Page 173 of Where the Snakes Sleep

“Ah, well, you will have plenty of time.”

The promise coils cold in my stomach. I make myself smile. “Yeah?”

“Yes.”

Henri steps nearer. There. Better.

His cane taps once against the floor beside his polished shoe. “Come. The car is waiting.”

He lifts his hand slowly, the thin skin stretched taut over pale knuckles, and this time he does not rest his fingers on my shoulder. He draws them across my cheek instead, brushing my skin in a motion so gentle, so affectionate, that I have to hold myself back from gagging.

I have spent most of this conversation wanting him closer; now he is.

My heart hammers like a war drum in my chest, as if I might hear it echo through the room.

His thumb is still against my cheek as I look into his eyes.

I think about Alberte—the young one from the photographs.

Twenty-one and hopeful, meeting someone who must have seemed larger than life.

A mentor.

A lover.

A future.

I wonder how long it took before Alberte understood.

How many times he had to redraw the line between love and fear before eventually discovering there was no line left.

Henri smiles at me. “You’ll be safe now.”

That does it.

My hand moves.

Henri’s expression barely has time to change before I reach beneath my clothes and close my fingers around what I hid there.

A shout—Camille’s anger, a guard’s alarm—floods the room.

Then everything happens at once.

I yank the syringe free and drive it into Henri before anybody understands what I’m holding.

His head snaps back, eyes widening into saucers of shock. Flesh parts under my fingers as I shove the plunger home.

A hand slams into my shoulder so hard that I’m ripped sideways violently, my feet leaving the floor.

The syringe tears free and skitters across the floor.

I crash to the ground, and pain explodes through my shoulder and side, but I barely register it because someone is shouting, Henri is stumbling backward, Camille is screaming my name, and suddenly three guns that were lowered a second ago are no longer lowered.

And then everything stops. For a long, frozen moment, nobody pulls a trigger.

Henri looks down at himself, then at the syringe, then at me. His face is blank with incomprehension. “What did you do?”

I’m breathing so hard I can’t answer.