Howard has summoned enough courage to catch Grant in a headlock and is awkwardly trying to wrangle him into the cuffs without dropping the threat of the broken bottle.
“Shush,” he’s saying as he tries and fails to capture Grant’s wrist. “I’m not going to hurt you.”
“Damn right, you’re not,” I say.
Two pairs of eyes flash up to me—Grant’s immediately softening with relief, Howard’s wide with horror. This is the part where I would normally assess the threat, review my options, ask myself what Uri would do. None of that happens. Instead, some kind of dormant Rage Monster Roxie awakens, and with a roar of fury, I charge.
I lose sight of everything but the force of my limbs and the vulnerable parts of Cowie Howie’s flimsy body. The heel of my hand meets the bridge of a nose. My fingers wrench a wrist. What’s left of the bottle shatters into tiny fragments on the concrete floor. There are jolts of impact. Grunts of pain. Twisting, ducking, striking. And then it’s done. What started in a rage ends with Howard unarmed, whimpering, and cuffed by both wrists to a pipe on the wall.
Out of breath, I watch him for a second, making sure he’s really secure. He’s shaking like a frightened gerbil. He isn’t scary, he’s pathetic. Then again, aren’t the pathetic men the ones you really have to watch out for?
I turn to Grant, finally, and sweep a frantic eye over him. His hair is a mess and his clothes are rumpled, but other than that, he’s exactly as I saw him last: psychologically tormented but physically unharmed.
It’s such a drastic contrast to the visions swarming my head that I rush forward and throw my arms around him.
He wobbles a bit, caught off guard, but right as I’m realizing that we don’t really do this and I’m definitely making this weird, he winds his arms around my back.
“Longest five minutes of my life,” he says into my hair.
“I ran in here in two. What happened?”
“It … it was an accident,” Howard bleats from his place by the wall.
“You. Not a word,” I snap at him with a glare, pulling away from Grant. Howard recoils like a child being scolded by the teacher.
When I look back at Grant, there’s a streak of blood on his cheek that wasn’t there a second ago. My stomach heaves. His face is drawn with concern.
“Listen, we need to get medical attention,” he says.
I’d forgotten about the broken window I scraped past. My hand flies up to my temple, which I immediately regret, and comes back sticky. “Oh, God,” I say, the mild sting flaring into acute pain. “Is it bad? Do I need stitches, do you think?” A needle puncturing flesh. Sutures looping through it. I’m going to throw up.
Grant frowns. “What? No, you’re—” He lightly takes my chin in hand, turning my head for a better look. My entire face feels feverish. “You’re okay. Just a scratch.” The softness of his voice downgrades my sense of impending vomit to a mildly threatening nausea. “But we need to call someone for—”
“Hellooo!” A chipper, accented voice interrupts him from the corner behind me. “I’m Princess Diana.”
I whirl around.
The person beaming at us is, in fact,notPrincess Diana but a bearded middle-aged man handcuffed to another pipe at the far end of the room. He sports a Café Bombay T-shirt, a black eye, and what I can only assume is a traumatic brain injury of some kind.
“Apparently, we were part two of a doubleheader today,” Grant tells me sideways, keeping a worried eye on the man.
“I didn’t mean to!” whines Howard.
“Quiet,” I snap over my shoulder. The injured man in the corner isn’t looking so good. Speaking seems to have reminded him that he has a tongue, and he’s now busying himself trying to touch it to his nose.
“I think the Takeawayer hit him with his oxygen tank,” says Grant. “That’s what he tried to do to me, but I dodged it, so he freaked out and shoved me in here. I think that’s his whole thing—he just locks people up and leaves them to die.”
“No, I don’t!” Howard protests. “I didn’t hit anyone. He fell down!”
I hiss out a breath like kettle steam. “I swear to God, if you say one more thing—”
“This isn’t even my house! I got lost and—”
I elbow him in the face without even turning around.
Uri wouldn’t like that.Only in response to an active threat!he would say. But in my defense, Howard was actively threatening my last goddamn nerve.
Anyway, it works to shut him up. Too well, actually. I turn around to see that against all odds, he’s unconscious, dangling limply from his cuffs, andsnoring. Somewhere in my bewildered mind, I send a harshYou cannot be seriousto Anna Matthews.
