Page 45 of The Castle (Endgame 3)
She shakes her head. “I think I can sneak into the back and find some steak knives.”
I wish I could spare her this, but I might need help. Gabriel could be in real trouble, and we might need strength in numbers. We might even need steak knives, not that they would be much proof against the guns that Jonathan Scott has access to. “Are you sure?”
“Wait here,” she says. “You can be the lookout.”
Only when she disappears into the side alley do I realize we don’t have a warning signal. I suppose I would just run back and join her if I see anything.
On the other hand, being a lookout probably isn’t a real job. We’re not robbing a bank, after all. It’s something to keep me busy so I don’t get in the way.
She returns in only five minutes, looking breathless.
“Thank you,” I say, taking one of the knives from her.
“When we get there, I’ll go in first. I know the layout, at least a little bit. And there’s always a chance it’s rigged to explode or something crazy like that.”
My mouth drops open. “So you’re going to sacrifice yourself?”
“It only makes sense.”
“Are you kidding me? It makes zero sense. If anyone’s going first, it’s me.”
“I’m nobody,” she says gently, as if she’s breaking bad news to me. “The way that royalty would have someone taste their food, to make sure it wasn’t poisoned.”
“I’m not royalty,” I say, horrified by her logic. “And no one’s going to die for me.”
She looks almost pitying, that she’s having to explain the facts of life. “Maybe not royalty in the official sense. But in every way that counts. Girls like me, no one saves us in time.”
“Damon did,” I insist, wishing I could explain how broken he looked, carrying her body.
“He kept me from dying, but that’s not what I needed saving from. What Jonathan did to me…”
He attacked her. Physically. Sexually. My stomach turns over. “God, Penny.”
“So you see what I’m saying. I’m already damaged.”
I shake my head, thinking about that castle again. About how you have to break it apart just to see inside. About the fact that we’re all castles—hard, packed pieces of stone. Perfectly composed by eons of earth shifting and forming, carved into our individual builds.
And when we shatter, there’s no going back to what we were before.
“Sometimes it’s harder to survive,” I murmur.
Her blue gaze sharpens. “Yes.”
“I won’t let you martyr yourself for me. We go together, okay?”
After a long pause she takes my hand again. Whatever we find, we’ll be side by side. I’m imagining something wild like a netted trap hiding beneath a pile of leaves, yanking us into the air as soon as we step onto it.
More likely we’ll find Gabriel already hanging from the tree.
I figured out long ago that Gabriel Miller always gets what he wants. He’ll find a way, even if it breaks him. Even if it kills him. And I’m afraid that with this, it might be worst of all. Because Gabriel is made of stone—he’ll survive anything Jonathan Scott does to him.
The hardest part isn’t dying; it’s surviving.
The way that Penny did. The way that Gabriel did.
And even the way I did, after my mother died, after my father betrayed me.
A scream rents through the street, echoing off the brick walls. The hair on the back of my neck rises. It’s an animal sound, made without conscious thought. Made from pain.
The sidewalks are completely empty. No one in the darkened windows of the tenements even comes to look out. They know something horrible if happening. Something evil.
The scream comes again, and I run toward the sound.Chapter Twenty-SixI expect to find a man being pushed to the edge of his limits. And I do find that.
But not the way I thought.
There’s a row of abandoned houses, each one stately and tall, each one crumbling beneath nature and neglect. Some of them have signs in the front, converted into businesses at one time. A lawyer’s office. A boutique. The sign at this house is too faded to read as I streak past it. The door hangs open, not locked. No one’s worried about intruders. No one enters a place with this level of danger, of dread voluntarily.
Instead of Jonathan Scott, looking sinister in a neat tuxedo, wielding some kind of instrument of torture, I find Gabriel Miller with his shirtsleeves rolled up, the white linen fabric stained dark with sweat and soot and blood, holding an iron poker, the end red from heat.
A pile of coals sits in the center of a large fireplace, the kind once used to heat large homes. Half of a desk stands sideways in the corner, signaling some kind of office setting. It’s a modern archaeological dig, layer upon layer of history, the remnants of life lived and lost. I don’t have time to document every artifact, to study every reference, but I can sense the despair in the musty darkness.
