Page 100 of Claiming Sarah

Jac shouted, “Sarah, no!”

But she ignored him and proclaimed, “I have taken Rex Terian as my hostage. He is trapped within my body as we speak. All of you, stand down now!”

“How do we know you have him?” one of his men asked.

Quietly, she said, “Rex, do the honors.”

Her body vibrated until she tipped her head toward her shoulder, revealing Rex’s head. Then his gruff voice snarled, “She fucking has me. Stand the fuck down. None of you will get paid if I’m dead.”

Sarah straightened again, shaking and absorbing Rex’s ghost. She demanded, “Lay all your weapons down, get onto your ship, every single one of you. I know everything he knows about you. Your names, how many there are, all of it. If any of you decide to stay here for any reason, I will kill Rex and I willblow up the ship with the rest of you on it. Go. Now. While I feel merciful.”

I watched as the mercenaries loaded up, each one with an eye on Sarah, as if she might somehow do something more extreme. Once she knew they were all on board, she turned to me.

Very calmly, she said, “For this to work, I have to go with them.”

“What?” Fear for her safety jolted through my entire body. “Why?”

“If I let Rex go now, he will kill me and everyone else here,” she said, her eyes pleading with me to understand. “I can hear it in his thoughts. I have to get him back to Faithless. Right now.”

I shook my head frantically. “You can’t go with them!”

She smiled sadly at me, bone knife still at her throat, just in case Rex became unruly. “You know I have to. If I don’t go now and force negotiations on Rex, he will come back here with an army. He will wipe all of us off of Halla—I can hear the plan he’s trying to formulate. This is the one contingency he didn’t think of. Him beingmyhostage. He isreallypissed right now.”

She almost giggled, but then her face fell into a more somber expression. “I will not let us live in this perfect cottage in fear of the next time Rex gets cranky. That is not the life we are meant to have, Deacon. None of us. I did not come all this way to lose my family now. I will be back, I swear it. I have to go.”

“Don’t, please,” I begged. I reached for her, but my arm flopped to the ground and my gut tried to heave from my concussion.

She turned to Jac, who was running toward us. “Take care of Deacon while I’m gone.”

“Where are you going? What is happening?” He shouted ahead of himself.

She walked up the ramp into Rex’s ship and her body quaked and jerked. Rex growled out her mouth, “You cannot kill me in a way that matters, Queen.”

Then her body trembled again and her softer voice said, “That is a problem for another day.”

The passenger door closed behind her just as Jac pounded on it, roaring mindlessly. The ship lifted off and he fell to his knees, gasping for breath or sense. He crawled to me, his mind a wreck, worse than when I had pulled him from the moat.

His voice was hoarse as he begged the question in my mind, “What do we do?”

I had no fucking idea.

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