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CHAPTER 1
Clara
Smoke fills my lungs, jolting me awake.
My eyes fly open, but there’s little to see through the hazy darkness. Worse, I don’t remember the room around me. I roll clumsily out of the bed and hit the floor shoulder first, then spend an awful second trying to free myself from the sheets. I can breathe a little more easily down here, but there’s still no light to see. Am I in a prison cell? A basement? I’m not bound, thank god. I pull the collar of my shirt up over my nose and crawl on my belly, reaching out frantically for walls, for furniture, for any clue of where I am and where the door out is.
My searching hands find a seam in the wall, and I reach up for the handle, then jerk back with a hiss. The brass is scalding. My hacking cough sounds more like a sob.
The window then. Please let there be a window.
I crawl around the edges of the room, reaching up with one arm to slap at the plaster, praying every inch to hit glass instead. Thick fabric hits my face. Curtains? I grapple with them, yanking them aside, and milky moonlight floods the room. Well, what I can see of the room through the smoke.
It’s a bedroom, a comfortable-looking but impersonal one that tells me it’s a guest room, and I remember. Last night, I slipped out the back gate of my uncle’s house, with no intention of returning. I showed up on Raleigh’s doorstep, and despite everything- my uncle’s betrayal, the war between our families, the ten years of radio silence- my best friend let me in. It’s her house I’m in now.
It’s her house that’s on fire.
This is my fault.
There’s an ominous orange glow coming in from under my door now, and even from my spot on the floor the smoke is getting thicker. I don’t hesitate again. The window latch doesn’t budge under my fingers- jammed intentionally or otherwise I don’t know. I yank on it, cursing and sucking in a black lungful for my trouble. My head, my vision, the room is spinning, and the more I try to breathe the harder it becomes. I scrabble at the window latch, as if it’ll open just because I really really want it to, but it’s no use.
My first night of tentative freedom, and I’m going to burn to death.
A shadow darts through the moonlight. I gasp, sucking in more smoke, and pound my fists against the glass. Too late I think that the silhouette might not be a firefighter, but the fire starter. Too late, because the shadow is back, looming on the other side of the window. It knocks on the glass. There’s something club-shaped in its hand.
“Stand back!” it shouts, and I trip over myself to get away from the window. The club swings. Glass explodes over the floor. Jerking the ruined screen aside, the shadow climbs into the room. Now that there’s only smoke between us, I realize just how big it is, broad-shouldered and solid.
A man, holding a baseball bat, which he impatiently tosses back out the window. The glass on the carpet crunches under his shoes as he comes toward me, and I have to fight not to scramble away. I don’t recognize his hazy features- he’s not one of my uncle’s men- but that doesn’t mean he’s not dangerous.
“Raleigh, get over here!” he orders, ducking under the smoke. Then he freezes. “Who the-”
Before I can react, he's in front of me. One large hand grips my upper arm while the other loops around my waist, lifting me effortlessly off my feet. I yelp, but he’s already carrying me toward the window. With a deft swift swing of his legs, he propels us both out of the house and into the side yard.
I've never been carried by a man before. The sensation of his powerful body beneath his well-tailored suit sends a thrill through me. But there's no time to savor the fresh air or the brief fantasy of my rescuer. He drops to one knee and deposits me on the rocky landscaping like an oversized bag of flour.
Before I can catch my breath, he grabs his baseball bat and presses the end of it against my sternum.
“Where is my sister?” he demands from above me. His expression is hidden in the silhouette of his body against the moon, but I don’t have to see it. His voice is ice cold with menace.
“I-I don’t know,” I rasp. “I was asleep-”
“If you’re lying to me, I’ll take you apart. Don’t move,” he orders. Then he’s gone, the weight of the baseball bat with him, and I finally gasp for air.
He came here looking for Raleigh. My sister, he called her. Which means the man that just threatened to dismantle me is Thomas Warwick.
My blood enemy.
I hardly recognized the man standing over me from the quiet, distant teenager I remember him as. Time has filled out his body and added well-defined muscles that ripple with every movement. But his voice, it’s the same. Hard and hollow.
The last time I saw him, I was fifteen, painting my nails with Raleigh in the back garden of the old Warwick estate. He was inside on the second floor, looking out his bedroom window, his head propped in his hand. I saw him in that window more often than I did in flesh and blood, but that didn’t keep me from imagining what it would be like to talk to him, just once. On that day, his eyes had drifted from the sky down to me, and I’d blushed and smiled. He’d looked away before I could tell if he smiled back.
That night, the Warwick estate was burned down to nothing, there were bodies in the back garden, and Thomas Warwick Sr.’s monopoly over the city was ruined by my uncle’s hand.
For a long time, I just lay there, my lungs burning with every breath. The rocks aren’t exactly polished stones, and there’s definitely more than one piece of glass digging through my clothes, but moving is impossible. Above me, smoke drifts out the window, filling the sky and cutting off the moon.
I have to get away from the house. Before Thomas comes back—before his people surround the place—I have to go.
For one wild moment, guilt floods me. I came here tonight looking for shelter, and now Raleigh’s house is burning down, and all I can think about is getting away before whoever started the fire finds me lying here like a sacrifice. Raleigh could be dead, and I’ve already written her off as collateral damage.
