What We Burn (Hangmen Trilogy #2)

1. Eli

ONE

ELI

I’ve been sitting in my car for forty minutes, parked across the street from Sage’s building like the pathetic, self-flagellating coward I am.

The engine’s off. Lights are off. My phone is pressed to my ear while Micah talks me through the specifics of how thoroughly I’ve destroyed everything. Four days of silence. I’ve earned every word of it.

“She’s barely eating,” Micah is saying. “Knox made her pasta yesterday and she moved it around the plate then scraped it into the trash when she thought no one was looking.”

I close my eyes. Press my forehead against the steering wheel.

“She won’t sleep in the bed. She’s on the couch with a blanket, and every time one of us tries to—”

“I get it.”

“Do you? Because from where I’m standing, you detonated a grenade in her chest and then fucked off to God knows where—”

Here. I’ve been right here.

Keeping an eye on Amy because that’s what Sage wanted us to do. I fucked things up to the point where I don’t deserve to be in the room with the rest of them. But the least I can do is take shifts with Dean, make sure the apartment and her friend are covered.

“—so fucking heartless. You’ve left the rest of us picking the shrapnel out of—”

That’s when I hear it. Through the cracked window, through the salt air and the ambient hum of the street. A sound that doesn’t belong to the night.

“Hold on,” I say, frowning, scanning the front of the building for Sage.

She was right there when I called—on the path near Micah, one arm wrapped around herself, head turned toward the street.

“Eli—”

“Shut up. I need to check something.”

I pull the phone from my ear and roll the window down all the way. The street is quiet. Streetlights throw pools of yellow on the sidewalk. A car passes two blocks over, headlights sweeping the intersection and moving on.

Where the fuck is she?

I’m about to ask Micah when I hear it again. A rocking creak. Rhythmic. A sound I know by heart.

Weight on a rope.

Every hair on my body stands up.

Fuck!

I’m out of the car before I’ve made the decision to move. The phone is still in my hand, Micah’s voice reduced to a tinny insect buzz against my palm. I cross the street at a run, vaulting the low hedge that borders the building’s foundation, and I’m into the bushes along the side of the building.

It’s dark. The landscaping lights are out—all I have to guide me is the creaking and the sound underneath it. A thin, reedy whistle. Air forced through a space too small. The sound a body makes when it’s trying to breathe through a crushed windpipe.

I round the corner of the hedge and I see her.

“SAGE!”

She’s hanging from a thick branch, rope around her neck, feet off the ground, jerking. Her hands scrabble at the twisted cord, toes scuffing at the air for some impossible purchase. She’s clawed her fingers bloody, her face already purple.

I sprint. Trip. Land hard on my knees. I don’t feel it. I rip the knife from my boot, then I’m under her, grabbing her legs, taking her weight against my chest to stop the strangulation while I reach up and saw at the rope.

“I’ve got you. I’ve got you, I’ve got you, I’ve got you—”

The knife bites through the rope in three strokes and she drops, a dead weight in my arms. We both hit the ground, Sage caught against my chest. She’s not breathing.

She’s not breathing.

I lay her flat on the mulch. Tilt her head back. Her neck is a horror. The rope bit a groove into her skin and left it raw and weeping. The circle is already bruising black.

I claw the noose loose, work it over her head, and my fingers come away slick with blood.

Fuck!

“Sage! Little savage, look at me. Open your eyes. Please, baby, open your eyes!”

Nothing.

I pinch her nose and breathe into her mouth. Once. Twice. Her chest rises and falls with my air, not hers. I start compressions—the heel of my hand thrusting against her sternum, counting, pushing, the mechanical rhythm I learned for school, never thinking I’d use it on the woman I—

Don’t think about that. Count!

One, two, three, four—

“Come on!”

—five, six, seven, eight—

“MICAH!”

I scream it so loud my throat tears. Sound carries at night on these streets, bouncing off stucco and asphalt. I scream his name again because if there is a God, Micah is close enough to hear me.

“MICAH! HELP! HELP ME!”

I keep pushing. Keep counting. Her lips are blue, her eyes half-open and seeing nothing.

“Come on, baby! Please.”

I breathe into her again. Nothing.

Come on. Come on.

“SAGE!”

I slam my fist against her sternum. Once. Hard. Every first-aid instructor I’ve ever had would flinch.

She gasps.

A shredding, tearing sound—like someone ripping canvas—and then she’s coughing, choking, her body convulsing as her lungs remember what they’re for.

She rolls onto her side, and I catch her before she face-plants into the mulch.

She’s retching, gagging, sucking air through a throat that sounds like it’s full of broken glass.

“That’s it. Breathe. You’re okay. You’re breathing. Keep breathing, little savage. That’s it.”

