The author of this book should not be allowed near children, or ideally, people of any age.

Rhine goes down through the kitchen and the head cook sees her and just can tell she’s planning to escape and apparently has a nice hot thermos of something ready for her to drink.

I would talk here about how the servants being sympathetic to the wives and not stopping her escape attempt would have made a lot more sense had this not taken so long, but I don’t care. I don’t want Rhine to escape. I want her to die.

Rhine isn’t competent, so she flails around in the snowdrifts for a while like she’s a southerner in the north rather than a northerner in the south until she falls and tries to catch herself on a tree and oh look that’s the hologram exit.

She calls for Gabriel. He’s not there.

I fear what Vaughn will do if Gabriel is left behind. Vaughn will know that Gabriel helped me escape.

Gabriel has done nothing to help her escape.

She’s decided to screw her escape attempt and instead try to find him, but the book’s run out of time so instead he just appears before she can continue to be stupid and he holds her steady in his big strong arms because she’s just a weak incompetent girl.

She wants to tell him about what happened but can’t because they don’t have time, Rhine being too stupid to realize that she can talk on the way as they escape. Because she’s fucking stupid.

They get to the gate. She tries her key card. It doesn’t work. It doesn’t set off an alarm either, which is more of a surprise. It does not occur to Gabriel to try his own damn keycard despite the fact it’s possible that a servant card would let you out while obvious a wife card wouldn’t.

Rhine spends a while failing at climbing and then they give up and wait to die. It doesn’t occur to her to try to use the massive snowbanks to climb.

She takes out the lighter she took from Jenna’s room, not that it’ll do much good heating them.

It’s the only light in all this darkness, and I think I’d like nothing more than to light this place on fire. To watch it burn like those ugly curtains.

She doesn’t consider that this would kill innocent people. Nor does she bother to head back and attempt it. Rhine has already used up her quota of bothering to do things for the day, you can’t possibly expect anything else from her.

Someone appears and Rhine goes off on how it’s the evil mad scientist there to torture them to death, but instead it’s the servant who replaced Gabriel. With a key card.

“Why?” I say. I move close to him so that I can hear him better. I’m shouting over the wind. “Why are you helping us? How did you know we were here?”
“Your sister wife asked me to help you,” he says. “The little one. The redhead.”

By implication here, the servants, or at least the first gen ones, would have helped any of the girls escape at any time if only they thought to ask. This starts to make sense, since the first gens should remember a time before kidnapping girls to rape was appropriate. Then you remember the first gen servants have spent the book acting like the girls were willing or at least should stop complaining because they get nice sheets on their beds.

I think this is meant to be Cecily trying to atone for being a terrible person. All I think is that it means Cecily’s safe from Rhine now. It’s not a good ending, but at least there’s one less person to abuse her. Maybe she’ll have better luck with whatever replacement girls the rapist buys. Not everyone can be horrible. Maybe later she runs away with them, or kills the two murderers and inherits the mansion. She’s still in a terrible situation and desperately needs help, but Rhine would never have given it anyway.