She searched the room, dazed, and found Thorne scrambling out from behind a toppled table with his hands still latched behind his back. He collapsed to his knees beside the bench.
“Come on, the cuffs!”
Her lungs burned. Her eyes stung. She was hyperventilating.
“I—I killed her—” she stammered.
“What?”
“I killed—she was—”
“This is not the time to go crazy, Cinder!”
“You don’t understand. It was me. I—”
Thorne threw himself at her, his forehead hitting hers so hard she yelped and fell back onto the bench.
“Pull yourself together and help me unlock these things!”
She grabbed on to the table and hauled herself back up. Head aching, she blinked at Thorne, then at the officer who lay slumped against the wall, neck dangling at an odd angle.
Her brain struggling to grasp on to reality, she lurched forward, dragging Thorne with her through the toppled chairs. Crouching beside the first fallen officer, she grabbed his arm and held up his wrist. Thorne twisted his hands toward her and the cuffs blinked and fell open.
Cinder dropped the limp hand and stood. She bolted for the door—but something grabbed her ponytail and hauled her backward. She cried out, falling onto a table. Glass bottles shattered beneath her, water and alcohol soaking into the back of her shirt.
The crazed man hovered over her, leering. Blood was dripping out from his lips and his bullet wounds but he hardly seemed to notice.
Cinder tried to scramble backward, but she slipped—a shard of glass slicing through her palm. She gasped.
“I would ask what brought you to little Rieux, France, but I think I already know.” He smiled, but it was haunting and unnatural with the jutting canines slicked with blood. “So sad for you that we found the old lady first, and now my pack has you both. I wonder what my reward will be when I bring your leftover pieces to my queen in a plastic box.”
Thorne roared and heaved a chair upward, breaking it over the man’s back.
The man spun around and Cinder used the distraction to roll off the table. She collapsed to the floor, looking up just as the man buried his teeth in Thorne’s arm. A scream.
“Thorne!”
The man pulled away, chin dripping with blood, and let Thorne collapse to his knees.
His eyes glinted. “Your turn.”
He took two sauntering steps toward her. Cinder upended the table, creating a blockade between them, but he kicked it aside with a laugh.
Standing, she raised her hand and fired a tranquilizer dart into his chest.
He snarled and yanked the dart out like a minor annoyance.
Cinder backed away. Tripping over a fallen chair, she cried out and collapsed backward onto the warm, unmoving body of the officer who had managed to get off two useless bullets.
The man grinned sickeningly, then paused again, paling. His cruel smile vanished and, with one more step, he crashed face-first on the ground.
Cinder stared, stomach in knots, at his still form amid the wreckage.
When he didn’t move, she dared to glance at the dead officer whose blood was leaking onto her collarbone. Rolling off him, she grabbed the gun that had been tossed onto the floor and shoved herself back to her feet.
She seized Thorne’s elbow and stuffed the gun into his hand. He moaned in pain but didn’t fight her as she hauled him to his feet and shoved him toward the door. Rushing back to the booth, Cinder tucked the power cell under her arm before running after him.
The street was chaos, people screaming and barreling out of the buildings and crying hysterically.