Page 158 of Where the Snakes Sleep

“No!” I yell, surging forward so violently that my injured head explodes with pain and the man holding me nearly loses his grip. “Don’t touch him!”

Ryan does not back away.

He should be running.

He should already be halfway to the river.

But no, that would be too easy. He stands there with his shoulders squared and his hands visible, looking at Henri as though he has walked into an argument rather than a room containing armed men.

I have spent the last several days trying to learn that loving Ryan means trusting him to make his own choices.

At this precise moment, I have never hated one of his choices more.

24

Ryan

Camille looks at me like I have just personally invented stupidity.

Considering he is kneeling on his own damn floor with his hands restrained behind his back, blood all over him, while three armed men stand around him and a seventy-seven-year-old psychopath holds a cane like he is contemplating whether to crack Camille over the skull with it again, I do not feel particularly inclined to accept criticism regarding my decision-making.

His face goes pale beneath the blood. “Ryan, what the fuck are you doing?”

The sheer panic in his voice does something strange to my anger, warping it into a hotter, sharper thing that crawls beneath my ribs and makes me want to cross the room, grab him by the shoulders, and shake him until whatever part of his enormous brain thought “Je t’aime” was an acceptable thing to say before volunteering himself for death rattles loose.

I glare at him. “What does it look like?”

“Leave,” he pleads.

One of the armed men takes a step closer, his gun never straying from me. I hold still and put my arms up.

Camille tries to do this backward-headbutt move against the man restraining him, but it doesn’t really do much more than aggravate the guy.

“Put your weapons down, gentlemen,” Henri suddenly says, watching the scene before him with obvious interest.

He has lowered the cane, although only enough that its end rests against the floor again. He looks exactly like the photographs and nothing like them at the same time. Age has hollowed his cheeks and softened the hard structure of his jaw, silver replacing the dark hair I saw beside my grandfather in those old photographs, but his eyes are disturbingly alive—alert, assessing, possessive.

That last one makes my skin crawl because I know, even without understanding all the French I heard through the door and then down the hall while I worked up enough courage to leave the lab, what they had been talking about.

Alberte.

Camille.

Me.

Henri holds out a hand towards me, smiling. “Ryan. Come, come. Sit with me.”

Camille makes a strangled noise somewhere between irritation and terror. “Ryan, don’t. Run. Go. Fucking go,” he hisses.

I look at him.

Blood streaks the right side of his face, matting his hair at the temple before running in a crooked line along his cheek, and one of his eyes is narrowed almost shut against it. I think his nose might be broken from how swollen and angry it looks. His wrists are still restrained behind him. He’s on his knees with a man standing directly behind him, one hand planted on his shoulder.

“Sit.” Henri’s voice is low, almost conversational. He gestures toward the sofa beside him with an open palm—not a command, but an invitation. Like I’ve arrived late to Thanksgiving dinner, and he’s making room for me at the grown-ups’ table.

Every survival instinct I possess screams not to go near him, not to step within reach of that cane still flecked with Camille’s blood.

I go near him anyway.