Page 139 of The Unfinished Line

“Who’s up there?”

A gate slammed closed.

Holy fuck. I looked at Dillon.

“Oh, fuck me!” she hissed.

Yeah, the time for that had clearly departed.

Not needing any additional motivation, I lunged to my feet, grabbing for my clothes—her clothes—whatever threads of fiber I could find to tug on.

She was still half dressed—courtesy of her knee brace—and was on her feet and ready to run before I’d even pulled up my pants.

“Turn off your torch!”

In my current state of turmoil, it took too long to register her meaning. She reached out and snatched my phone, flicking off the flashlight.

“Okay, come on, we can go through the south keep.”

Again, I struggled to keep pace with her, my shoulders colliding with ninety-degree turns and toes stumbling over jagged steps. Down a pitch-black staircase into an even darker hall, I caught hold of the tail of her t-shirt as we burst out a cockeyed doorway and ran for the west curtain wall.

“Hey!” A man’s voice bellowed, his shadowy shape moving across the courtyard lawn. “Stop!”

Had yellingstopever actually worked in the history of crime?

Dillon threw on the brakes as we reached the drainage pipe, waiting to shove me head-first to the other side.

“Head for the wood,” she whispered as her crutches preceded her through the pipe.

Inside the castle, the man’s curses rang off the stone, but we were already halfway across the open parkland, making for the shelter of the trees.

“Oh, my God,” I panted when we’d finally waded through waist-high foliage to find the woodland hiking trail leading to the main road. “What the fuck, Dil—?” My words were cut short as I stumbled over an exposed tree root and a low-lying branch smacked me in the face.

The perfect abridged synopsis of the way my evening was going.

Dillon was still laughing as she caught my elbow, steadying me. “Mr. Roberts—the groundskeeper. He must have seen your light.”

“You didn’t mention a groundskeeper!”

“I wasn’t expecting him to be around. He lives off property.”

As we picked our way out of the last of the trees and onto Mumbles Road, I paused to take inventory of what I was wearing:

Dillon’s jacket. My unbuttoned pants. Underwear on one leg. Both shoes.

Which meant my bra, t-shirt, sweatshirt, jacket, scarf, beanie, sunglasses, and dignity had been lost to the holy chapel of Oystermouth.

Sorry, Alina.

But whatever. Centuries of ladies left alone while their lords went off to war—no one was going to convince me Dillon and I were the first pair of women to find pleasure within those walls.Againstthose walls. However you wanted to look at it.

“Uber will be here in three minutes,” Dillon said, looking up from her phone.

An older couple passed us as we waited on the corner for our ride. I struggled not to laugh from behind the upturned collar of Dillon’s jacket as they gave us a wide berth, no doubt assuming we were a pair of derelicts wandered out from the pub. Dillon’s hair was wild, slick with sweat and dusted in cobwebs. Her elbows and thighs were streaked with grass and mud from our belly crawl through the drainage pipe, and half the foliage in Mumbles was stuck to the velcro of her knee brace.

“Happy Christmas,” she said cheerfully, prompting the pair to pick up their pace.

The Uber driver gave us a long glance in her rearview mirror, and then Dillon turned the chat to the latest Wrexham football match until we reached her front door.

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