Stuck in an Island with Twelve Beautiful Women
Chapter 879 - 881

Chapter 879: Chapter 881

She blinked. Her entire expression collapsed, like a puppet whose strings had been cut. She stumbled, nearly falling backward into the water. He caught her.

"Emma, ?"

She looked up at him, face pale and wet. "I, what happened? Why are we, ?"

"You walked into the pool," he said quickly, helping her back onto the bank. "You must’ve gotten dizzy from the sun."

She shook her head. "I don’t remember. I was just... cleaning the fish traps. Then I was here."

"You didn’t feel anything before that?"

"I don’t know. Maybe. I felt... warm. But good. Like, like I was in a safe dream. Then it was gone."

He helped her sit down on a flat stone and watched her for a long moment, searching for any signs of residual possession. Her breathing had evened out. Her gaze no longer lingered too long. Her hands stopped trembling. If the smoke had been inside her, it was gone now. Like all the others, it left no trace.

He said nothing more. Instead, he carried the remaining fish back to camp himself, watching every movement in the trees around him. By the time he arrived, the others had returned, and the sun had begun its slow descent. Shadows lengthened, stretching toward their home like claws. There was something in the air again. A charge. Jude recognized it now. It always came before someone changed.

He spent the evening quiet, watchful. He didn’t sit next to any of them. He didn’t touch them. He didn’t let himself be lulled into the peace of food and firelight.

After dinner, they sat around the fire as always. Talking. Sharing small stories. Nothing deep. Nothing heavy. But every so often, one of them would look up sharply. Or blink as if waking from a nap they hadn’t taken. At one point, Zoey began to laugh, a full and sudden sound that startled everyone, including herself. She looked down, her face flushed, then mumbled something about the way Stella had pronounced a word. But Stella hadn’t said anything.

Later, Natalie dropped her water flask and stared at it like it wasn’t hers. Lucy whispered a word that sounded ancient and sharp in a tongue no one knew. When she realized what she said, she clamped her mouth shut and excused herself. Grace sat with her hands under her thighs, eyes scanning the canopy like someone listening to music far away.

Jude could see it all, playing out like a script.

When the fire started dying and the others prepared to return to the shelters, he spoke up.

"Wait," he said. "I want to ask something."

They paused.

"I’ve been keeping notes," he continued. "Trying to understand the pattern. Trying to see what it wants. But I can’t do it alone."

Everyone stilled. The fire cracked and popped.

"I need to know when you black out. Even if it’s small. Even if it’s just a second. I need you to tell me, the moment it happens."

Susan was the first to speak. "And what if we don’t know? What if it tricks us again?"

"Then at least we’re watching. That’s better than being blind."

Stella looked down. "What if it doesn’t want us to remember?"

"Then we write it down before it’s gone."

Silence again.

Then Sophie whispered, "I think I... touched something. In my dream last night. Something huge. Cold. Not human."

Everyone looked at her.

"I think it’s waiting. Not just to take us. But to become us. It’s learning. Through us."

Jude nodded.

They all sat back down around the fire, no longer pretending it was just another night. No longer pretending that routine would protect them.

"I’ll keep watch tonight," Jude said.

"No," Grace said suddenly. "We take turns. You need sleep too."

They argued. Not loudly. Just insistently. But Jude eventually relented. Grace and Susan volunteered to sit up first, weapons near, eyes wide. The rest returned to the shelters in uneasy silence.

Jude lay down beside Lucy and Scarlett in the upper treehouse, but he didn’t close his eyes. Not right away.

He kept his ears open for whispers.

And just before he drifted off, he heard a voice, not spoken, but pressed into his thoughts like heat:

Soon... you’ll understand. I only want to be loved.

Jude stood at the edge of the forest, watching the shadows shift in the underbrush like silent serpents curling around the roots of ancient trees. Morning light filtered through the dense canopy in fractured golden beams, dappled across his arms, his chest bare and warm beneath the sun’s weight. The leaves around him rustled not with the breeze, but with the subtle stirring of unseen things, small, invisible movements, like breathing just beneath the skin of the island. He didn’t trust it. Not anymore.

Behind him, the treehouses stirred to life. A few birds cawed from the distant cliffs. Somewhere near the river, someone laughed, Grace, maybe, or Zoey, always the early risers. The sound would’ve comforted him once. Now it sat strangely on his shoulders, too cheerful, too detached from what he felt in his chest: that slow, steady hum of dread that had wrapped itself around him over the last few days.

He turned and made his way back to camp. The forest floor was soft beneath his feet, the path between the trees worn smooth by daily footsteps. As he approached, he saw Sophie and Stella crouched over the firepit, coaxing the embers back to life. Grace was stringing up fish they’d caught the day before, her hair pulled back, her expression focused. Everything looked normal. Familiar. But Jude saw the glances, quick and flickering, exchanged when they thought he wasn’t watching. He felt it in the way Serena’s fingers lingered a moment too long on his shoulder when she brushed past him, in the too-quiet hush of conversations that stopped when he arrived.

They didn’t remember. That much was clear. Every time the blue smoke touched one of them, it slipped in and out like a dream, erasing itself from memory, leaving only confusion and that strange, disoriented look in their eyes.