one moment Horn was weightless, the next his ribs were clamped in a vise as the bight he’d made tightened under the weight.
He’d somehow expected that, if he managed to get them over the parapet, the rope would hold him while the other fell to his death. But it didn’t happen like that. He’d needed to lock on tight to carry the man over the wall, and maybe it was the years of training combined with the climber’s instinct, but his arms refused to yield their grip. As if they honestly couldn’t believe what his brain was telling them—to deliberately let someone fall.
So they hit the end of the rope like a mad dog hitting the end of its tether, with a yelp of terror in Horn’s ears and a gasp of pain in his throat; and above them the bed banged against the bedroom wall, and the rope whined its distress and then it too, somehow, held. And they hung in midair, half a meter from the castle wall, turning slowly while the rope held Horn and Horn held Hanratty’s assassin.
With the rope cramping his lungs it was several seconds before Nicky Horn could find the breath to speak, even in a rasp. “Drop the gun.”
It took the other man several more seconds to reply, and though his voice was shaken to its foundations, his resolve held. “In another universe!”
Horn screwed his eyes tight shut, trying to block out the pain in his chest, the weight on his arms. “All that’s keeping you alive is me. If you shoot me, what do you think’s going to happen next? My brain’s leaking out of my ear, but I’m going to keep on holding you? Drop the damn gun!”
“You’ll let go of me!”
When Horn had planned this last desperate strategy, pounding up the tower steps with death’s shadow on his heels, it was never his intention to try to save anyone but himself. The math stacked up only one way: to have any chance of walking away from this he needed Tommy Hanratty’s hired gun dead, and he could only think of one way to achieve that. It made the massive gamble he was taking worthwhile; because although there was a good chance that the rope might break, or the bed might break, or while he was struggling to carry them over the parapet the man might gather his wits just quickly enough to shoot him, that was as nothing beside the certainty that if he didn’t take the chance, he wouldn’t live long enough to regret it. He didn’t fool himself that killing this killer would stop Hanratty’s sending another; but that would take time, and time was Horn’s friend. Given a week’s head start he could lose himself where even God would have trouble finding him.
And yes, that one would find him too, eventually. But Nicky Horn was a young man. Eventually seemed like a lifetime to him. So he’d laid his desperate plan with every intention of holding Hanratty’s man just long enough for his own momentum to carry them both over the parapet, and then let go.
What he hadn’t allowed for was how hard it is for an ordinary human being, given any choice at all, to kill someone. Even someone who’d earned it as thoroughly as this one had. Horn hung on to him because that’s what you did, if you had a soul worth saving, even if you weren’t a climber whose reactions and muscles and deepest instinct were trained for this moment. He wanted to let go. He needed to let go. And he couldn’t.
But he wasn’t going to tell the man in his arms that. “You draw this out much longer, I’ll let go of you anyway. I can’t hold you forever. That’s kind of what we’re doing here, isn’t it? Patrick Hanratty was the best friend I ever had, and I couldn’t save him. You think I’m going to try harder for you? I wouldn’t crack a knuckle to save your life; I wouldn’t break sweat. Do what I tell you, do it now, or I let go. You reckon you can shoot me in the time it takes you to hit the ground? Because you’re sure as hell not going to do it afterwards.”
Knowing better than to struggle, the man had become a dead weight in Horn’s arms. His voice was muffled. “I don’t want to die.”
Horn gave a gusty little laugh. “Guess what—me neither! And I don’t deserve to, and