PARADISE PARADOX (#1 PARADISE ISLAND duology)

-- ten --

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**TRIGGER WARNING — NOT QUITE RAPE BUT NON-CONSENTED SEXUAL RELATIONS ARE MENTIONED. PROCEED WITH CAUTION**

Kera scratched. And scratched. Harder, deeper, further into her skin; yet her nails didn't seem to satisfy her itch.

Huh?

She shot up, panting, wheezing, opening her eyes to be welcomed by blurriness. She was hot, and sweat was covering her forehead and drenching under her armpits and the creases behind her knees.

And she was so damn itchy.

She blinked once, twice, three times, dozens of times, before her eyesight adjusted, at last.

She was sprawled on a beach, fully clothed, with water lapping onto the sand a few inches away from her. The water didn't touch her, but she could smell it—salty, sultry, toxic.

Toxic?

The mere thought of that water made the insides of her nostrils itch something fierce. When she raised her hand to scratch, she found that her arm weighed a hundred pounds. She was sore, as if she'd lifted weights all day and collapsed from fatigue.

But she hadn't lifted weights; she'd been deported to a tropical island with a bunch of rebellious students, and had followed them into the forbidden forest, and—

"Whoa, shit." She saw—really saw, this time. Something had happened, something major, but she had no idea what, and couldn't seem to recall no matter how hard she tried to remember.

The others were with her, all awakening on this beach, all appearing as confused as she was. Moaning, complaining about headaches and bruises, about soreness and pain. And all clothed, like her.

To Kera's left, Jessa was brushing off sand as she stood up, glaring at every single person there, mumbling accusations of them hurting her. Vick had landed face-first into the sand, and was now on all fours, spitting out mouthfuls of said sand, coughing. Patrek was frantically scratching at his forearm, the sleeve of his leather jacket ripped off and exposing his skin up to his elbow.

Where was Miles? He was the person Kera remembered seeing before—before what? Blacking out? Passing out? Losing track of space and time and having no notion what the hell they'd been doing?

What she did know is there had been water, so much of it; it had pressured her, captured her, drew her towards that cave—

She flipped in the direction of the cave in the distance, eyes narrowing at it. When she'd last seen it, she'd been approaching it, right? She'd been swimming, Miles at her side—no, behind her. They'd all been in the water, clothes removed, happily meandering on towards the cavern. Then the world had grown dark around them; hadn't the sky become red and navy, with lightning streaking across, and fat clouds clogging with rain about to unleash a deluge upon them? And hadn't the water become murky and brown and gross?

The sand beneath her wasn't wet, not like it would be had it rained. And now, the sky and water were normal. Normal as could be for this exotic location, at least—the sky had not a cloud in sight and was a bright, boisterous blue. The waters scintillated, transparent and tempting as they'd been when the group had first emerged on the beach.

But where the fuck was Miles? Either Kera's vision hadn't gotten better as expected, or he wasn't on the beach with them.

"Okay, what the fuck happened?" Jessa was pacing back and forth, her tangled tresses like a stream of fire in her wake. Kera had a vague recollection of seeing her topless, then completely in the nude, and shook off the weird sensation that that memory caused in her lower half. "We were... we went into... didn't we all get into the water?"