“We’ve already accepted that inevitability,” I assured him.
Malloy swallowed thickly. “Will it be quick? May I at least ask for that mercy?”
“No.” Gallagher lunged over the bed faster than a man his size should have been able to. He hauled Malloy’s much smaller frame across the mattress, and the thin man’s high-pitched scream echoed through my head.
I turned as the distinctive sound of tearing gristle echoed across the room. My stomach pitched.
I’d thought I had to watch. That the baby would insist upon seeing the slaughter. Maybe even on participating. But as thefuriaeand the fetal warrior celebrated, I backed into the hallway, and neither of them tried to stop me.
Hoarse cries followed me down the stairs and into the kitchen, and just when I was starting to worry that the nearest neighbors would hear, they dissolved into a choking, gurgling sound. As if Malloy had been punched in the throat.
Gallagher was determined to make this death last. I almost felt sorry for Malloy.
Almost.
At the kitchen sink, I gulped cold water from my cupped hand, then wiped my fingerprints from everything I’d touched. My prints were on file from my arrest in Oklahoma, the day I was sold into Metzger’s menagerie, but I wasn’t sure that would even matter. It was just as illegal for us to be living free, in hiding, as it was for us to kill someone, and they could only execute us once. So erasing evidence felt pointless.
But leaving fingerprints around felt careless.
Something thumped to the floor overhead, and I flinched again. My eyes fell closed, and I was bombarded with mental images of what must be happening upstairs. The blood. The dismembered body parts.
My eyes flew open again, and—
I stumbled back, startled to see a man’s silhouette framed in the window over the kitchen sink. He was standing in the middle of Malloy’s backyard, watching me, though he couldn’t possibly be seeing much, with the interior lights off.
Still, he was a witness. What if he’d already called the police?
I should get Gallagher. We should soak his hat and go.
The silhouette slid his hands into his pockets, and the tiny hairs on my skin began to rise as we stared at each other, each seeing nothing but the outline of a stranger. Then he stepped forward, and I gasped at the suddenpullfrom deep inside me. It felt as if the baby had tugged on some organ I’d never even realized I had.
Or maybe that was thefuriae.
The silhouette took another step forward, and that pull came again, so insistent that I actually took a step of my own and bumped into the sink.
Heart pounding, palms suddenly slick with sweat, I threw the back door open. Logic screamed at me to stop. To close the door and bolt it. To race upstairs as fast as my poor swollen body could move and tell Gallagher what was going on.
Instead, my legs carried me down the steps, my fingers itching for...something.
My mind railed against this betrayal by my body, shouting protests and terrified utterances my mouth refused to give voice to.
My feet hit the grass and I prayed that Gallagher would look out of Malloy’s window and see me. That he might somehow intuit that I’d left the house. That his child and I were in danger.
I could hear the mechanical whine of Malloy’s central air conditioner and, more distantly, the gurgle of his pool filter. Crickets chirruped and, somewhere, an owl hooted, as if this were any normal night. As if my sworn protector weren’t upstairs ripping a man to pieces in my honor. As if my body weren’t carrying me and my unborn child toward untold—
The silhouette stepped closer, and suddenly I could see his shadowy face in the ambient light of a sky full of stars. As my thoughts raced toward panic, I studied his features, trying to find some sense in what was happening.
Pale wavy hair. Eyes that were probably blue in the daylight. Slim, fair features and a trim build.
I’d never seen him before in my life.
The man frowned as he stared at me from several feet away, as if he were making the same assessment. As if he were drawn to me through that same pull, yet had no idea why.
I opened my mouth, but before I could ask who he was and what was happening, something thumped against an upstairs window. Startled, I twisted to look as a gory hunk of flesh slid down the glass.
When I turned back to the man, I found him still watching me, evidently unconcerned with what was happening upstairs. He opened his mouth, his brows drawn low in confusion. “Who are—?”
My hand shot out as my legs closed the slim distance between us. I felt my hair rise from the roots, twisting around my head as if the strands had life of their own. The familiarity of the impulse was both a relief and a frustration. Thefuriaewas awake, and whoever this man was, she wanted him.
