38. Elena
38
ELENA
T he booming on the door is like a battering ram. The impact hits again and again, deafening, relentless. I don’t know where Lorne is, or Ivy—all I can see is the patch of room directly in front of me, mostly the front door. So I see the moment the axe bites through, glinting steel breaking through just above the latch.
I’m screaming for Atlas though it’s less than a whisper. I keep screaming as he hacks through the door, the axe taking enormous bites of the wood and wrenching them away.
He makes a hole, and the wind and rain come pouring through. He hacks and cuts and smashes until his whole Goliath frame bursts through, scratched by splinters, drenched with rain, bloodied, furious, and fucking gorgeous.
He’s barely through the door before Lorne leaps out at him, and I see a slash of silver as he whips a knife down Atlas’s side. Atlas howls, a long gash opening up on his shirt, showing a strip of bloodied flank. He clouts Lorne backhand across the face and follows with a swing of the axe that might have taken Lorne’s head off if Lorne didn’t slip on the wet slate and tumble all the way backward.
The axe embeds in the door directly over Lorne’s head. He stares up at my furious and bloodied lover attempting to wrench the axe out of the door and apparently loses the last of his courage. He dives through the Atlas-sized hole in the door.
Faintly, in the rain-drenched yard, someone shouts.
The rain thunders in, mud pouring under the door. Atlas is dripping wet as he yanks the axe free of the wood and crosses the flagstones, hand clasped to his side, the blood running down his fingers black as pitch in the crack of lightning.
I’m pounding the wall with all the momentum I can muster in the fraction of space I have to move.
It makes no sound, but it doesn’t matter—Lorne left the sliding window open, and Atlas can see my eyes peeking out at him.
He strides across the room, shoulders hunched, thick arm pressed against his wound. The axe glints wickedly in his red-drenched hand. “Elena! How do I get you out?”
“I don’t know,” I say in the faintest raspy whisper. “I don’t know how I got in…”
“Are you standing upright?”
I nod.
“Are your hands at your sides?”
“ Pretty much …”
“Then close your eyes.”
Atlas lifts the axe.
He lifts me out of the wall and carries me in his arms, like a bride over the threshold. Only, we’re exiting the castle and going home to the Monarch Hotel.
I know this like I know my own name, as I nestle my head against Atlas’s chest, my arms around his neck.
I’m already home.