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I nod, tears blurring my vision. “Kir?—”
“But for now,get Mal,” he rasps, his voice cracking. “Go.”
I glance at Hana, crumpled on the floor, her body limp but her chest rising softly. Kir sees the fear in my eyes and nods.
“I’ll make sure she’s okay,” he barely whispers. “Nowgo.”
My legs obey before I can think, carrying me stumbling out of the room and through a dark hallway until I come to a staircase leading up intoanotherbasement. Mal’s roar of pain echoes through the walls from somewhere above, a sound so anguished it sends shivers down my spine. My breath comes in ragged gasps, my heart racing as I push on.
At the top of the stairs, I burst through a door into an utterly dilapidated, crumbling old farmhouse.
And everything goes to hell.
The light hits me all at once, blinding after the suffocating darkness of the basement.
Burningme.
I flinch, gasping as I stagger back into the dimness of the staircase.
It’s daytime.
Sunlight streams in through the cracked windows and the holes in the ceiling and walls. Pure survival instinct sinks its claws into me, and I shrink back from the light, my body shuddering.
Then I hear it.
A roar of pain.
My heart wrenches as I venture to the top of the stairs again. I crane my neck, peering out through the half burned-out kitchen and the shattered side door and across an overgrown farmyard.
Holy fucking shit.
Jonas is dragging a heavily bloodied Mal across the dirt toward the open maw of a leaning, rickety old barn.
I choke back a sob, my heart twisting as I watch the monster yank the man I love into the shadows. Through the huge open barn door, I watch, sobbing, as Jonas ties Mal’s wrists together. He yanks an old rope down from a pulley up in the rafters, slipping the metal hook at the end of it through the bonds at Mal’s wrists.
I stifle a cry when Jonas yanks hard on the other end of the rope, hoisting Mal up into the air, his body dangling from the hook, his feet barely scraping against the ground.
Mal’s blood drips onto the dirt floor, his body limp, his face twisted in agony. Jonas moves with chilling calmness, a cruel smile forming on his lips as he grabs a whip from the wall and cracks it through the air.
“NO!!!” I scream, my throat raw and cracked, my body past the point of exhaustion. Tears flow hotly down my cheeks as I sink my nails into the old doorframe of the basement stairs, watching the horror unfold across the sunlit yard.
The whip slashes across Mal’s back with a sickening crack. His body jerks, and I scream again, choking on the sound.
Another crack.
And another.
My heart breaks.
I can’t do this. I can’t watch him die like this.
Iwon’t.
Jonas turns, his eyes gleaming with demented delight as he reaches for a rusty hay fork hanging on the wall, and my blood runs cold.
No.
It all comes rushing back to me: the story Mal told me about the night when Kasper beat Filip to death. The night Mal snapped, running his own grandfather through with a hay fork.
