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“We’ll break it first,” he said grimly. Taking the cloth strip, he awkwardly looped it around his calf and held the ends for her to tie. Della executed a neat square knot while Cal grabbed the rusty hacksaw handle to use as a windlass. He placed it on top of the knot. “Tie this.” She did, and together, they began cranking to wrench it tight.
Pain declared itself as the tourniquet stanched his blood flow. His tissues registered the loss of oxygen and thundered in protest. Cal gritted his teeth, knowing the worst was yet to come. “One more thing,” he said through pursed lips, “I need something big and heavy enough to smash the bones.”
Della whimpered. “I’m going to throw up.”
“Della! For Christ’s sake!”
Scrambling to her feet, she ran to the doorway and returned, hacking smoke from her lungs and holding a sizable rock that looked like a busted-up piece of concrete. “We have to hurry.”
“No shit. Stand back.” Taking the rock, he hefted it in his one working arm, grateful for the jagged edge he could aim at his bones like a wedge. He didn’t have time to calm himself with deep breaths or peaceful meditation, his gaze centered on the lower part of his leg, and he slammed the rock down with all his strength. A sickening crack reverberated to his stomach and renewed his battle with the nausea. The jarring blow invaded like a worm, and white-out pain made him battle for consciousness. Not wanting to take any chances, Cal bit his cheek as hard as he could and struck again, this time letting a grunted curse spill from his lips when he felt the weight of his foot separate from the rest of his body.
Cal reached for the bottle of spirits, white spots bobbing in his vision. “Gimme your hands.” Not looking at her face, he drenched Della in the spirits up to her elbows before moving down to douse his skin, speaking quickly in case he passed out. What she would do with his inert body if that happened, he couldn’t even dare to imagine. “Once you start, you have to keep moving. Angle the blade to leave as much skin as you can, but no matter what,keep going.”
“I can do this,” she muttered, flinching as another crash thundered from above them. Sweat ran down her noble forehead. “I can do this.”
Cal grasped her chin, desperate to impart all the confidence he could. “You can do this.” With a final squeeze, he held out the knife, and she took it, zeroing in on her target.
Not much remained in the jug of alcohol, but he tossed what little there was down his throat. It went down like water and was gone too soon. Holding the final swallow in his mouth, he pulled the shackled chain, keeping it up and out of the way of the blade, which lay poised and sharp against his flesh. Breath locked tight in his chest, the moment balanced on a literal knife’s edge as a fresh wave of hopelessness socked him in the gut. Would she actually do it? Or would they die in a crush of fire and flame?
God bless her, the first cut was deep and decisive. Cal’s neck snapped back, the last swallow of alcohol running down his throat. Its burn absolutely nothing compared to the agony of skin and muscle carved away from his bones. If his leg jerked away from the agony, well, he couldn’t help it. He tightened his grip on the chain to try to hold himself still.
He couldn’t watch. With his neck tilted to the ceiling, the pain took on a life of its own. His vision wavered white, gray, and black at the corners, and above their heads, the fire raged like hell had evicted heaven from the skies.
After an eternity that was probably only a minute, Cal forced his eyes to the scene, seeing his body filleted open like a freshly butchered pig. Sticky blood soaked everything, coating his lower leg and foot in his gruesome path. Alcohol-flavored bile rose up his gullet, and he choked it back down. He couldn’t vomit and risk distracting Della from her task.
As directed, the blade never stopped moving. An extension of Della’s hand, it became indistinguishable as the edge rotated around, making deep, hacking slashes to sever his body in as little time as possible.
“Almost there,” Della said.
A booming, thunderous crack shattered the roar of the fire. A crashing board fell behind Della, sending up a flurry of sparks. Della screamed, and light from the inferno flooded the room through the gaping hole in the floor. Heat blasted his face and lungs. If one board had succumbed to the fire, the others would soon.
“Hurry!” Cal screamed through a snarl of agony. “This whole place is going down!”
“Solve the problem. Solve the problem,” Della chanted to herself like a prayer.
Distantly, over the roaring of blood in his ears, snaps, pops, and cracks of burning wood polluted the air like a morbid countdown to destruction. Eyes squeezed shut, Cal braced himself for the final blow, whether it would come from Della’s knife or the crush of a final, fiery ruin.
“It’s done!” Della’s scream ripped him back into the moment as she yanked the chain from his limp hand and slid the shackle off his leg. “Get up! Get up!” He opened his eyes to find Della on her feet, her bloody hand extended and her face dripping sweat. “I can’t carry you! Comeon!”
Dizzy and sick, Cal lurched to his knees and then his feet—foot—leaning on Della when she plastered herself against his injured side. His head and vision swam with dizziness and, in his wild roving, chanced upon the stump of his foot on the dirty concrete floor, a grisly sacrifice to whatever gods cared about this sad wreck of a planet. If only it were enough. With a stabilizing arm wrapped around his waist, Della urged him toward the door.
Hop after excruciating one-footed hop, he hurled his broken body toward the exit, every minute a battle between dread, pain, nausea, and the seductive pull of unconsciousness. At the foot of the stairs, she took his one working hand in her bloody ones and slapped his palm to the step. “Crawl!” she commanded, pushing on his torso to hasten his ascent. “Go!”
He wanted to scream at her to go first, to get ahead of him, to get herself safe and leave him, to tell her this was all his fault, that he deserved to die, far more than she did, for what he’d done to his family and his Pack and to her. To describe the instant when the first whiff of her scent touched his nose and how the tug deep inside him signaled the once and forever reordering of his entire existence. To explain how he’d loved her from the moment he’d seen her face alight with the gentle glow of the bonfire. To beg her forgiveness for stealing her away, for disrupting her life, and damaging her relationships with her Pack. And, most abhorrently, to confess that, despite all of it, despite all the destruction and ruin he’d brought in his wake, he couldn’t feel anything other than pride and awestruck gratification that she was his mate.Only his. And he’d die with the single ray of light in his heart, the knowledge she wore his mark forevermore.
Yet no capacity remained to express any of this to her. Like an angry beehive, his brain buzzed incoherence, and thoughts refused to form into words. Numbly, his hands and knees moved up the steps while Della screamed words he couldn’t understand behind him.
Then, his hand lifted off the steps, his body jostled by strong hands gripping his body. A deafening thunderclap shook the ground, and the flaming heavens opened, shooting embers like demonic fireflies carrying bits of hell on unholy errands.
The light in his chest flared with a final, searing burst of fear, and then everything went dark.
CHAPTER THIRTY
Della
The screams wouldn’t stop. They tore from her smoke-scorched lungs like something attached to her but notofher, not in the way the bond that sputtered in her chest wasof her,its brilliance fading like waning stars in the coming dawn.
They dragged Cal’s limp body free of the mess hall, now a flaming pile of wreckage, while Della shrieked about being careful of his shoulder, his foot, and his head. It wasn’t until they laid him down in the shadow of Hunter’s cabin that she realized someone had been carrying her the entire way as well. She fought against the hold, watching Cal’s head loll like a doll without stuffing. “Let me go!”
