“I’ll tell them,” I snarled. “I’ll expose?—”
“You’ll do nothing of the sort,” he interrupted, the warmth draining from his voice.
He slid the needle into my neck, his thumb pressing down.
Cold flooded my veins.
I gasped, the world lurching violently as my muscles began to betray me, strength bleeding out of my limbs in a rush that made me feel suddenly, terrifyingly small.
Ashcroft withdrew the syringe and rose smoothly to his feet.
All of a sudden, I was being dragged down into darkness that pressed in from all sides. I fought it out of sheer spite, but my body no longer obeyed me.
The last thing I heard was Ashcroft’s voice, distant and composed.
“Make sure to dispose of him properly.”
I woke to the sound of waves.
At first, I thought it was another hallucination, just my mind scrambling for familiar shapes as the drugs burned their way out of my system.
Cold bit into my skin.
Real cold.
I groaned and tried to move. Pain flared through my arm, terrible and insistent, and I sucked in a breath that tasted of salt and open air.
Open air.
I forced my eyes open.
Gray sky loomed overhead, heavy and low, pressing down on a jagged stretch of coastline. The sea crashed against rocks below, white foam tearing itself apart again and again in a violence that felt honest compared to the controlled cruelty I’d left behind.
I lay on my side, half-curled, my clothes damp and stiff withdried blood. My arm throbbed where the bite had been hastily bandaged.
I was in Ireland.
I didn’t know how I knew, only that I did.
Boots crunched on stone behind me.
I tensed weakly, fear spiking anew, but the sound moved away from me, not toward me. Then I heard voices, their tones muted and dismissive.
“Leave him,” one said.
“He won’t last long here anyway.”
A pause.
“What a waste.”
They walked away.
I lay there for a long time, staring at the sky, the sedative fog thinning just enough for clarity to hurt. When I finally forced myself upright, my legs shook beneath me, but they held. I gathered what little strength I had and began to walk inland.
I didn’t know how long I had—hours, days—but I knew one thing with absolute certainty as the cliffs gave way to grass and trees.
Ashcroft had made a mistake.
