Page 83 of Dangerous Exile
Before Talen could blink, the dowager grabbed the fire poker, swinging it high into the air.
He froze.
The same fire poker he’d watched swing down at his mother, sending her to screams.
To pain.
To death.
His mother’s bloody temple. The life leaving her. He couldn’t move. Couldn’t save her.
The dowager swung down, the curved spike at the end of the poker aimed at Ness’s temple. Just before iron met flesh, Ness rolled, dodging the spike. But it forced her body up against the bench, cornered.
A screech from the bowels of Hades ripped from the dowager’s mouth and she pitched the poker upward, poised for another blow.
Ness on the floor. Just like his mother. Death looming above her. Death coming down swiftly at her head.
Frozen.
But no. His limbs were moving. Moving on their own. Not frozen. Lunging across the room, his arms flailing out, hitting iron in mid-swing, tackling the wretched woman.
Another scream pierced his ear and he had the dowager on the floor, holding her down by her neck as he grabbed her wrist and slammed it hard onto the floor, the bones in her wrist snapping as the iron poker flew from her grip.
Such a weak woman.
Yet such destruction she’d caused.
He grabbed the top of her scalp, his fingers curling into her tightly pulled back grey hair, and he lifted her head, then cracked it down onto the stone floor.
Not enough to kill her. More than enough to send her to tormented unconsciousness.
How he didn’t kill her, he wasn’t sure.
Scrambling off her inert body, he crawled to Ness, his fingers furious as he tried to calm them enough to untie the knots at her feet and then her wrists.
She was free. Free and looking up at him, wonder in her eyes.
His hands slid under her, crushing her body into his.
He needed to feel her breath. Feel her heartbeat. Feel her hands moving along his back, his torso, his arms.
“You didn’t freeze.” The choked words vibrated, muffled into his chest. She wedged her head free from his hold, looking up at him. “You didn’t freeze. You saved me.”
His right hand lifted, capturing the side of her face, needing her skin, her eyes on him. “No, Ness, you saved me. A thousand times over.”
This. This one second in his life—a new defining moment.
He didn’t freeze. Didn’t fail. Not when his whole life, when his whole world, his whole future, needed him most.
He couldn’t save his mother, but he saved Ness.
And Ness was everything.
Seconds count.
{ Chapter 30 }
“It is done?” Ness’s look jerked up from the soap and washcloth in her hands as Talen walked into her room at Washburn. It had been dark for hours now, and she’d finally broken and pulled herself away from worrying at a window, her stare locked on the front drive to Washburn. She’d had the bath readied in a hopeless effort to calm her frayed nerves.