Page 159 of Dance of Thorns

I feel paralyzed, unable to even make the slightest attempt to catch myself as I topple over sideways.

A pair of feet approaches, and when I swivel my eyes I see Melinda standing over me.

“I’m sorry,” she says in an eerily calm, logical tone. “I had to. I have to killher, you see, and you would have stopped me.”

I ignore her, my wild, blurring gaze stabbing past her to the tub.

To Lark, lying in the rapidly filling water, arms draped over the porcelain edges and head lolled to one side.

Her eyes swim aimlessly, like she’s been drugged. I roar another gurgled sound, spewing blood across the floor as I try to push myself back up. But my hands slip on the blood, and my limbs have no strength in them anyway.

I crash back to the floor, tasting copper as my gaze lands on Lark.

I’m getting worse.

My vision blurs and narrows, until all I see is her.

Then I see nothing at all.

44

DOVE

No.

Please.

No.

I can feel my eyes drifting all over the place, barely able to focus.

That is, until I see Bane stiffen and yell, and spit blood as he drops to his knees with that monster behind him.

I want to scream. Or cry. Or tell him I love him. But my voice isn’t working, just like the rest of my body from whatever Melinda put in that coffee.

All I can do is lie in the tepid water as the tub fills around me, screaming silently in my head as I watch the man I love fall to the side, his face chalky.

Blood pours and gurgles from his mouth. More pools around his body.

Oh God, there’s so much of it.

All I can do is stare in horror and pain, tears falling from my eyes as I watch Bane sink to the floor with a kitchen knife still lodged in his back.

“I had to!” Melinda mumbles, but not at me. She’s talking to herself again, like she was when she forced me down here, and made me turn the water in the tub on, and climb in.

“He would have stopped me,” she mutters, shaking her head. Her movements are erratic and twitchy: her gaze rips to me, then the ceiling, then her hands, then lastly to Bane, lying on the floor.

“He was going to try to stop me,” she blurts.

Tears flow down my numb cheeks as she suddenly whirls to look right at me.

“He was going to stop me, Lark!” she screams at me. “He can’t do that!” She shakes her head violently back and forth. “He can’t!”

She looks at her hands, and suddenly, she’s bolting from the room.

For a second, I wonder if she’s just snapped and decided to make a run for it. But then she’s back, brandishing another gleaming kitchen knife.

She discarded the gun upstairs, after emptying it into the two Marchetti guards who came running at the sound of her first two shots. But the knife in her hand looks plenty lethal as she steps past Bane and storms over to me.