Chapter Seven
The two giantshalf dragged, half carried Owen over to a wooden chair close to the diorama and threw him down into the seat.
An ugly bruise had bloomed like a purple pansy on the left side of Owen’s face, and blood had oozed out of a deep, nasty cut in the center of the swelling, trickled down his cheek, and dried on his skin like rusty paint. Owen blinked and blinked, but he didn’tresist as the giants tied his arms down to the chair with thick, heavy ropes. He was still clearly dazed from the hard hit he’d taken when the men attacked him behind the blacksmith forge.
Some of the tension in my chest eased, and my breath escaped in a relieved rush that sent the dust motes spinning through the air. Yes, Owen was injured, but Jo-Jo could use her Air magic to heal his head,along with all the other damage the giants had done. I just needed to get him out of the barn first—and figure out exactly who these people were and why they had kidnapped him.
I could understand Hugh Tucker, Mason, or some other Circle member snatching Owen to lure me into a trap, but it sounded like Lancelot had been ordered to kill me outright, while Owen was still alive. Why eliminate meand keep him alive? Unless...
Unless this was all aboutOwen.
This whole time, I’d thought someone had been using Owen to get to me. But these people didn’t care about me at all, other than making sure that I stayed out of their way. No, they had been after Owen this whole time. But why?
I studied Celeste and the four giants, but I had never seen any of them before today. I was certain ofit. I also didn’t remember seeing their faces in the files Fletcher had kept on Ashland’s many criminals. These were either low-level players or new folks in town. But that still didn’t answer the question of why they had kidnapped Owen.
Celeste glanced over at the two giants in front of the laptops. “Aren’t you ready yet?” she snapped, an impatient note in her voice. “How long does it take totype in a few passwords?”
“A fewdozenpasswords,” one of the giants corrected her, still tapping keys the whole time. “And we’re almost ready. We’re just logging into all the accounts so that we can see the transactions and make sure that everything processes correctly.”
My eyes narrowed. Accounts? Transactions?
The giant was making it sound like this was all about...money.
Kidnappingsomeone and cleaning out their personal and business holdings was a common enough scheme, especially in a place as corrupt and violent as Ashland, but I still wondered exactlywhyCeleste and the giants had chosen Owen out of all the businesspeople in the city.
It wasn’t like they’d seen Owen walking down a dark street at midnight and decided to grab him on the spur of the moment. This wholesetup reeked of weeks, if not months, of careful planning. But how had Celeste and her men even known that Owen was going to be at the renaissance faire? It wasn’t like he’d posted photos of his blacksmith costume on social media like his younger sister, Eva, would have. The only people who had known that Owen was going to be here were me and my friends and of course—
A faint, ominouscreaksounded.I froze, as did Celeste and the giants on the first floor.
She yanked her two swords out of their scabbards and snapped them up. “What was that?”
The two giants who’d dragged Owen in here drew their own swords and started looking around, while the other two men in front of the computers stopped their staccato typing, their heads swiveling left and right, searching for the source of the noise.
A bad, bad feeling filled my stomach. I shifted my weight the tiniest bit to the right. Sure enough, another faint, ominouscreaksounded.
I was the one making the telltale noise.
I grimaced and glanced down. For the first time, I noticed that the boards under my feet contained several deep, jagged cracks, far more cracks than the surrounding wood. My grimace deepened. I’d picked exactly thewrong spot to crouch down and spy on my enemies.
I slid my knife back up my sleeve, then slowly stood up and scooted one of my feet to the side. I was trying to get off the weakest-looking board, but the next one I stepped onto wasn’t any better, and a third ominouscreakrang out. I scooted my foot to a different board, and thatcreakcranked up into a low, steady whine.
I grimaced again andglanced around, trying to find a sturdier board to stand on, but there was nowhere for me to go. All the wood up here was cracked and rotten. So I changed tactics, leaning forward and stretching my hand out toward the window. Maybe I could at least grab hold of the windowsill and take some of my weight off the weak wood—
Too late.
Crack! Crack! Crack!
One after another, the boards splintered,and the entire floor gave way beneath my feet.
Apparently, I wasthe straw that broke the hayloft.
For a moment, I had the weightless sensation of falling, but then gravity set in, sucking me down, down, down. It all happened so fast that I didn’t have time to grab hold of my Stone magic and harden my skin, but I landed on one of thebales that wasn’t filled with weapons, and the hay softened my landing.
But smacking onto a solid surface was never pleasant, and pain spiked through my back. The blow also punched the breath out of my body, and I lay there sprawled across the hay bale and broken boards for several seconds, just trying to get air back down into my lungs.
While I sucked down breath after breath, two of the giantsrushed forward and flanked me, their swords still clutched in their hands.
When I felt steady enough, I slowly sat up and dusted the splinters of wood and bits of hay off my clothes. Then I looked at the giants.
