Chapter 222. The Red Blur I
Maisie
Seven months ago...
I woke up to the cold kiss of metal to my throat.
My eyes snapped open and intense blue eyes bore holes into mine. Kisten Hunt’s face hovered just inches away in the dark, but there was something cold and dead inside them, something that made me realize immediately that this wasn’t going to be some weird reunion.
Kisten had been sent to kill me.
I was so used to pain, I risked it, slitting my own neck on the knife just so I could slam my forehead into his nose. He jerked back with a snarl and I twisted as hard as I could, sending us crashing sideways off the bed.
Pain flared across my neck and I felt my blood dribble down my skin, but Kisten was already moving and so was I, driving my knee up, my fingers clawing for his eyes, for anything soft. He grunted and caught my wrist, slamming it into the floorboard hard enough that the knife skittered away.
We rolled.
I bit him. He hit me. My head cracked against the leg of the table in the cramped room. Stars burst behind my eyes, but I ignored it, swinging my elbow into his throat and scrambled for his fallen knife. My fingers closed around the handle just as his weight crashed into me again.
He was stronger.
He had always been. And I had barely been out of the hospital for a week.
In seconds, he had both my wrists pinned above my head and his forearm braced across my throat, cutting off my airflow as he watched me struggle for breath and fail. My lungs burned. Black spots danced at the edge of my vision as I choked and wheezed.
"Who..." I choked out, my eyes watering. From the pain of the betrayal or the lack of air, I couldn’t tell. "... sent you? M-margaret," I gasped as he crushed harder. "Or have you become the Queen’s dog?" I was going to pass out soon. My legs kicked out from beneath him. "You... were supposed to... be my family. Family... protect their own. Or was that... a lie as well?"
His hands shook. He blinked and some of that cold cleared.
He lowered his forehead to mine, even as he continued to strangle me to death. "Disappear," he said harshly. "You will find some dead-end town, some hole in the ground, and you live out whatever pathetic life you have left. You do not come back. You do not try to clear your name. You do not contact them. You do not exist."
My vision turned completely back and I could barely hear him over the roaring in my ears.
"The Queen predicted every move you could make, every path you could take, every ally. Fingerprints have been collected from everything you’ve ever touched and planted at every scene. Not only is it useless to attempt to prove your innocence, it will trigger a different round of investigation. And this time, it will be your husbands who take the fall for it. And this time, the execution will happen."
My eyes pricked with hateful, bitter tears.
His eyes were wild and he laughed softly. "And she won’t stop there. The more you fight, the more she will break your will. She will take Kara next. She already has her. One word that you have resurfaced and our sister dies.
"Then she will burn through everyone you have ever loved, your friends, acquaintances, any one who has ever helped you–the nurses from that hospital, the doctor who tended your wounds, the driver who brought you here without asking for payment–unil there is nothing left attached to your name but ash."
Those eyes pierced the dark for a second. "You are better off dead to all of us than alive. Your existence, your life is like poison to everything connected to you. So do us all a favor." His forearm trembled against my windpipe. "Find some ditch and fucking die in it."
***
Now
There were too many of them.
But that wasn’t the problem. They were stalling, and the why of it was no doubt on the way to ’retrieve’ me like I was their goddamned property.
I ducked under a swung fist and I spun into a crouch, kicking out his legs from under him.
There wasn’t a single day I didn’t think about the Queen and Tessa. In fact, I thought about them religiously. Intimately. I thought about them when I woke up every morning, whenever I got into the shower and traced my flat, empty stomach. I thought about them while I worked. I thought about them while I walked home. On the bus. On a scooter. On my evening runs and routines to force my body never to rely just on Lycan strength, so I would never be helpless again. I thought about them before I went to bed. And I dreamt of them.
I dreamt of how exactly I was going to sink a blade into their black hearts for what they had stolen from me. I dreamt of other methods, too.
I thought the blade would be a novelty, considering I had enough trauma from Lyon’s death that I couldn’t go near blades anymore without twitching.
But vengeance came at a cost. One I wasn’t ready to pay. Not with their lives. Never with it.
Goddess, I wanted it enough that I woke up sweating every day after nightmares of Lyon’s death and that cliff, with the desperate need to kill.
But I knew better. I could never go back. Not until I had proof. And ’proof’ was whatever the Queen wanted it to be. I had learned that bit the hard way.
I could never go back.
I had just straightened, squaring off my shoulders to face the last mercenary when my Lycan stirred in my chest, and every hair that sat on my skin lifted. The air grew heavier with an oppressive feeling and not even one heartbeat later, a massive blur of red fur exploded from the side of the trees, slamming into me like a moving truck.