Page 71 of Dance Practice, Marooned: Part 2

“My father told the world we got sold,” I whisper, my bottom lip trembling. “So we were out there, all that time, and nobody was fucking looking.”

My voice rises on the last word, coming out as almost a high-pitched shout.

Rachel nods. “M-m-mum said that your father was ‘paying’ investigators to try and find where we had been sold, but we all know he wasn’t. He was hoping we were all dead and would never come back so he never had to face up to what he did.”

Shame washes over me.

Shame that I came from such a monster.

“There is a warrant out for their arrest,” Rachel goes on. “If we go back to shore, they’re going to prison.”

Aggie gasps, Kaylee’s eyes widen and I flinch.

This can’t be happening, it can’t.

“Can’t we just say that isn’t what happened?” Aggie whispers.

“No.” Zeke’s voice is flat, final. “Men like Grace’s father don’t just win—they erase you. We set foot on land, we’re not walking into handcuffs, we’re walking into our own graves.”

A sound punches out of me—raw, jagged, nothing like laughter. My vision blurs at the edges. Rachel makes a choked sound, like someone kicked the air right out of her lungs. Aggie’s crying now, quiet and hopeless. Ash hasn’t moved, doesn’t even blink; he just watches us like we’re wreckage he pulled aboard.

He probably feels sorry for us, lord knows I would.

No one speaks. The satellite phone sits between us, black and silent as a gun.

The world doesn’t feel like it has stopped anymore—it feels dead. Like we’re the last ones left spinning in the silence.

Can we survive another day, another drama, another lie, another betrayal, another fucking death? God, can we? Because I don’t have anything left to give. I’m scraped hollow. Every time I think we’ve hit the bottom, the floor drops out again.

I’m so tired of falling.

Tati might be dying in a room down the hall and my father—my own father—is out there telling the world his daughter got sold like cargo, when all along it was him who put this into motion. Aggie is pregnant, something none of us have dared mention since Tati was injured. Not to mention they’re not speaking to each other, now Aggie and Rachel aren’t speaking to each other either, and it’s all a big fucking mess.

So, tell me what we’re supposed to do. Tell me how you keep going when every door you walk through just leads to a worse room.

Will anything ever be ours again?

Or are we just ghosts now? Haunting a life that doesn’t want us back.

Then—a low, grinding shudder runs through the ship as the anchor hits bottom. We’ve officially arrived at our own personal fucking hell.

Hang on.

It can only get worse from here.

TO BE CONTINUED...