The hands on my arms pulled, then pushed, propelling me toward something I hadn’t fully seen but could imagine. I skidded toward one of the barred doors, open and ready to admit me to the cell inside.
The men holding me marched through, dragging me as I set my heels and let my weight settle. They were content to let me fall this time, dropping me on the scuffed wood floor and making a hasty exit from the tiny block of a room.
I barely had enough air in me to yelp, and I scrambled on hands and knees to see Kit still in the hall, held by a guard oneach side. I couldn’t speak, couldn’t call for him with my chest empty and aching.
Fortunately, he did the shouting for me.
“Penny!”
My name echoed off the walls as Kit called out again. He swung one arm, then the other, shirking the guards who attempted to restrain him and forging toward the one who stood in the cell doorway with his back to me.
“Gods, no,” Kit declared, then stabbed a finger at me. “If he’s going in there, I’ll be with him. And Iwillbe talking to Levitt. Immediately.”
He cut an imposing figure despite his obvious weariness from our journey here. Maybe that was why they didn’t grab him again. Or maybe it was his father’s legacy. The weight of Vaughn Koester’s influence hung heavy in this place, making Kit a man of import by heritage alone.
They didn’t seize him, but the man in the doorway didn’t relent. He was as tall as Kit and a bit broader—though most of the added size was in his gut. He set his stance and repeated a variation of what we’d already been told.
“You are to beseparatedfor questioning.”
Kit reached toward the knife at his hip. Ready to fight for me.
His hand was within striking distance, fingers open and ready to loose the weapon from its sheath before the men behind him seized him around the arms and shoulders to restrain him. Another guard plucked the knife from its sheath and retreated to keep it well out of reach.
“We’ll answer no questions if not from the Right Hand himself,” Kit snarled. “And we won’t be separated for any reason. Do I make myself clear?”
I knelt on the floor, shivering and awestruck. The man who once said he wasn’t sure he could love me—love anyone—was now the man who leaped at the chance to call me his husband,who kept me warm when the fire was too much, who bandaged my hands and bought me mittens so my fingers wouldn’t ache. And here he stood in the center of a crowd of five other men, demanding to be near me.
The others weren’t as impressed as I was, because the man blocking the cell door stepped forward and swung the bars shut behind him. The lock engaged, closing me in with a clang that reverberated through my bones.
“You are in no position to be making demands here.” He gestured farther down the hall. “Take him to Matina.”
“No!” Kit struggled against the men holding him. Panic must have given him a rush of strength because he almost broke free.
The man standing in front of my cell door stepped forward and swung a balled fist that cracked against Kit’s cheek and rocked his head to the side. The fight went out of him, and he slumped, dazed, in the grip of the guards.
My yelp of protest tore out of me, too jagged to shape into words, and useless besides. They wouldn’t have listened. Not the brutes dragging my darling down the hall until he vanished from my sight. The scrape of Kit’s boots against stone echoed long after he was gone, grinding into me until it was all I could hear. That and the wet, broken sounds I couldn’t quite swallow back.
Silence followed. Heavy. Suffocating.
I’d never see him again.
Never see home again.
They had already decided what we were. Traitors. And everyone knew the punishment for that.
Death.
My fingers curled against the floor, nails biting into grit as if I could anchor myself to something solid, something real. Because it wasn’t true. None of it was.Anderswas the traitor here, not us. And we wouldn’t go out like that.
I’d been weak at the mission, frozen by the same fear that crept in now. And I’d been ashamed of that. I’d fallen short of my own expectations of the kind of man I wanted to be. The kind of husband I wanted to be if and when I got the chance.
The panic didn’t fade, but it shifted—sharpened. Turned outward instead of in. I gathered every splinter of it and forged it into something mean. Something that bit back. I let it bristle under my skin, let it stiffen my spine and bare its teeth for me.
Let them come.
Let them try to name me a traitor. Let them try to break me for it.
I hunched low where they’d left me, body coiled tight. My breath came slow and steady despite the ache clawing at my ribs.
