Page 109 of Inferno
I locked myself into the bathroom under the stairs and assessed the window. It was too small to fit through; I had overestimated my tininess. Dammit. I ran the tap and cursed loudly enough so he could hear me. Then I shouted through the door, ‘Can you please get me a toilet roll from the cupboard in the upstairs hallway?’
My heart thudded in my chest.
Please please please.
There was a loud, pointed sigh and then the heavy plodding of his feet on the stairs. I eased open the bathroom door, shut it quietly behind me and darted into the kitchen and out the back door. I had seconds at best.
I grabbed my rucksack from where it had landed, and catapulted towards the end of the garden. I threw the bag over the wall and started climbing, my feet scaling the trellis, my hands clawed tight against the concrete. I was halfway over the wall, my feet scrabbling against wood on one side and my fingers clutching stone on the other, when Jack’s voice rang out behind me.
He was running and I was struggling, heaving my body over the wall until it scraped along the top as I slithered overit. And then he was below me, lunging for my foot and wrapping his fingers around my ankle. With a primal shriek, I kicked out, anchoring myself with my hands as I bucked against him. He held firm. With my free hand over the wall I grabbed Luca’s switchblade from my back pocket and flicked it open. Jack yanked me by the ankle. I slipped towards him with the blade outstretched, and slashed it as hard as I could across his face.
He fell backwards, shrieking as blood pumped from his eye and coated his fingers as he held them tight to his face. He lunged blindly for me, but I had re-straddled the wall and was rolling over it, falling away from him.
I landed with a thud on the other side. The drop was high and the fall jolted the wind from my lungs. I re-stashed the blade, ducked and rolled, grabbing my rucksack and stumbling into a small line of trees that hid me as I pressed against the wall that bled into another, larger street of houses. Jack’s screams of agony hung heavy in the air behind me, and I seized the surge of adrenalin they gave me.
I sprinted along an endless row of boxy homes, hopped into a nearby garden and weaved my way behind a squat wooden house with a dilapidated porch. At the back of it I lost myself in an expanse of shrubbery and threw my rucksack over wall after wall, chasing the sun as it sank away from me, until I was too tired to do anything but wedge myself behind a garden shed somewhere along the endless row of houses. I tucked my limbs inside my body, shrank into a ball and waited for the darkness to hide me from Jack and his Marino assassins.
I took out my phone and called Millie.
‘Soph?’ She cleared her throat, waking her voice up. ‘Is everything OK?’
‘Yeah,’ I said quietly, conscious of the fact that I was trespassing on someone else’s property. ‘I just wanted to tell you I’m leaving town for a little bit.’
‘What? Why? What’s happened?’
‘Calm down,’ I said quickly, cutting off the freak-out. ‘I’m just living, Mil. I’m living like you told me to.’
Panic vibrated in her voice. ‘Soph, you’re freaking me out. What are you talking about? I didn’t mean “leave town” when I said that, I meant “get up and go for lunch with me” or something. This is definitely not what I meant.’
‘I know.’ I smiled against my phone. ‘I’m not going off on some big soul-searching adventure.’
‘Oh,’ she said, relief colouring her tone. ‘I thought you were about to ditch me for the pyramids or the Grand Canyon or something.’
‘Jack’s back in Cedar Hill.’
She sucked in a sharp inhale. ‘Shit.’
‘Yeah,’ I concurred. ‘I’m going somewhere he can’t get to me… until I want him to.’
‘What exactly does that mean?’
I tempered my response. There were some things she would understand, and some things she definitely wouldn’t, and the truth of what I was planning was in the latter category. ‘It means I’m going to lie low, just until the danger dies down.’
‘Then lie low here, Soph. You know you’re always welcome at mine…’
I had to smile, because we both knew it wouldn’t work, andstill she had offered because that was the kind of person she was. Unafraid. Loyal. ‘You really are an amazing friend, Mil.’
‘So are you,’ she shot back.
‘I think you’re definitely winning in the friendship stakes right now.’
Her laugh tinkled down the line. ‘You’ve had your moments too, Gracewell.’
Gracewell. I bristled. That word. That lie.
It stood for nothing.
‘We’ll deal with this together,’ she said, filling up the silence and pulling me from the impending spiral of rage and disappointment I was becoming all too used to.
