“Not yet!” She couldn’t walk with a tourniquet.
Diana took off again, making a frantic circle around the Menagerie. A few minutes later she landed next to him again, this time with a canvas sack, a pair of scissors, and an oversized metal spoon. Augustine was right. The wound was deep, and the stream of blood was too fast. It would soak though a makeshift bandage. She had to cut off the flow.
He watched her cut the sack into five-inch strips and fold them into one thick, long bandage. She stripped her pants off. The deep hole in her leg gaped like a red mouth. Blood ran down her skin.
She looped the improvised dressing above the wound and tied it into a half knot in a flash of pain. The spoon was next; she placed it on top of the knot and tied the strips again.
“Let me.” He pushed himself half-upright.
“I’m fine.”
He gripped the spoon and rotated it, winding it like a clock. Pain squeezed her leg. Diana cried out.
Another turn. Another. The flow of blood stopped. Augustine looped the tails of the dressing over the spoon, tied it in place, and collapsed.
She lay flat on her back. The adrenaline had worn off, and she had nothing left. Kitty, who’d been trailing behind her during her frantic search, padded over, sniffed at her blood, and flopped on the floor between them.
“Any way out?” Augustine asked.
Diana wanted to lie to him but couldn’t. “No. There is no way to open the door, and there is no cell service.”
“That’s to be expected.” His voice was quiet. “We’re in a bunker with four-foot-thick concrete walls.”
Woodward’s death must’ve triggered some sort of failsafe, because the steel door blocking their exit had no lock. She couldn’t find any mechanism to open it. It was just a wall of metal sealing them in. There were no windows, no exits. Nothing in the Menagerie could breach the reinforced concrete walls. She’d hoped for a landline in the little room where she found the towels, but there had been none.
They were truly trapped.
If they didn’t get to a hospital in the next hour or two, Augustine would die. She didn’t know if his intestines were perforated. Even if they weren’t, they would dry out. He could go into sepsis, and he was still bleeding.
If she didn’t get medical treatment soon, she would lose her leg, and then she would die.
She could almost hear Woodward laughing. They would all die here. Together. Eventually someone would open that door and find three human corpses.
She forced herself to reach for the pocket in her jacket, pulled out a pouch filled with liquid, unscrewed the lid, revealing a rubber nipple, and offered it to Kitty. The cub sucked on the pouch, making greedy growling noises.
Diana waited until all of Celeste’s milk was gone, typed a message on her phone, removed the password, and put it down next to her.
“What does it say?” he asked.
“It says House Harrison will give five million to whoever brings Kitty back to my House alive. She just had her milk. That gives her a couple of days. I left a dish of water on the floor.
“It will be fine,” he told her. “We will be okay.”
It would not be okay. There was no escape.
“Stay with me, Diana?” he asked.
She turned to him and forced a smile.
His eyes weren’t wholly green. They were a light, beautiful hazel, a ring of greyish green with a starburst of golden brown around the pupil.
It hit her. His magic was gone. Augustine was spent. She was seeing the real him, and she looked at him, reallylookedat him.
His shoulders were broader. She’d caught a glimpse of his true body during the fight with the Hesters, but now the hard muscle cording his frame was obvious. An old scar sliced through his left cheek, cleaving his upper lip in the corner. Stubble roughened his jaw. His features had lost their flawless perfection, but somehow that only heightened their impact. She’d always assumed he had reshaped his face with his illusions. She was wrong. Augustine still looked like himself. Her deadly prince was truly that beautiful.
She sat up, pulled off her jacket, rolled it into a wad, and gently tilted him up to slide it under his head.
A massive scar scoured his back. She gasped. An arcane circle, not just drawn but burned into his skin, so deep the lines of the sigil were shallow trenches in his flesh.
