by Luis, Maria
Craning my neck to avoid the knife’s sharp tip, I squirm in place. I’m strong. I’ve always been strong. Dad put me in mixed martial arts as a child. He thought it would be a good outlet, since I had the particularly bad habit of picking fights in school with the bullies who targeted the smaller children. Quinns were raised to lead, to do better.
I exceeded all expectations.
And now . . . And now I’ve let terror render me useless.
I twist my head, my eyes scouring The Octagon until they land on Saxon, who’s fending off two other men and Gregg. He’s poetry in motion, a violent storm of sharp jabs and roundhouse kicks.
Turbulent. Powerful.
Savior. Devil.
All in one.
Saxon came to save me, but I’ll be dead before he even has the chance.
Muscles faltering, I take a deep breath . . .
And let it happen.
Dad’s knife descends like a guillotine dropping to sever its victim.
I watch it fall, watch it aim for my neck, and then, at the last second, I slam my hand against its serrated edge and send it clattering to the wood floor, where it slides out of reach. Searing agony erupts in my palm, the metallic scent of drawn blood hanging in the air.
Move.
Move now!
I move, ignoring my quivering limbs and growing fatigue, and hook my legs around Coney’s hips. Using his surprise to my advantage, I roll him beneath me and pin his legs down. Alarm splices across his face and he struggles against the restraint of my legs hooked over his, but I hold on. I hold on. Self-preservation kicks in, overruling all else, and I circle my hands around his neck, the same as he did to me.
And I squeeze.
Until his face turns a ghastly, unnatural shade of purple. Until my arms beg for relief. Until I feel tears coat my cheeks because maybe I could convince myself that I wasn’t a murderer after shooting King John, but now I have two victims, and there’s no hiding from the truth staring back at me with lifeless brown eyes and bruises shaped like my thumbprints already blooming on his throat.
I shot King John.
I strangled Professor Ian Coney.
Saxon’s words from yesterday haunt me now: Sometimes we simply amount to what we’ve always been destined to become.
A ragged, watery sob catches in my throat, just as strong arms wrap around my waist. “We have to go,” Saxon grunts in my ear, “right now. Before the Met gets here.”
He lifts me off Coney’s dead body.
I struggle to breathe. “I killed him. Saxon, oh God, I killed him.”
Large hands frame my face, jerking my attention up to meet pale green eyes. “You’re alive. Right now, focus on that.” His nose bumps mine as his thumbs cradle the hollows behind my jawbone. “We’re going to run. Do you hear me, Isla? If you can’t do it, I’ll carry you myself. But we have to go now.”
So, I run, with only one glance back at The Octagon.
Beauty meets chaos. Heaven meets hell.
And dead bodies litter the ground.
We weave through campus, my hand clasped in Saxon’s, the heavy rain erasing our sins.
My over-imaginative brain paints nonexistent faces in the windows, all gawking at us as we run past, cataloging our bloody clothes and the tears streaking down my face and Saxon’s hard expression that never once cracks.
Has the Met been called yet?
No sooner have I had the thought than sirens break through the monotony of rain pelting pavement.
Saxon slows, his head twisting as though he’s pinpointing exactly where the sirens are coming from, and then he drags me to the right. I stumble over an overgrown tree root. “Go,” he bites out, pushing me in front of him.
My gaze flies over the narrow snicket. A metal dumpster sits on the opposite end, blocking the exit. “That’s not going to work. There’s no way we’ll be able to get out—”
“We’re going to crawl.” Hand to the space between my shoulder blades, he pushes me forward. “Unless you want to be caught when those coppers come barreling down on us.”
As if to prove his point, the sirens escalate, louder and louder, until one police cruiser, then the next, flies down the campus road we just vacated.
“Get down,” Saxon growls, “before the next one happens to look over and sees us fucking meandering our way to safety.”
This time, I don’t defy him.
I drop to my hands and knees and crawl my arse toward the dumpster. Gravel bites into my wounded palm, and I try not to think about the possible infection I’ll be battling if I don’t clean it soon.
