Page 73 of These Godly Lies
“Hey! Hey, you can’t do that!” their driver shouts, twisting in his seat. Khiran doesn’t spare him a glance, but Anna murmurs a soft apology as she slides across the leather seat and takes Khiran’s offered hand. He slams the car door behind her.
The sound echoes, sharp in the sudden silence.
Anna’s heart stills.
She ducks her head, looking through the passenger window, hoping to find movement. The cabbie driver stares past her, unblinking and lips pulled back in frustration beneath a thick mustache. She faces Khiran, his name a breath on her lips.
He isn’t looking at her, though. His eyes dart between the cars,searching for something Anna doesn’t have a name for. A sound, a rhythmic clicking, echoing off the tiled walls.
It sounds like footsteps.
There is no warning. One moment he’s waiting, the next they’re fleeing. Urging her, with his fingers on her pulse, torun.
Run and don’t look back.
A laugh, cutting and cruel as a nightmare, surrounds them like a flood. Filling her ears and drowning her hopes. She watches Khiran reach into his pocket, drawing the divine blade from its sheath. His lips pull into a sneered grimace, eyes electric and ready to draw blood as he turns—
And stops.
Snared in the web cast by the Timekeeper’s hand.
Anna falters, her hands ghosting over his arms, his chest, as if she could coax movement from him. “No—no no no!” Her voice cracks, harsh in the silence despite how quietly she frets. There’s a trembling against her palms, it takes her a moment to realize it’s not just the shaking of her hands buthim. Frozen as he is, he’s still fighting the bonds keeping him still.
A different set of footsteps, heavy and flat compared to the clicking of Marcia’s booted heels, sounds behind her. Anna stills, pulse beating in her ears like an executioner’s drum. A looming presence behind her, a deep voice accented with the graveled edge of time itself. “So,” he drawls, his fingers trail over the ends of her hair escaping her scarf. “You’re the one causing all this trouble.”
Slowly, Anna’s hand slips down Khiran’s arm, carefully unfolding his fingers from the blade’s handle and taking it into her own. She wills her hand to stop trembling as his words breathe across the shell of her ear. “It will be fun, watching Marcia break you.”
The handle of the blade bites into the palm of her right hand, scar tissue brushing against the iron that put it there. Her eyes lift to Khiran’s frozen expression.
She isn’t ready to lose him.
Anna turns, barely registering the surprise flitting across Dante’s chiseled features, before she plunges the blade into the soft tissue ofhis muscular throat—feels the snap of bone as the tip drives into his spinal cord.
Blood coats her hand. Warm and wet. Anna can’t bring herself to look away from the face that stares down at her. His thick, dark hair is past his shoulders, his beard a shadow around the full lips parted around a final breath. She pulls the blade from his flesh, more instinct than thought. He buckles, dropping to the ground like a puppet with cut strings. All joints and limbs, splayed over the road and blood pooling beneath him.
Dead.
He’s dead.
She killed him.
Noise returns. Car horns and shouts swelling like a tide, but Anna already feels like she’s been swept under. The blade slips from her fingers, the iron clang against the brick almost lost amidst the noise. More shouting. She thinks she might recognize the echo of her name in the chaos. A familiar arm wraps around her waist. The feeling of the universe folding—
A collision, arms slipping away from her and air whistling past her ears.
She’s flung from Khiran’s arms, body landing with bruising force. Her fingers curl against the soil, dry grasses slick against her bloody palm. They’re in a field, snow-capped mountains dotted with evergreens on the skyline and the air thin. The sky is blue and cloudless. Blindingly bright compared to the dimly lit tunnel they came from.
It takes too long for her eyes to adjust. Too long to register the feeling of a body behind her, an unfamiliar arm caging her in, and a blade at her throat. She’s caught—a fly in the web, unable to escape and waiting for death to descend. Anna’s eyes find Khiran’s, the fear clamoring in her chest sharpening into regret. He’s on the ground, paused mid crawl, as his terror rimmed eyes flit between her face and the knife at her throat.
“Don’t,” he says, the words strangled, “Marcia,please—”
“Reduced to begging now, are we, Liesmith?” Marcia mocks, pressing the blade closer and nicking Anna’s skin. She winces, feeling a bead of blood run down her neck. Marcia’s porcelain cheekbrushes hers with enough friction to feel like a threat, her voice a venomous purr. “Tryharder.”
“Take me.” Khiran pleads, his hand splayed over his heart. “That’s what you really want—what you’vealwayswanted, right? She is nothing to you.”
A pause, and then Marcia laughs. The sound of it cutting through the mountain air. “You would have known better once.” The cruel curve of her mouth presses against Anna’s cheek as she gives a taunting hum. “Do you always make him so stupid, I wonder?”
“Please—”
