Our Dark Duet (Monsters of Verity #2)(45)

“What are you doing here?” he asked, voice low. “You shouldn’t have come back.”

“Nice to see you, too,” she snapped.

His gaze tracked over her, taking in the bruise rising on her cheekbone, the five purple lines around her wrist.

His voice softened a fraction. “Are you all right?”

Four small words, but in that question she glimpsed the August she’d known, the one who cared so much more than he should.

She ached, but at least the red light—that terrible, unnatural reminder of what she’d done—was gone.

“I’m alive. Thanks,” she added, “for stepping in.”

But the softness had already vanished, leaving his features smooth and cold. Somewhere nearby, the familiar drone of a car’s engine was rising. He produced a zip tie and looped the plastic around her hands as the vehicle came whipping around the corner.

“Don’t thank me yet,” he said, right before a sack came down over her head.





It had been five years since the car crash.

Five years since the force of Kate’s head against the glass had shattered her right eardrum and robbed her of half her hearing. Five years, and most days, she got by. She still had one good ear and four other senses all firing to make up the difference.

But as the hood came down over her head, the loss of a second sense left her disoriented.

Disembodied noise—voices, car doors, comm units—reached her good ear in fragments through the suffocating cloth. No one spoke—at least, not to her. One second August’s hand was on her arm, and the next it was gone, replaced by other, rougher hands, forcing her body forward, head down, off the street and into a vehicle. Her wrist ached against the plastic zip tie, her cheek throbbing from the Sunai’s punch.

There was a thin line of light at the bottom of the hood, but everything else was reduced to shades of black, the jostle of tires, the hum of the engine. They drove for three minutes, nearly four, and when they stopped, Kate had to resist the simple, animal urge to fight back as she was pulled from the car.

She didn’t say anything, didn’t trust herself to speak. Besides, she had a feeling the time would come when she’d have to. Breathe, she told her lungs. In, one two. Out, one two.

The ground changed subtly beneath her feet—asphalt, concrete, rubber, concrete again—the atmospheric shifts of outdoor and indoor, the echo that came with walled space. She tried to keep track, but somewhere she stumbled and in that dizzying moment, she lost the thread.

Then—a hallway, a threshold, a metal chair.

The momentary kiss of a knife against her wrists, cold on warm, a flicker of panic before the zip tie broke, and then, just as quick, the weight of the cuffs, the clank and pull of metal threaded through metal, fastening her hands to a metal table.

Steps, the door falling closed.

Then, silence.

Kate hated silence, but she held on to it now, used the lack of information to steady her spinning head and focus on the task at hand. She splayed her fingers against the cold metal and tried to decide which would be less suspicious, panic or calm.

The door opened.

Footsteps moved toward her, and then the hood came off.

Kate squinted in the sudden light—stripes of harsh, artificial white embedded in the ceiling—as Soro rounded the table, the shining hilt of the flute-knife jutting from the Sunai’s pocket. There was no sign of August. No sign of anyone else. The room was small and square, bare save for the table, two chairs, and the red light of a surveillance camera in the corner. She kept her gaze down.

The wraithlike Sunai, meanwhile, was looking at Kate as though she were the monster in the room. Soro said nothing as the bag—her bag—was upended on the table. When the first metal spike hit the table, Kate’s pulse rose, longing to lunge for it, even though the chain wouldn’t reach, even though it wouldn’t do a damn bit of good if it did. She kept her eyes on the cuffs themselves instead, studying the intricacies of each steel loop.

But as Soro began to methodically arrange the contents of Kate’s bag, displaying them as if they were tools in a torturer’s kit, another force began to pull at her—the Sunai’s presence, like a hand at her back, a subtle, insistent urge to speak. Kate kept her mouth shut as Soro sank into the opposite chair.

“Well, then,” said the Sunai. “Let’s begin.”

The surveillance feed hummed with static.

It was low enough that humans probably didn’t notice, but the sound filled August’s head, a background of white noise behind the video.

Kate Harker sat unmoving in one of the two chairs, while the shadow beneath her feet twitched and tangled around the table legs.

Her hair was different—bangs falling into her eyes—but other than that, she looked the same, as if the last six months hadn’t touched her.

Do you know where she is? Alice had goaded him.

Far away from here. Far away from you.

Only she wasn’t, she was right here.

Why had she come back?

Ilsa’s gaze flicked toward him, featherlight, as if she’d heard the question in his head. August kept his eyes on Kate.

She looked almost bored, but he knew it was an act, because everything about Kate had always been an act—the bravado, the cold air, all the aspects of her father arranged into a shield, a mask.