Fighting off the urge to whimper, I opt for a desperate dose of humor. “So, come here often?”
A big hand lands on my arse, just short of slapping the cheek, and urges me to move faster. “Only you would crack jokes at a time like this.”
I keep my eyes on the ground in front of me, evading shards of broken glass. “It’s either that or cry. I’m doing us both a favor.”
“I don’t need any favors,” he snarls, and immediately, I’m assaulted by the visual of livid, unholy eyes and a scarred, tortured mouth bearing down on me, from behind, “I need you fucking alive.”
My heart skips a beat. “Because you care?”
“Crawl, Isla,” is his curt response.
We reach the dumpster, and Saxon moves around me, up onto his knees. The rain has dampened his shirt to the point of translucency. Muscles stacked upon muscles, which are put on more prominent display when he reaches toward his hip and retrieves a gun from its holster. Pistol in one hand, he dips a hand into his pocket and reveals the bloody hilt of Dad’s knife.
The knife that nearly killed me. I swallow, hard.
Green eyes find mine as he hands it over. “You follow me. Every step. Every pause.”
I drag in a sharp breath, only to hiss between my teeth when the hilt collides with my wound. Still, I grip it firmly. Steadily. With every ounce of strength that I have left in reserve. “Where are we going?”
“No questions, just follow.”
Severing eye contact, he turns, his big frame hunched like a rattlesnake poised to strike.
More sirens echo in the near distance, sending a chill of fear rappelling down my spine.
The Octagon will be all over the news by nightfall.
Saxon doesn’t need to tell me that he left no survivors—he couldn’t have, even if he’d wanted to, not with the chance of them telling the police our identities. Also my fault. Saxon hadn’t wanted to do anything about the loyalist group, even with the mounting target on his back.
I hate that I dragged him here, that I forced more spilled blood on his hands and on my own.
Selfishly, though, I know there was no other option.
I recognized Ian Coney because I’d seen him at The Bell & Hand. And he’d seen me, too. How many others are there like him? How many supporters of the Crown are lurking, biding their time, within the pub that Saxon and his brothers set up as a safe haven for anti-loyalists?
If I hadn’t shown up tonight, who knows when they might have attacked.
Perhaps today, tomorrow, three weeks from now.
But they would have, and they would have managed to catch Saxon off guard, perhaps fatally, and I don’t know what it says about me that I would rather have the blood of Ian Coney on my hands—literally—than discover that he’d stripped Saxon of his life.
The man in question shoots out an arm, blocking me from further movement.
“Do you hear something?” I whisper.
He tilts his head, listening. “An ambulance,” he rumbles, “which means someone isn’t dead.” Twisting toward the brick wall, he comes just short of punching it. At the last second, his fist curls behind his nape, pressing deep into the flesh there. “Fuck!”
“Understatement of the year,” I choke out. “They know who we are.”
“I know.”
“I’ve got to get home. Peter, Josie, they—”
Twisting around, Saxon
’s fingers find my chin, his thumb grazing the skin just below my bottom lip. The sudden, unexpected contact clams me up, snapping my mouth shut. “We get out of here and I’ll send Guy to them,” he says, his gaze searching mine. “But me and you—we need to hustle.”
“Hustle.” When I nod, his thumb slips over my wet skin and my heart stutters. “I can do that. I don’t crack, remember?”
His hand falls to his side, the ghost of his touch erased by rain. “Now’s your chance to prove it. Don’t disappoint me.”
21
Isla
I don’t disappoint him.
As lightning shatters the sky, Saxon leads me from snickelway to snickelway. Though we’ve left the sirens behind, it’s done nothing to soften our pace. Two months ago, I assassinated the king in a plot that I’d planned for months, ever since it was announced that he would be speaking at a rally, in full sight of the thousands gathered to see him. Today, there is no planning—only the controlled chaos that Saxon sets into motion to shuttle us away from Queen Mary’s campus.
I step in a puddle, and dirty street water promptly drenches me from toe to ankle. “Bollocks.”
