Free Engraved: Book Five of The St. Croix Chronicles by Karina Cooper Page B

he hurt?”
    He looped his fingers behind his back and levied upon me a stare that revealed nothing. No spark, no anger. No blame. Whatever I chose to feel, he would not be gracious enough to allow me his own actions to pin it on. “Yes,” he said flatly.
    I did not know if I paled, but the room shuddered on the outset of my vision. I ground my teeth near to dust, fighting the angry words that jammed into my throat.
    I would not allow this man to threaten my hard-won composure. I stepped away from the chair with determined effort. “I will fetch—”
    “No,” he said over me, and I paused. “I have wasted too much time already. Come as you are or not at all.”
    “You’re a bloody bastard, aren’t you?” I shot back, lip curled.
    He smiled, a gleam of very white teeth against his dark skin, and his eyes glinted with laughter that cut. “There will be no other opportunities,” he told me. “Hawke’s time has run out.”
    I did not know what game Osoba played at, but the meaning was clear enough.
    If I did not go see Hawke now, I would never see him again.
    Was the Veil prepared to execute him?
    Was he hurt so badly that his life slipped away as I stood here and argued?
    Blast it all and bloody the beggar. Whatever else I might have attempted, whatever argument, they all paled beneath one simple truth: Osoba might be bluffing, but he also might not. Did I have the cards to win this pot?
    Oh, that Hawke would become that pot. The very idea was so ludicrous that it didn’t bear saying aloud. He’d never deign to be something to be won—or rescued.
    Were I a little less driven on the matter, I’d have let Hawke stew in his own servitude.
    I was such a fool. “Very well.” I brushed past Osoba, knew he followed me to the front when the beads in his hair clattered faintly in my wake, and I added, “But I owe you no favors.”
    I seized the doorknob.
    “No,” he agreed. “You do not.”
    I should have been more careful. I had grown lax in my time away from the London streets that had taught me never to turn my back upon an opponent.
    The sudden
click
and
clack
of those beads was all the forewarning I received. A feeling, a sense of movement had me turning to engage—too late, as fingers clamped around my throat.
    My back slammed against the door, so hard that the single pane of filthy glass rattled and cracked. Pain shot through my back, my head, and again through my knee when an overly bony hipbone turned just so to block my strike.
    Osoba did not smile. He did not speak, nor change from a fiercely determined glower in the torturous seconds he held me pinned. He was strong; stronger than I had thought him capable. Throttled into silence, I could not fight, and I seized his wrists in desperate panic.
    I do not know what it was he did, what secrets he plucked to do it, but within those seconds, my world turned abruptly black.
    Surprise would always be the greatest of equalizers. Any fool raised in the devil-fog would say so.
    I’d forgotten all too much.

Chapter Five
    The “direct method” Osoba chose left me feeling weak-kneed and wobbly when I came to—rather more suddenly than a true fainting spell should allow. One moment I was unconscious, without the benefit of dreams to soften the black, and the next I was awake, upright through no effort of my own, and clammy for it.
    Whatever it was Osoba had done, it left me with a headache raw enough to split bone. I could see nothing more than the dimmest of outlines. All else was murky and dark. We were somewhere indoors, out of the chill and damp, but where?
    It was not enough to be carted about like a sack of moldy wares. Osoba had taken the liberty to wrap an arm under mine, his long fingers splayed at my throat and the whole of my weight held easily against his much taller figure.
    I had never doubted the strength inherent in such wiry muscle, and could not misunderstand it now. It was the lion prince’s own power that held me upright, back to his chest,