She can’t talk. Her eyes are wild—rolling, unfocused—and her hands are shaking so hard they might as well not be attached to her body. She grabs my shirt, my arm, whatever she can reach, and holds on with a grip that’ll leave bruises.

I pull her into my lap, wrapping both arms around her. I press my mouth against the top of her head and hold on. There’s nothing else I can do. She’s shaking so hard my body rocks with it.

“It’s okay,” I tell her, over and over, my voice barely working. “You’re safe. I’ve got you. You’re safe.”

She shakes her head, the tiniest movement, but it’s a start. The bloodied ruin of her fingernails digs into my forearms. Her airway is a mess. Wet, wheezing sounds, each breath an audition for which one will fail. I cradle her and look around frantically, trying to find where I dropped my phone.

“Micah!” I call out again.

“Eli!”

He comes around the side of the building at a dead sprint.

He heard me. Thank fuck, he heard me.

His face goes white as he takes in the scene—Sage in my arms, the rope on the ground—and I watch the horror reorganize itself into purpose. He drops to his knees beside us.

“Jesus. Jesus Christ. Is she—?”

“She’s breathing. Call 911. Now.”

He pulls out his phone and dials with hands that are shaking almost as badly as mine.

I hear him talking. Giving the address. Saying words like strangulation and possible tracheal damage and conscious but nonverbal. His voice is steady because Micah can be steady when the world requires it, even when his eyes say he’s falling apart.

There’s a shout from the front of the building, muffled by distance and brick walls, but it’s unmistakably Knox. “Micah? Where are you?”

“We’re here!” I yell, throat raw.

“Behind the bushes, east side,” Micah calls, and there’s a commotion—a stampede on the sidewalk as two more sets of feet tear around the side of the building. Knox and Milo skid to a stop in the mulch, sneakers carving mud tracks, faces whiplashed into open terror.

“Fuck,” Milo breathes. “What—?”

My arms are tight around Sage, but my hands are shaking so badly I nearly drop her. Knox crouches beside us and hovers, like Sage might break if he so much as grazes her shoulder.

“Don’t touch her,” I snap, my chest a bottomless, ugly pit of fear. “Let her breathe.”

“Fury,” Knox whispers.

She makes a sound. Not a word, but enough to signal she knows he’s here.

Milo stays behind Knox. Milo, who is never quiet, who always has something to say, stands at the edge of the scene with his arms at his sides and doesn’t speak. I’ve known him for three years and I have never seen him silent.

The ambulance arrives. Red and white lights strobing through the hedge, turning everything into a carnival of shadows.

Micah runs to the street, leading the two paramedics to us.

They come around the building with a stretcher, and I don’t want to let her go—my arms tighten involuntarily, animal-brain overriding everything else—but Micah puts his hand on my shoulder.

“Let them work, Eli.”

I loosen my grip. They take her. She makes a small, desperate protest when she leaves my arms, her hand reaching back, fingers grasping air. I catch them. Just for a second. Just long enough to feel the squeeze.

“I’m riding with her,” I tell the paramedic.

He looks at Micah, at me, at the blood on my hands and the look in my eyes, and nods like he’s decided this isn’t worth arguing.

I climb in. They’re working on her—oxygen mask, IV line. I sit on the bench, holding her hand.

I don’t let go.

Can’t.

Her eyes find mine over the oxygen mask.

I watch the recognition land. She sees me.

I’m the man who sat across from her four days ago and told her she was easy and fun and not worth a fucking dime.

I’m the man who walked away because I’d convinced myself that cutting her out of our lives would make her safe.

Now she’s on a stretcher, half dead, rope burns around her neck, and the safety I tried to buy with cruelty was worth sweet fucking all.

Her mouth moves beneath the mask. I lean closer. I can’t hear her—but I can read her lips as they shape a word under the fogged plastic.

Eli.

“Yeah,” I say. “It’s me.”

Her face crumples. She turns her head toward my hand and presses her cheek against my knuckles. The sound she makes is barely human, a keening that vibrates through my bones.

I bring her hand to my mouth, pressing my lips to her fingers. I close my eyes.

The monitor beeps. Her fingers tighten around mine, reaching for safety even as her eyes drift closed.

I press my forehead to her knuckles. For the first time in my life, I pray. Not to anyone in particular. Just to whatever is out there listening. Whatever divine force decides who lives and who doesn’t.

Not her. Take anything. Take everything. But not her.

The sirens wail. The hospital gets closer.

I press my lips to her knuckles again and try to stay in the prayer. I can’t. My head keeps going back to the sound that pulled me out of the car. Weight on a rope. A sound I know by heart.

I know it because we make it.

Someone hung her the way we hang men. And they weren’t counting on anyone cutting her down.