Page 124 of Hounded: Ashes to Ashes

Stepping forward brought my foot down hard on the stone floor. The knocking sound stopped Jonathan midstream.

“I stood back and let you have your wife. Your family,” I began, practically seething. “I waited in that lonely flat for weeks at a time, desperate for your company. Mydeathgave me more than you ever did.” The truths piled up, bitter at first then growing sweet until I found myself smiling through tears. “Itgave me a better life. So many lives with a man who adores me. He fights for me, and he would… he might…”

It was hard to say. Impossible to accept. I could relive the horrors of the past, fueled by righteous indignation, but the present was too painful to face.

Tears dripped from my lashes as I met Jonathan’s gaze.

“He believes what I used to think of you,” I said. “That I’m worth dying for.”

A loyal man would have freed him, and Iwasloyal, but not to Jonathan. Not anymore.

So, I didn’t summon my glaive, I didn’t cut through the bars, and I didn’t waste another word trying to convince him of what I knew.

He was a despicable man, and Hell could have him.

Loren

Jonathan’s shoutschased us out of the catacombs, but I wouldn’t be stopped. My mind and heart were focused ahead, pulled by the fragile thread that had always connected Indy and me.

Whitney followed while panting at the effort of keeping pace. I wasn’t sure I’d ever seen him winded before.

Up and up and up. The many sets of stairs I’d practically flown down became mountains to hike, and I was breathing hard, too, by the time I reached the top and skidded through the turn toward the nearest hall.

The corridor stretched on and on until it felt like a joke. Like the end was, in fact, endless, and my steps led me nowhere at all.

Until I arrived.

The door was ajar, and that sight alone shocked my feeble heart. The red ooze dribbling from the knocker’s maw had created a pool on the floor that I stepped over as I pushed inside.

All-encompassing darkness draped over me, smothering, as I fought my way forward, breathing in the acrid smell of smoke. It billowed and rolled, waist high and rising. Thick clouds I waded through, gasping and gagging because it was all too familiar.

It was our trailer where he’d burned up in bed while the smoke detector screamed.

It was a club bathroom where I’d had to sit and block the door so no one would walk in and find a man on fire.

It was Indy’s car, the one before the Pontiac, fully ablaze by the time I found it parked at the lookout he loved so much.

There was smoke, but no flames. No light in the pervasive dark. So, like in the catacombs, I let my nose guide me, following the stench of scorched hair and flesh.

My eyes adjusted, but the cloud was as dense as a wall. I stepped forward and swatted it away, squinting and straining and sobbing by the time my foot struck something metal, and I stopped.

I dropped to my knees to feel around. But the air was clearer down here, and I could see more easily than before.

Chains blanketed the floor. They spread out like a web, or a net with a wide perimeter anchored by bulky iron weights. In the open spaces of the net’s grid, golden feathers littered the ground, using any hint of light as an excuse to shine. They spread to the edges of the web, growing denser toward the middle where they piled around a huddled form.

A human form.

An abject cry escaped me, and my glaive came to hand before I thought to summon it. I stood, almost stumbled, then swung the blade down, rending the chains from the weights that anchored them.

Casting the polearm away, I knelt again, shoving the net aside to uncover the person trapped beneath it.

When my hands brushed Indy’s body, ash smeared my skin. His clothes were charred as black as everything else in the room, and his face was stained as well. I crept closer, pressing into him, nearly laying on top of him in my need to touch him. My fingers threaded through his curls and found them similarly powderedwith soot. Then my palm pressed tentatively against his chest, over his heart, and I waited.

The rise and fall was subtle but steady, and his heart thumped weakly beneath my hand.

“Indy?” I whispered while sliding my arm behind his head and lifting him. “Doll?”

His eyelids twitched, and his lips followed suit.

---