She pulled.
The dislocation was immediate and total. Her left shoulder separated with a wet, grinding pop that she felt in her teeth. Pain exploded through her chest and down her arm—white-hot, blinding, so enormous that her vision went dark at the edges and she heard herself make a sound that was barely human. A choked gasp ripped out of her before she could clamp her jaw shut.
Worse. So much worse than the other times. The stiffness she’d been tracking all night had made the joint resistant, and forcing it past that resistance would cost her something she’d feel for days.
She didn’t stop.
Her left arm hung dead against her side, the shoulder collapsed inward, and she turned and pressed herself into the gap. The iron bars dug into her ribs, her spine, the soft tissue below her collarbone. It was a tight fit but the rest of her body was more narrow than her shoulders, and with the dislocation, she fit.
She pushed through. The bars scraped against her shoulder blade and caught on the silk of her suit and she kept going because there was no choice.
She made it through.
The other side. Open ground. Dark trees.
She caught herself against the gate with her right hand, bent double, breathing in ragged pulls that tasted like iron. Her left arm was still hanging. She had to fix it now. Right now, before the adrenaline dropped any further.
She gripped her left wrist with her right hand. Rotated the arm. Found the angle she’d practiced a hundred times in empty apartments and borrowed rooms.
She shoved the joint home.
The shoulder seated with a deep, meaty thunk that vibrated through her whole skeleton. The pain didn’t stop. It changed shape, shifting from the screaming white of displacement to a radiating throb that pulsed outward from the joint in waves. Her eyes flooded. Her teeth were clenched so hard her jaw ached.
She straightened up. One breath. Two.
A sound from the other side of the gate. She looked back through the bars.
Isaac was standing right there, his hands on the iron. She could see his whole face in the faint light from the distant party. She’d expected anger. Frustration. The expression of a man who’d lost a game he thought he was winning.
What she saw was horror.
He’d watched her do it. Watched her wrench her own shoulder out of its socket and force her body through a gap that shouldn’t have been possible. His face was open in a way she’d never seen—no charm, no composure, no confidence. Just a man who’d seen something he couldn’t process.
His mouth opened. He didn’t speak.
Flashlight beams cut through the maze behind him. The guards’ voices, closer now, calling out to each other as they swept the corridors. They’d find him in seconds.
She held his gaze through the iron bars for one more beat. His eyes were dark in the low light, and what she saw in them wasn’t the look of a man who’d lost his quarry.
It was the look of a man who was terrified for her.
She cradled her arm to her body and turned and walked into the dark.