My clothes are soaked, my hair is nothing more than a bedraggled rat’s nest that sticks to my face, and if I’m ever able to dry out these boots to wear again, it’ll be a miracle of epic proportions.
Holding up a hand for me to stop moving, Saxon peers out onto Mile End Road, his dark head shifting from right to left. I walk this street nearly every day on the way to the Tube, but it all feels . . . foreign. Like I don’t even recognize my own borough.
“We can’t run all day,” I whisper to his back. “At some point, we’re going to have to stop, regather.”
And save Peter and Josie, too.
I haven’t forgotten Saxon’s promise that he’ll send Guy for them. And while Saxon’s older brother isn’t exactly on my list of chums that I’d love to grab a pint with, I know that he cares deeply for his family. If he’s sent for my siblings, they’ll be in good hands. Safe hands.
I hope.
Distracting myself from thoughts that may send me into a downward spiral, I press my back into the building that lines the snicket. My teeth chatter from the chill that’s swept over my body. The longer we move, the colder I become. The adrenaline ditched me somewhere near the Stepney Tube station, leaving nothing behind but festering fear and mounting dread.
What have I done?
“Saxon.” When he doesn’t answer, I reach for his back, laying a hand on his spine to snag his attention. The contact to my throbbing palm has me hissing out a short, uneven breath. “Saxon, please. Where are we going?”
With his hair plastered to his temple, and his skin pebbled with pearls of rain, Saxon looks like an ancient warlord reincarnated. Broad shoulders, hard chest, thick thighs. The scarred mouth and intense stare that he levels on me only fuels the feeling that he could save me, or break me, if he so chose.
He indicates the opposite side of the street with a tilt of his chin. “There.”
Slack-jawed, I stare at the appointed brick building.
It’s not unlike the tens of others we’ve passed in the last half hour. A phone shop on the ground floor—two stories above it. Narrow, single-paned windows meshed with a decided lack of character or charm. From our vantage point, it’s hard not to miss the crumbling brick façade and the string of rubbish strewn along the pavement. The store’s windows are completely boarded up.
My own flat isn’t exactly posh, but this . . . “It’s a hellhole.”
Saxon leverages a hand over his pistol, re-holstering it in one smooth move. “Tonight, it’s our hellhole.”
“You’re taking the piss, aren’t you.”
“Not even a little.”
“The ceiling looks like it might cave in at any second!”
“Only imagine the opportunities if it did,” Saxon murmurs, slicking a wet hand over my shoulder and giving me a nudge forward. “Chances to fake your own death don’t come around every day.”
I take it back. All of it.
Saxon Priest isn’t a coldhearted bastard—he’s certifiably mad.
Tempted as I am to dig my heels in and demand that he bring me home, I trail him across the busy street. Home is dangerous . . . or it soon will be. Realistically, it’s only a matter of time before the survivor from The Octagon gives the police our identities. And while the Priest brothers seem to have experience with successfully erasing themselves from the public eye—or, at least, the internet—the same can’t be said for me. Even after killing the king, I carried on with my routine, hoping that acting normal would translate to normal all around.
Simply put, I’m fucked.
Throwing a hasty glance to the right for oncoming traffic, I spot The Shard’s hazy silhouette on the horizon. It stretches toward the sky like a beacon—of what, I have no idea. Stability, perhaps. Normalcy. Not that any part of this day has been remotely normal.
“You do have a key, don’t you?” I ask.
He approaches the run-down phone shop with quick, measured strides.
“Saxon?” I scurry behind him, picking up the pace. “Saxon, breaking and entering is not going to be what turns this day around for the better. Do you know the owner? Are they on our side? Because I’m telling you right now, I hope you trust them with everything that you are, or we are so fu—”
I grind to a halt when he stops before the shop’s front door, swipes his dark hair back from his face, and waits.
I almost miss it. No, I would have missed it, had I blinked a second earlier. The door—the glass door—reflects Saxon’s grim expression before turning a shade of red along the perimeter of his body. An outline of glowing neon that dims a moment later.
What the hell?
