everywhere.
Heidi raised the revolver.
Fired.
The crack was deafening in the small space. The recoil slammed through her wrist, her elbow, her shoulder.
The creature stopped.
Looked down at its chest.
Tilted its head with something almost like curiosity while the wound closed like water filling a hole in sand — slow, inevitable, completely indifferent to what she’d done.
“Did you think that would work?” it asked.
The voice was wrong. Too resonant. Too much of it, like more than one thing was speaking through the same mouth.
Her fingers slackened. The revolver dropped.
The pull came then — that familiar suffocating dark that lived in her chest since the laundromat, since the bite, since the fever. Like gravity shifting sideways. Like something reaching in through her ribs and closing a fist.
Stop resisting.
Her legs buckled. Her back hit the cabin wall. The world blurred at the edges while the creature stepped closer, unhurried, predatory in the way of things that had never once needed to rush.
“No.“
Lila.
She came from the left with a shard of cabin glass in her fist, wild and furious and completely without hesitation — no strategy, no calculation, just pure protective rage launched at something twice her size that had already proven it couldn’t be hurt.
The jagged edge caught it across the face.
It didn’t flinch.
It turned toward her slowly. The way something turns when it isn’t threatened but has decided to be annoyed.
And then its hand moved.
One motion. Effortless. Almost lazy.
Its fingers closed around Lila’s throat mid-lunge, the grip absolute, and for one suspended second she hung there — feet off the ground, glass shard still in her fist, dark eyes wide and furious and completely unafraid even now, even here, even with a monster’s hand around her neck.
That was Lila.
Right up until the end. Furious and brave and refusing.
Then it threw her.
Not hard the way humans threw things. Hard the way forces of nature were hard — indifferent, total, final. Lila crossed the cabin in a fraction of a second and hit the wall with an impact that Heidi felt in her own bones.
The sound came a half beat after.
A crack.
Small. Quiet. Devastatingly specific.
The sound of something that could not be undone.
It stole the air from Heidi’s lungs before her mind could process what it meant. Before she could scream. Before she could move or breathe or do anything except stand there with her back against the wall while that small terrible sound echoed through her like a stone dropped into still water.
Lila didn’t crumple slowly.
She simply wasn’t standing anymore.
She was on the floor. Dark hair spread around her. One arm bent at the wrong angle. Her eyes still open — still her eyes, still dark and sharp and Lila — but the thing behind them already gone, already somewhere Heidi couldn’t follow.
The glass shard rested inches from her open hand.
She’d held it until the very end.
Heidi opened her mouth.
Nothing came out.
Not a scream. Not a word. Not even air. Just the bottomless, breathless silence of a grief so immediate and enormous it hadn’t learned to make sound yet.
The creature turned back to her.
Smiled its too-many-toothed smile.
Now. Where were we.
And from the shadows behind it, deeper and darker and more terrible than anything else in the room, stepped the one she recognized.
The one from the laundromat.
The one who had started all of this.
His eyes didn’t glow the way the others’ did.
They burned.
