Chapter 25 #3
“I’ll have undercover cops with me, and hopefully we’ll have them arrested. Someone wants to lure you there, and there’s no way I’m allowing that to happen. Stay here with August where it’s safe.”
I want to believe him. But it’s so hard.
My heart’s racing with panic as he kisses me.
He kisses me hard, his mouth demanding, his fingers threading through my hair. He kisses my ring, his lips pressing to the peridot stone like a vow. Then he leaves, and the shop feels too quiet.
August comes around the counter and pulls me into his side. He kisses the crown of my head, his arms warm and solid around me, purring.
“I’ll put on some music,” he says, and his voice is careful. “It might help calm you down.”
“Maybe we should go back to the penthouse,” I say, my palms sweaty.
“It’s best that you don’t leave and go outdoors at all right now,” he says. But something in my chest is tight, and I cannot shake the feeling that I am being watched.
During the next twenty minutes, I’m in the back of my shop alone, trying to grab more ribbon while August is working with our last customer. I am reaching up for the spool on the high shelf when the air suddenly changes.
It is faint. Sharp.
I freeze with my hand still on the spool, my body going rigid before my mind can catch up. The smell of pine. It is faint enough that I could have imagined it. But I have been smelling this scent in my nightmares for six years, and I know I’m not imagining it.
Something’s wrong. I can feel it. I quickly pull my phone out and dial Cole’s number.
“Hello there, runaway,” says a voice.
My stomach instantly drops when I see Bram step out of the shadows in the basement of my store.
Magnus’s packmate is dressed in gray, and his eyes are on my face with that flat, observant look I remember from the Thornton house.
From the years of watching, waiting, reporting back to Silus about where I was and what I was doing.
He has a small white scar at the corner of his mouth that pulls when he almost-smiles.
My hand finds my floral shears on the wet block where I left them yesterday morning.
“Get out!” I scream, slashing my shears wildly at him. All I can feel is sheer terror and rage as I swing at him before he can prepare.
The blade catches Bram across the forearm, and he grunts, blood blooming through the dark sleeve of his coat, sudden and red.
“Fuck you,” he swears, grabbing my wrists and twisting them.
Pain shoots up my arm, and the shears clatter to the workbench, and I am trying to scream when a hand clamps over my mouth from behind. Hugo. He had come in at some point, through the front or the side door.
Hugo is enormous. His hand covers my nose and mouth completely, his palm rough and tasting of salt and metal, and he smells like the same pine and gun oil and frozen earth that Magnus had smelled like.
My stomach heaves, and I gag against his hand, and I cannot get enough air.
He presses a damp white cloth over my nose and mouth, holding it there with his other hand. The smell is sharp and instant. Like chloroform, and I thrash. I kick backward, my heel catching Bram in the shin, and he laughs at my feeble attempt.
My phone falls from my hand onto the workbench. The call to Cole is still live, the screen glowing, and I hear faintly through the rushing in my ears Cole’s voice saying my name over and over, getting louder, getting desperate. “Liana? Liana? What’s going on?!”
Silus walks in through the back door behind Bram, unhurried, in a dark coat that looks expensive and joyless. He is smiling at me the way he had smiled at me on the day his father had been buried.
He stops in front of me and lifts my chin with one finger, his skin cold, and looks me in the eye.
“You have been very hard to trap,” he says, in the voice I have heard in nightmares for years. “But that is over now. I am going to take you home. To your true home.”
My vision narrows.
The chemical smell of the cloth is pulling me down, slowing my thoughts and making my limbs heavy. I thrash once more, weaker now, and my knees buckle. Hugo catches me against his chest, his arm like iron across my ribs, and I can feel Bram step closer, feel his presence at my side.
Bram reaches down and takes my left hand. Turns it over. Sees the ring on my finger. He pulls the ring off my finger with one rough motion, dropping it on the workbench with disgust. “They actually proposed to this whore.”
“You’re wasting time. Let’s go,” Silus barks at Bram and Hugo.
Hugo lifts me from the ground.
My head lolls back against his arm. The ceiling of my shop spins above me, the skylight bright and distant, the place where Ezra kissed me once, where August and I made bouquets together, where Julian made me laugh until I cried.
The last thing I see before the chemical pulls me under is the green-gold flash of the peridot stone on the workbench beside my bloody floral shears.
The last thing I hear is Cole’s voice on the abandoned phone, no longer saying my name, no longer asking questions, just harsh breathing as I hear him driving, and then…my vision goes dark.