Page 29 of Threadbound

So he didn’t reply, putting his phone back in his pocket and shrugging his shoulder up to keep the strap of his satchel in place.

Home was a better idea.

No, arunwas a better idea, he decided, as his legs felt twitchy and his palms itched, causing him to flex his fingers. He needed to burn off whatever this toxic energy was that was keeping him from being able to concentrate on anything—work, cooking, even macramé and murder mysteries hadn’t been able to hold his attention for the past few nights.

He walked home quickly and changed into running gear, then headed out into the early twilight. He had time for a decent run before it got dark, and he brought a headlamp—tucked into his running shorts pocket—just in case it got dark more quickly than he was expecting.

The running helped.

It didn’t fix the increasing sense that something wasoff, but it at least got his mind off its endless cycles of what-ifs about Bran, about his research, and about whether or not Trixie was going to be pissed that he didn’t respond to any of her texts.

Rob had been in for curry, but Jamie hadn’t said a thing, even when Trixie asked him, specifically. They were probably at the curry place right now, Jamie thought as his legs carried him up the slope of Salisbury Crag.

He glanced upward, his eyes scanning the sky for the familiar shadow of the big, black bird that he so often saw when he climbed the crag’s slopes, but the sky was empty even of its frequent dusting of starlings.

For some reason, that made him even more agitated.

The sun was going down by the time he rounded Arthur’s Seat and made it back to Queen’s Drive. Despite the fatigue in his legs and the obvious physical tiredness from poor sleep, he was still jittery and wired, his heart racing faster than it should have been, and his chest tight.

He knew he needed to stop. To rest his muscles and eat something.

But he was too wound up, too agitated.

So he kept running. Following Queen’s around in a half-circle, passing his usual turn-off and continuing past the golf course, past Duddingston Loch, around the curve toward Dunsapie, then past the parking lot—car park—and the smaller loch, toward the entrance to Meadowfield, his heart in his throat the whole time.

The path that led off into the neighborhoods at Meadowfield was shadowed by a smattering of trees, so he almost didn’t see them.

But he heard them.

The unmistakable sounds—to Jamie’s sadly experienced ears—of fist and flesh, boot and bone. The panting of violent breath, muttered curses, grunts, and pain.

He stopped at the top of the pathway.

“Hey!”

The sets of eyes that turned to look at him seemed, for a moment, to gleam and glimmer, reflecting some light source that Jamie couldn’t identify, since he hadn’t yet had to put on his headlamp, although he would have to pretty soon.

“Go on, get the fuck out of here!” he rasped, his own breath coming short into his lungs from running. He took a step onto the path, dirt and gravel crunching under his shoes. Now that he wasn’t running, the sweat on his skin took on a slight edge, clammy in the evening breeze.

As his eyes adjusted to the gloom under the trees, his heart beat faster.

Because among the figures in the dappled darkness, he recognized Bran.

Forced down onto his knees, another man’s hand fisted in his dark hair and the other around his throat. Bran’s face was a mess of blood and pain and rage, white-knuckled fingers gripping the arm holding his neck. The other arm hung limply at his side, and Jamie took a step closer, his protective instincts surging.

And then he noticed that Bran—despite being much smaller than all three of his attackers—appeared to have given nearly as good as he’d got. One man’s nose was bleeding profusely, a tall woman held her wrist with one hand and leaned all her weight on a single leg. Even the man holding Bran down had a split lip and blood smeared on the knuckles of the hand holding Bran’s throat.

Jamie was broader than all of them, taller than at least two. He wasn’t sure he’d be able to actually beat them in a fight, but that hadn’t ever stopped him from intervening when Bill Eckel had gone after his mother or one of his half-siblings. He wasn’t about to let it stop him now.

“Let him go,” he ordered, his voice low and angry.

The man holding Bran’s throat bared his teeth. In the weird dappled moonlight, they looked too jagged, like there were too many in his mouth.

Jamie took another step forward, forcing his legs not to shake from the combination of adrenaline and lactic acid. “I said, let him fucking go.”

“You don’t know what you’re getting yourself into,duine,” the man hissed, something odd and deeply unsettling about his voice.

Jamie didn’t know what aduinewas, but he didn’t particularly care. He recognized an insult when he heard one, and he had plenty of practice ignoring them.

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