Slowly, the door cracks open as though invisible hands have tugged on the handle from the inside. Saxon pushes it wide. “Go in.”
Déjà vu.
Not for the crazy, high-tech door or this wild, insane day, but for him.
The car, the confessional, this boarded-up phone shop. Each time he’s told me some variation of “get in,” I’ve found myself more deeply embroiled in this world of chaos. This time, unlike the others, however, I don’t have the luxury of turning him down—not that I’ve done so, yet.
Within hours, I’ll be a wanted woman. A criminal. Just as I feared after murdering King John.
I slip past Saxon, my fingertips accidentally grazing his hip as I knot the fabric of my shirt to squeeze out the excess rainwater. “Well, are you going to explain how all that worked?”
He closes the door behind us, flipping the deadbolt. “Security system.”
It takes everything in me not to roll my eyes. “Yes, Saxon, a security system. One that’s state of the art, nothing like I’ve ever seen before, and programmed to analyze a person’s identity simply by stepping in front of it.”
Not to mention that this fancy-schmancy tech security system is being used at a dead-beat phone shop in Stepney, of all places. Which means that this building is either not at all what it seems, or the Priest brothers were in need of a testing zone for another locale and figured this one would do.
Either way, it doesn’t make a lick of sense.
How can they afford technology like that? Surely, The Bell & Hand does well—but this well? And why in the world do they own an abandoned building in the East End, in the first place? One glance around the space proves that the ramshackle exterior suitably matches the inside. An old register sits along a far wall and aisles take up the majority of the space to my left. Dust and debris crunch beneath my boots as I turn in a small circle.
Hellhole is a grave understatement.
Saxon brushes past me. “Has anyone ever told you that you ask too many questions?”
“Yes, actually.” I stare at him, deadpan. “My old employer at the network right before he sacked me for insubordination.”
“Seems like he had the right of it.”
Deep breath. Take
it in; let it out. Do not kill someone else today.
Fingers tingling at the memory of what I’d done, just hours ago, I slam the door on those debilitating thoughts before they cripple my wits. “Who owns this building? Just you? You and your brothers?”
He guns me with a quick stare. “Sometimes, the less you know the better.”
“You know what I think?”
“Something tells me that you’ll say what’s on your mind, no matter how I answer.”
Disgruntled, I plant my good hand on my hip. “It was a rhetorical question.”
“Rhetorical questions are for the weak-minded.” I drag in a sharp, affronted breath, just before he adds, “Say what you want or don’t say it at all.”
“Fine. All right. Then I don’t agree with you—knowing less makes you a sitting duck.” Restlessly, I dig my fingers into my hip. “Yesterday, you essentially told me that the information I had didn’t interest you.”
“I said that I didn’t want to know anything more, not that it didn’t interest me. Two very different things.”
“Either way,” I bite out, reining in my temper, “you chose ignorance. That’s your prerogative, of course, and I was going to do just that. Lay off and let it be—begrudgingly, I might add, because it was obvious that something was brewing and knowing less is like throwing a white flag in the air and begging to be caught before the war’s even begun.”
“Brilliant visual, Isla,” comes his dry reply, “really.”
Stubborn.
Infuriating.
Man.
“Father Bootham tipped me off today. His and Peter’s stories lined up, even though they’ve clearly never met before.” Lifting my chin, I continue, “You might believe that knowing less is better, but I was always taught to gather the facts, then assess the situation when you have it all laid out before you. It’s what I did as a publicist. It’s what I did on the network, when they allowed me to actually do my job. And it’s what I had to do here, too, to make sure you wouldn’t be utterly blindsided.”
I step forward, only for my wet boot to squeak loudly against the floor. Following the source of the noise, Saxon’s attention drops south. He pauses, hands flexing at his sides, and cocks his head. Something in his expression . . . God, there’s a rawness there that I’ve never seen before, not from him. It’s not vulnerability, I don’t think. Not affection either. Like every other aspect of Saxon Priest’s icy exterior, it’s impossible to put my finger on it and yet I feel that look anyhow.