I suck in a breath, my body tense.
I still don’t fight back, because I know I won’t win. But whatever trust I had in Faust shrivels.
“That,” he says against my ear, “is an excellent question.” Then he tightens his hold around my throat.
This time, I gasp, and I don’t stay still. My body blares with alarms, and I think I’ve miscalculated the murders, the suspicion, my trust.
I ball my fist with my free hand—the one he doesn’t have pinned down with his hold on my waist—and jerk my elbow back as hard as I can, hitting him straight in the chest.
His grip doesn’t loosen. He doesn’t so much as breathe in deep.
He holds me tighter, squeezing the air from my lungs, my belly.
Panic engulfs me. I should have listened to Nolan. Gotten a lawyer, carried myself away from Drayton. I knew the connections. The targets. The common denominator.
Me.
And if I die in here, they’ll go after Cynthia, too, thinking she knew more than she did. She won’t even know to be on alert because she has no idea Sylvan broke Will’s nose in our home.
Why didn’t I let Tasia have Sylvan? Why did I let Faust in?
Am I always going to fuck up my life?
The lack of food in my body makes me feel weak, unsteady, and I curse myself for that too. For wanting a constantly flat stomach, to feel smaller in my clothes, to never nourish myself so I could relish in the feel of “skinny.” As my ribs showed and my bones between my breasts became more apparent, I felt a sick and twisted pride. Now, without a single strand of hope that I might twist out of Faust’s grip, there’s a different type of self-loathing running through my veins.
“I think I know, though,” Faust says quietly as his hold becomes more cruel. “Just what he wants to do to you.” He laughs, but it doesn’t sound right. Contrived, still with hissignature coldness. I’m unsure what’s real and what’s not. This isn’t the Faust I’ve come to know.
“Eventually, he was going to stab you too, North. Let your blood clot the snow.” His breath sends shivers down my spine as spots pop in front of my eyes. “Maybe I can save him the trouble.” His lips ghost that spot between my shoulder and my neck. “After all, it’s so much easier to fuck a corpse if she’s still intact.”
No.
How could I not have seen this?
What did I miss?
Faust Darling was quiet, yes, cold, sure, but he was pure. Good. In nearly four years of studying the psyche, in my own fascination with what motivates people, what repels them, what makes one a murderer, he never crawled across my list.
If anything, I pegged him as too naive. Too trusting. He seemed to think of Sylvan Connor as a harmless fly, buzzing around his orbit.
All along, Sylvan was a falcon, the protector to the dragon hiding his fire.
I hit Faust again, and again, and again, until I feel I might faint. Then a wave of dizziness passes over me so extreme, my knees buckle, and I sag in Faust’s arms. My vision goes gray, then it fades to a frightening black, but there’s nothing I can do about it.
“Ah, there you go, North. It’ll be easier now, choking the life out of you?—”
“Stop.” A cold, clinical voice pierces the darkness in front of me.
I can’t see, no matter how much I blink, how much I try to find my feet. If Faust wasn’t holding me—gripping my throat, my waist—I would collapse.
Then who knows what they would do to me.
Faust doesn’t let me go, but his hold on my throat loosens. It was never enough to kill me, but it was enough to hurt.
“Breathe, Neve,” Sylvan says, and he sounds annoyed. Agitated. I hear the creak of Faust’s deep gray wooden floors and I know he’s coming closer. “Breathe in through your fucking nose and breathe out through your pretty littlestupidmouth.”
I gasp then, and my eyes fly open, air rushing into my lungs and filling my chest, mybrain.The black of my vision fades to gray, then white spots, then it clears as I blink rapidly.
“Keep breathing.” Sylvan is there, in a black blazer, a white collared shirt, tailored pants. He looks like a vision. A dream. His white-blond hair is messy, like he’s run his fingers through it and pulled.
