Marked

Chapter One

She imagined her capture a million different ways as she did most mornings, staring up at the ceiling of her cabin.

Just as she'd always done, back at the compound.

But now, the images were different.

Instead of hunting her through the forest, she pictured a thousand capital jets flooding the bright blue sky in the early hours of the morning. Poacher boots would thump on the decks of the ships as they landed and their bullets would spray blood everywhere.

When they pinned her against the deck, she'd taste saltwater, from tears or the ocean, there would be no true way to know which.

Nicolas would rise from the depths of the ocean in the middle of the night. His submarines would look like demons clawing their way from the deepest, darkest abyss, their cargo doors open like the gape of a great white shark, there to swallow them whole.

And in the end, she still wasn't sure, in that pivotal moment of imagined capture, if she'd cry with relief or sadness.

Rachel closed her eyes and went under the water in her bathtub.

Water pressed against her eardrums and made her limbs feel weightless.

Her eyes fused shut, her body unable to do anything else but let the water push and pull her. Her lungs burned from lack of oxygen. Her hands caressed the water, not calm, but assured, with no fear, only an overwhelming urge to sob. But she couldn't sob, not unless she wanted to waste precious oxygen.

Her lungs felt like they would explode but if she didn't focus on it for too long, the whole ordeal was rather peaceful. In this little bubble of water, suspended in time as she was, it became easy to forget that she had killed a man; she could even forget, for a few oxygen-deprived seconds, that her mother was a crazy scientist and her father was a tyrant.

For a moment, even the fact that freedom was a fragile thing, contingent upon not being discovered, slipped away.

When unconsciousness began creeping its fingers at the edge of her mind, she allowed herself to come up for much-needed air.

She pushed her wet hair back and blinked the water out of her eyelashes. The bathtub didn't appear half as serene as it had with her eyes closed and now bored with it, she plucked a towel from the curtain rod, stepped out of the water, and wrapped herself up.

A tiny, oval mirror was suspended in front of a sink within the cramped bathroom. She stared at her hair, slicked back and made to look burgundy by the water. Her eyes reached the large swathes of red skin on her arms that she'd developed as a result of the compulsive scratching episodes that always, without fail, followed every memory of the dead capital man.

Tearing her eyes away from her reflection, she dressed and went out into the cabin she'd been assigned. It was plain with only a cot and a desk and in all ways unremarkable. Except that there was a blanket strewn on the lumpy mattress that screamed to be seen. It was colorful and hideous but she loved it-loved it because Simone had made it for her before Gabe had come along and taken over her every waking second.

Rachel tied up her boots and stepped out into the corridor. After a few weeks aboard, it was easy to ignore the rocking of the ship. The only time she really ever noticed it was when a particularly large wave would hit and the ship would groan and tilt for a few seconds that would freeze her heart in her throat or when a storm would strike, beating and battering the ships until she was sure nothing would be left by morning.

But none of that happened now as she bounded up a flight of stairs and out into a crisp, airy morning. The unmistakable scent of the ocean always surprised her, but it was nothing compared to the beauty of watching the sun rise over the horizon.