Page 104 of Prohibited

The red headed woman was suddenly in front of him, moving her lips though he couldn’t quite work out what he was saying.

The one he had left behind at Stanley’s house.

The one who had escaped.

A hallucination. She was a hallucination leaning over him with her eyebrows drawn together, soft pink mouth moving out of sync with the irregular and panicked beat of his heart.

“What happened?” Her voice finally sliced through the thick fog that seemed to be filling his mind and spilling into his ears.

“S-Stanley,” he gasped. “Got me. Evie’s gone.”

“Goddammit,” the woman said, straightening for a moment, fists clenched. “Where are Ryan and Alex?”

“Please help,” Roberts said through clenched teeth, a tear sliding down his cheek.

“Where are they?” she asked, bending forward to look at him with a coldness in her eyes that frightened him almost as much as Stanley.

“Cell,” he gasped. “Locked in.”

Something tugging at him. The sound of clinking.

The keys on his belt.

Feebly, he lifted his arm and tried to shove her away, but she flipped his hand away with a flick of her wrist and held up the key ring.

“Please,” Roberts said with lips that wouldn’t move much. Something warm and wet leaked down his chin.

Drool. He was drooling on himself.

“Goodbye, Lieutenant,” she said. Through the dark haze that was settling over his vision, he watched her walk to the door. She turned to look back at him for a moment, though he couldn’t read the expression on her face.

Then, the door closed.

Roberts tried to scream, but all the came out was a gurgle.

Chapter forty

Alex

When Alex heard footsteps, his hand tightened on Ryan’s and anger prickled through him. Anger at being interrupted during a moment he had waited his whole life to have. Anger at what they’d done to Ryan. Anger that they were coming back to do more.

He looked down and found Ryan’s good eye open and looking up at him. It was difficult to read his expression with how swollen his face was, but Alex could feel his fear in the way his body tensed. He slipped his hand under Ryan’s head and helped him slowly sit up.

Then he stood and slipped his hand into the front of his trousers where he had a small knife secreted in a sheath against the right side of his abdomen. It wasn’t a butcher’s knife, but it could cause the right kind of puncture in the right sort of place.

The footsteps drew nearer and his ears sharpened. They were quick, light, and off kilter. A limp. Alex’s heart jumped for a moment at the thought of Lindsay being here. But that was nonsense. There was no tapping of acane. And these footsteps were lighter than his, not the steady, measured rhythm that Alex had come to know so well.

He could hear the keys clanking, though, and his hand tightened around the short handle of his blade. He steeled himself, waiting–

“Saoirse?” Ryan said behind him in a voice distorted by his injuries.

“What the fuck did they do to you?” Plain as day, Saoirse stood there on the other side of the cell, holding the key ring in one hand and gripping one of the bars tightly with the other.

Beautiful like her brothers, with a long shock of hair that put theirs to shame, she had a hardness to her that Lindsay lacked. A quality Alex had always respected, but she was no more interested in allowing him to lay a finger on her than she was walking across broken glass.

She treated him with a hostile tolerance that he’d come to find endearing on a good day and annoying on a bad one. Today, though, he had never been more glad to see anyone.

“Open the door,” Alex said, moving quickly forward to grasp the bars. “How did you get the keys?” As her fingers moved quickly between the keys, trying one after the other to get the door open, Alex did not miss the smear of blood on her knuckles.

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