Road To Fire (Broken Crown Trilogy #1) - Maria Luis Page 0,126

nary a blink. But he follows. One step, two, tracking me across the room. I feel the hair raise on the backs of my arms. “You think Priest will be here to save ye?” he taunts, moving closer. “It’s me and you, little bird. Me. And. You.”

“I’ll scream.”

An unidentifiable emotion nips away his earlier frustration, something cold and deranged settling in its place. Trailing a finger along the desk as he nears, he goes so far as to close the drawer with an audible snick. And then, “Will you scream as loud as last time?”

As loud as last time?

A sick sensation lands in my gut, twisting, mounting. I stare at him, visualizing his face in an entirely different setting. One with gorgeous herringbone floors and octagonal walls and galleries that allow secret visitors to never show their faces to those down on the ground floor.

But there’s no way . . .

We would have seen him. Heard him, at the least. Right?

Those astute brown eyes shine with delight as I shuffle backward, adding another meter between us. And they positively gleam when I shoot a hasty look toward the door, marking the number of steps it would take me to flee.

One.

Two.

“Screaming—really?” I swallow, as I make step number three. “I hate to say this, but I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“A little reminder, then.”

I don’t move fast enough.

He launches toward me, catching me around the middle, and drives me to the ground with so much power that we skid, together, across the tile. My head glances off the desk’s corner leg.

Pain ricochets though my skull and the ceiling, it spins and spins and—

A hand seizes my nape, his thumb digging into my pulse while my fingers scrape the floor, determined to drag myself away.

“Get off! Get off!”

“Won’t you scream for me?” The question comes in a heavy pant beside my ear. “The way you did for Ian?” When I stiffen at the name, the implication truly settling in, Jack releases a noisy, sinister laugh. “Oh, yes, I was there. Up on the gallery. I watched you fight to live, little bird. Shaking legs. Graspin’ hands. Even from up there, I could see it all.”

My lungs pump for oxygen, dragging in air through my nose.

Saliva builds in my mouth, from his hand locked around my throat, but still I manage a choked, “A-a loyalist.”

Another laugh, this one accompanied with more spittle that lands on my cheek. “An opportunist. I go where the money takes me, and I had it real good, workin’ them both. But then Priest sacked me because of you.”

“J-jealous.”

His other elbow clamps down across my back, roughly angling my cheek into the hard floor. “I turned on him before he even met you,” he hisses. “You think you know e’erythin’, and I already told ye”—he squeezes my neck, and a gurgling noise erupts from my throat—“I ain’t jealous. Now scream for me, little bird, just like your priest did.”

Father Bootham.

Oh, God. Oh, God. OhGod.

“You k-killed him—”

Lips land on my temple. Wet. Chilled. They part to whisper, “Suppose I am a little jealous. The good father did nothin’ to me. Always said ’ello when I saw him. But it’s yer fault, anyway.” Panic wells within me, and I thrash my legs beneath the weight of his, barely able to raise my hips from the floor. “Had you just been in your flat when I showed up, the priest wouldn’t be dead. How was I goin’ to get information for the lads when I was sacked? No information, no money. You had to go. You have to go.”

My vision blurs.

My heart stampedes.

I’ve crossed Lady Luck too many times now to expect another slice of mercy.

The knife. Grab the knife.

A stifled moan reverberates in my chest. I have seconds, no more, before those deceitful hands squeeze the life out of me. My head feels swollen, a balloon on the verge of imploding. No one is coming for me, not this time.

Josie and Peter—

Oh, dear God. The twenty-minute countdown.

Move, move, move.

With weak fingers, I fumble for my trousers. For Dad’s blade that I stuck in an oversized pocket. I find the handle, pulling it out, but my grip is so weak that it clatters noisily to the floor.

Jack’s hold on me imperceptibly slackens when he realizes what I’ve dropped.

Silence reigns, a throne of impending doom, and then he lunges for the knife while I drag myself away on unbalanced hands and knees. I sway. Elbows giving out beneath my weight. I