Page 66 of Girl, Entangled

The next was the field. The stake, the figure bound to it, the wood stacked at the base as it had been at Marston Hollow, and the giant standing off to the side to watch it take.

The third was a cabinet.

It stood upright on a flagstone floor, taller than a man, the inside shaped to take someone standing. The front had been drawn open on hinges. The inner face of each door was lined with iron points the length of a finger. The hooded man stood beside it with one hand on an open door and the other arm raised toward the cavity within.

Three were done. This one was not.

T.G. in the lower right. All three.

Reuben Hoy had called Greaves a gentle giant. A wronged man. Maybe both still held. But the gentle giant had also sat in a cell on death row and drawn the deaths he wanted for his enemies. The giant in his sewing class had watched him put them on paper week after week and learned the picture by heart.

Then, noises from the other side of the wall.

Ella snapped to attention and followed it to the source. She readied her gun, moved to the next door in the hallway and grabbed the handle.

Three.

Two.

One.

She exploded into what her peripheral vision identified as a living room. She cleared the corners in one circle, and then her attention was automatically drawn to the room’s central feature.

A bound man, writhing and struggling on the sofa.

He was a big man gone small with fear, folded into the corner of the sofa where the arm met the back, and someone had tied him so he was part of the furniture. His wrists were lashed to the wooden frame of the arm, and the cord had cut white lines into the skin where he’d been pulling against it. A man tied like this could thrash all night and move nothing. His mouth had been stuffed with a strip of dark cloth and the cloth fixed in place with another strip wound twice around his head.

His eyes were what reached her. They were wide and stripped and shot through red, and they were fixed on her face with a force that was trying to convey a message.

And the message was not help me.

His head jerked toward the doorway behind her. Then again. He was screaming behind the cloth in his mouth, and still his eyes kept cutting past her shoulder and back to her, past her shoulder and back, telling her the one thing she had walked in without checking.

Not in front of you.

Behind.

Ella spun around.

A hand came over the top of her head from behind and closed across her brow and her eyes; a hand so wide it folded the side of her face into her ear.

The world went out. A small bright sting opened in the side of her neck and she felt the cold of it spreading down the length of her throat to her collarbone and then up into her jaw.

Her gun was the first to know.

Her knees were the second.

Her last clear thought was of Barton’s eyes, and the room he had been telling her about with them, and how he had been telling her not to come in.

CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

Unconsciousness did strange things to a mind. Ella came up out of it thinking, of all the things in the world, about DC101, the Home of Alternative Rock in D.C.

Remember, we need the name of the artist and the song. Are you ready to play Test Your Metal?

I’m ready, Dave.

She knew from muscle memory that she’d been drugged. It was not the first time she’d been drugged, and the weariness and weakness and patchy hallucinations were alarmingly familiar to her body’s immune system. She blinked herself to something approaching alertness, and was first taken aback by the perimeter of bricks keeping her captive.