“I found help,” Sadie-Grace told me cheerfully. “And you found Campbell!” She paused for maybe half a second and then babbled happily on. “I’m wearing a smartwatch. Miss Olivia took our phones while we were unconscious, but she must have forgotten about my watch, so Boone was able to track it. You know, in a way, this means Boone found us. Very heroic.”

Even on the tail end of having been drugged, kidnapped, and thrown in a hole, Sadie-Grace glowed when she talked about Boone. I couldn’t help thinking that it would never occur to her to keep anyone at arm’s length. She didn’t protect her heart. She wouldn’t even have known how.

If I’d been the only one in that hole, there wouldn’t have been anyone to track me, I thought, the realization gumming up my brain like tar. Nick didn’t even know that I was gone.

“Yes, Sadie-Grace,” Campbell said with an elaborate roll of her eyes. “Boone is the real hero in all of this. Now, might I suggest we find Hope and get the hell out of here before the storm hits?”

“Hope’s here?” I asked.

“Everyone else cleared out after initiation,” Campbell replied. “But since Hope’s the one with good enough taste to have chosen me as her replacement, she hung back when I did.”

“She didn’t stay for you,” Victoria informed Campbell. “Hope lives on the edge. She likes trouble.”

“And she’s on this island,” I said. “Somewhere.”

I had no idea what, exactly, the person calling herself Olivia Taft had planned to do with us, or why she’d chosen this island as the place to do it, but given that we’d kept all things White Glove a secret from her, I had to believe that she’d expected this island to be as vacant and abandoned as advertised.

Thunder boomed in the distance. Victoria raised the hood of her scarlet robe and turned toward Campbell. “What do you think the chances are that Hope doubled back to the boats?”

“Only one way to find out,” Campbell replied. As we limped our way toward the east side of the island, I processed the fact that Victoria hadn’t asked a single question about why Sadie-Grace and I had missed initiation or why we were covered in dirt and still unsteady on our feet.

I wondered how much Sadie-Grace had told her.

I wondered how much of what Sadie-Grace had told her she’d believed.

The last twenty yards to the shore, I spent every step expecting “Aunt Olivia” to pop out of the shadows. Was she still on the island? Or had she left us, assuming that Sadie-Grace and I were well and truly contained? Or did she leave when she realized that we weren’t the only ones on the island?