“Live; I want to live.”
“Good,” I nod.
I soak her up one last time as she floats effortlessly in the water with a willpower I don’t understand. I hope to remember this image of her, forever. To remember what weakness feels like and what strength looks like.
I turn and swim hard to the yacht without looking back. I’m sure she is swimming after me, but it will make no difference.
I reach the yacht first and climb up the ladder in the back. I disengage the autopilot before Kai has a chance to make it to the yacht. When I walk back to the side and look down, I see Kai has stopped swimming and is floating a couple feet from the boat.
“I’ll die if you leave me in the ocean,” she whispers angrily.
She looks up at me. “You weren’t giving me a choice. I was going to die either way. You are just too much of a coward to kill me yourself! You’ll let the ocean take me instead.”
My heart does a weird fluttering in my heart again, trying to convince me to jump back in and warm her. But I can’t. This is the only way. My gut-wrenches as I force myself to stay on the boat.
“You won’t freeze or drown if you truly want to live.”
“I’m not strong enough.”
“Kai may not be your given name, but it is who you are.”
“How do you know my real name isn’t Kai?”
I shake my head. “I don’t; you just confirmed my suspicion.”
“I’ll die.”
I lean against the railing, getting as close as I can to her, even though we are a deck away as I stand up on the main deck, and she floats in the depths of the water.
“Kai means sea in Hawaiian. You were raised by the ocean, just like me. You know how to tame it as easily as I do. If you want to survive, you will.”
Her lips part and her eyes deepen as she begins slowly drifting away from the yacht.
I could have Kai so easily. Steal her and make her mine, but as evil as I am, I won’t risk my own death to take her. Only to save her.
I shake my head as I watch her float further away. She knows enough about currents to make it back to shore. I’m not the one who’s saving her; she’s saving herself.
“Leave Miami, if you are strong enough to survive,” I say roughly into the night with a threat in my voice of what will happen if she stays.
10
Kai
My neck aches as if a thousand-ton elephant sat on it.
My throat burns with the salt of the ocean water sticking to my lips and hair.
And my core aches for a boy who left me here to die.
I’m alive, but for how long?
I shiver again in the cold water, wishing Enzo was here to keep me warm. If it were daylight, the sun would heat me, but at night there is nothing except my trembling muscles to regulate my temperature. And every second my body spends energy shivering is one less second I will have to survive. I can’t afford to waste any energy on anything but swimming to shore.
The yacht speeds away, further and further until it melts into the horizon and the sound of its engines no longer vibrate through me.
Dead.
That’s what I should be. He all but killed me with his hands before we plummeted overboard.