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Bockton’s arm slowed, the sword flinging from his grip and clattering onto the floor just past her.
He slumped. Slumped to nothing. A bullet hole in his head.
She couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think until she twisted and scrambled across the floor to Roe, her hands manically going to his face, his body, his leg.
Blood. So much blood on her hands it was impossible to grip him.
His mangled shin bone stuck out through his bloody trousers.
“Your leg.”
“You’re here.” His voice not his own, the words seeped through a jaw that wouldn’t open.
“Your leg.” She looked up at his face. Only one of his grey eyes focused on her, accusing, his left eye swollen shut.
“You’re here.”
“I am.”
The anger palpitating from his one eye scorched her. “What in the bloody devil are you doing here, Tor?”
She moved back up to his face, her hands shaking, wanting to touch him but not wanting to cause more injury to his face, to the gaping wounds across his cheeks, his temples. “Helping.”
“Tor.” The tortured anguish in his grey eye, in her cracked name, cut her to her core.
She set her hands onto his mauled face, ignoring the pain it must have caused him. She needed to touch him. Touch him fully in that moment. “I run after the people I love, Roe. I run like hell into hell.”
His one eye closed, his mouth slightly agape as he drew an anguished breath into his chest. “You’re going to kill me.”
“Or save you.”
His right eye opened and he looked at her face for only a moment before his gaze flew off of her, looking behind her. “Shit.”
Her heart dropped into her gut.
The fire.
She had to force her head to turn, to look behind her, even though she knew what she would find.
Fire.
A wall of fire already licking up the far wall, attacking the ceiling.
An explosion below them shook the building, sending sparks flying up through the cut-through in the floor where the stairs had been.
Hell. No. No. No.
Not again.
She spun in a circle on her knees, searching, searching for an escape.
They couldn’t go back down through the opening, not with barrel after barrel waiting to explode below them. A wall of fire was eating across the floor toward them—Bockton’s body had already caught aflame.
A fat ember landed on her shoulder, singeing through her dress, sizzling into her skin.
No.
Not again.
