Elijah is a steady, formidable presence at my side. Just like his father, he’s got his head screwed on tight when he needs to. Me? I feel like I’m falling apart, layer by layer, as the large structure looms ahead.
I try to force down the insistent fear that wants to render me useless, but something is terribly wrong. I feel it in the air.
Gray, ominous clouds gather overhead, crows caw in the distance, perched on the roof, and the air smells of an impending storm.
We walk up to the entrance, weapons drawn. Sinclair puts his ear against the surface and makes a few hand signals before slowly opening the door. After a final nod, he steps inside. I follow, hearing the crunch of dried leaves underfoot. Elijah comes in next, holding the door open for the man behind him.
Sinclair puts his arm out to stop me, and I raise my gaze to see a Pawn tied up on the floor, beaten unconscious, by the looks of it, but alive. A note written in blood is stapled to his shirt, and I crouch down and rip it off.
“Darian, enjoy your gift.”
Elijah frowns when I hand it to Sinclair. Behind us, the other men look around the vast empty space.
“She’s not here…” My voice shakes as I feel something break inside me—the small sliver of hope I had left.
Sinclair drops the note, allowing it to flutter to the ground, and looks at me. His brows pull down when a drop of red splats on my shoulder, and I swallow, feeling the warm liquid on my fingers as I touch it. We share a worried glance before looking up.
“Holy mother of God,” Sinclair breathes, and all hell breaks loose around me.
“We need something to get her down. NOW!” someone shouts in a panicked voice that sounds muted and far away.
Suspended from the roof, crucified, Cecilia’s beautiful hair cascades from the upside-down cross, her naked body whipped and covered in dried blood.
The floor opens to swallow me whole, and I feel myself endlessly falling and spiraling until there’s nothing left but an unquenchable desire for revenge.
As she’s lowered to the floor, I fall to my knees beside her broken body while they remove the ropes and call for medical assistance.
“I’m sorry,” Sinclair says, squeezing my shoulder while I feel for a pulse in her neck.
“She’s not fucking dead,” I spit, refusing to lose my wife, refusing to let the fucking Exodus break me a second time. They’ve taken too much already. They’re not taking my wife, too. She will survive this, and I will bathe in their blood and burn the entire society to the ground. I don’t care what it takes.
Their reign ends with me.
Sinclair crouches beside me, stroking her blood-streaked hair away from her brow, a wretched look on his face. “Fuck, I’m so sorry,” he says again, and fury explodes inside me like a supernova as I stare at the bloodied nails in my wife’s pale hands.
I launch myself at the tied-up, unconscious Pawn on the ground, lift his head off the floor, and smash his skull againstthe concrete until there’s nothing left—until my fingers are slick with his blood and brain matter.
With an agonized roar, I hop to my feet and kick his dead body. I kick the living shit out of his remains for my mother, for my wife, for every helpless woman who’s fallen victim to the Bishop and his reign. Some of the men try to stop me and calm me down, but I shove them away before stomping on his bleeding corpse.
How the fuck could the Bishop do this to his niece. His own flesh and blood.
To the woman I love.
“We have a pulse. It’s weak, but we have a pulse.” I’m torn away from the broken body, and Sinclair jostles my shoulders, his face blurring in front of me. “She’s alive, Darian.”
I whip my head around. Paramedics have entered the room. Paramedics we can trust.
Because we’re on the run now.
Fugitives on the run from everything we’ve ever known.
Sinclair’s big hands clamp down on my tear-streaked cheeks. “She’s alive.”
In the fewmonths I’ve known my wife, we’ve been through hell and back, yet here we are, still fighting.
Well, she’s healing, and I’m fighting.
Always fucking fighting for her.
