Page 78 of Looking Grimm

He kissed me again, his lips gently meeting mine. Knowing this existed—a future with him—hung a light at the end of a long tunnel of darkness. Maybe we really could walk away from this, hand in hand, and neither of us would ever look back.

I wasn’t sure howthey corralled everyone in the city for a triple-bill execution, but they definitely made it harder than it needed to be. They should have just hired a town crier to wander the streets announcing “Fitch Farrow to die at last! Watch his head roll! Get there early and score a seat in the splash zone!”

On that note, I expected posterboards and banners like the ones I’d seen on the Capitol lawn before my trial. But I wasn’t the headliner, merely the opening act, sent out first to warm up a cold and unnaturally quiet crowd. They were packed tight in here, wedged in a square of space surrounded by buildings and Hex rookies who paced the perimeter with assault rifles barred across their chests. It looked more like a prison yard than a public space.

Vinton chortled to himself as he frog-marched me across the execution stage. His anticipation of my death must have overpowered his desire to beat me bloody a second time because he made quick work of dragging me out of theholding cell and through the corridors of the Capitol building. What I saw on the way haunted me. Dead investigators and employees littered the ground. Dozens of them lay in heaps and piles, stripped of their service weapons and discarded like yesterday’s garbage. The gang had turned the building into a battleground and waged a dramatically one-sided fight. With nearly a day since my meeting with Tobin, Felix, and Nash, I checked every vacant face to reassure myself that my allies were still alive and kicking.

We passed the guillotine, that towering, medieval thing made of craggy old wood. Its sharp, angled blade glinted in the afternoon sun. A Bloody Hex initiate stood beside it with his tattooed hand resting on the lever handle. When he caught my gaze, he licked his lips.

I stared so long that I stumbled, nearly falling over the woven basket set before the murderous contraption. The inside of it was stained muddy brown from the blood of hundreds of witches before me who had met this gruesome fate. The sight chilled me through, and I shuddered, frozen with fear until Vinton jerked on my sore arms and steered me around the basket in a push toward center stage.

In the far corner, Maximus and Holland sat flanked by Hex recruits. They wore shackles, antimagic collars, and impassive expressions. Maximus’s attention was fixed on a distant nothing, but Holland turned toward my approach. Her eyes were red and moist.

She mouthed two words I struggled to discern: “I’m sorry.”

Vinton held me by the handcuff chain and collar, forcing me to stand bolt-upright and turned toward the audience. But my eyes cut a hard angle to the right where Grimm stooda few feet away with a microphone in his hand.

He must have been speaking before I arrived because he wasted no time with pleasantries before launching into a monologue.

“Here is a man who requires no introduction, but I would be remiss not to give him the honor of one.” Grimm swung his arm toward me. “Fitch Farrow, Marionette, is one of the most accomplished mercenaries in our city’s history. Certainly, the most gifted telekinetic I have ever known.”

His head dipped in a slow, almost reverent nod.

“He was once like a child to me, my favorite son.” He caught my gaze then, his blue eyes pale and piercing in the light of day. When he continued, his voice held the contempt I’d expected from the start. “But he strayed from my favor. He fell in league with the enemy, swayed to the side of corruption and deceit. He turned on those to whom he should have been loyal and, for that, he must be punished.”

My better judgment warned me not to look across the swath of people gathered below. I couldn’t stomach their scorn and sneers, or worse, their relief at seeing a villain like me being erased from existence. But I searched anyway, hopeful for the flash of Nash’s red hair. I wanted to see a friendly face in the midst of the hate.

God, I was down bad. Obsessed with that lumberjack bastard.

But I needed to find Tobin. He was the one I counted on. When the guillotine blade fell, he would be the one to catch it. Leaving that critical task in the hands of a man who had never minced words when it came to his feelings about me made me uneasy.

Sifting through the sea of people yielded no one familiar.My pulse pounded in my ears as Vinton paraded me toward the guillotine. Grimm kept talking and throwing out words that stuck like knives in my heart.

Traitor.

Disappointment.

Failure.

I should have been numb to all of it, but it stung. Grimm’s disparagement, the loathing of the crowd, the knowing that I had given up so much to survive and even succeed at the life I’d been thrown into. I became the kind of villain my father would have hunted down. A tool, Grimm called me, fit to be used until I was blunted and broken. That had always been the plan: to change me, corrupt me, then cast me out. From the start, everything led to this.

Vinton shoved me to my knees before the guillotine. I hit the ground hard and started to tremble. My hands fisted behind my back as I stared at the hole between two pieces of bloodstained wood. The Hex-member-turned-executioner lifted the top piece to expand the opening, and Vinton bent me forward, pressing my neck against the cut-out groove.

The upper wood slab dropped into place with a cracking sound that made me flinch. With my face turned down, I couldn’t see anything but that rotted old basket waiting to catch my severed head. I shifted on my knees, swallowing the acid that surged from my empty stomach.

Mentally, I rehearsed the plan. I revisited every detail until they were all scrambled in my brain. Sweat streaked down my face despite the mild weather, and my toes curled inside the infirmary-issued grippy socks. I didn’t want to die like this. Bedraggled and beaten, wearing blood-spattered scrubs and with my nose caved in. Hell, I didn’t even wantto be seen like this. Defeated. Frightened. Ready to beg for mercy to avoid relying on my own shitty scheme.

Grimm’s voice grew louder, booming through the microphone as his speech neared its end. “Let his death be a message to any who attempt to defy me,” he said. “They will be shown no mercy.”

Tenuous thoughts slipped out and tested the lock on one of the handcuffs. I braced, wary of a reprimanding shock from the collar, but none came. Taking the guillotine blade out of the equation made my job only slightly easier. I still had my shackles, the collar, and the wooden stocks to deal with. Then I had to get my hooks into Grimm.

I hadn’t considered the way I would kill him, but I’d fantasized about how it would feel. Fast. Efficient. Satisfying as fuck. I wanted him to bleed out on this stage. I wanted to lord over him while he watched his delusions of grandeur fade. I wanted my traitorous, disappointing, failure of a face to be the last thing he ever saw.

But my mind was wandering, and I needed it focused. There was an order to this. Cuffs first, then the collar, then the wooden stocks needing to be lifted or broken so I could move.

What if Tobin didn’t stop the blade? What if he and Nash and Felix were caught and killed, their bodies discarded in some corner of the Capitol building I hadn’t seen? What if I was, well and truly, alone?

If I wanted to keep my head attached, the answer to that question was the same as I’d given Nash in the cell yesterday: I’d have to think fast.

---