“The timing of death, like the ending of a story, Gives a changed meaning to what preceded it.”
Mary Catherine Bateson
The asp bared its fangs and struck. Thorn stiffened, adrenaline pumping through his body, setting all his nerves on high alert. An instinctual response. He reminded himself that the clear panel separating him from his death wouldn’t slide open to allow the five serpents from their lower compartment into the glass case surrounding him, unless Erik was here to activate it.
Another asp struck, leaving behind droplets of clear, deadly venom on the glass surface beneath him. A pheromone filtering into their section of the case had provoked the reptiles to a raging state. Their auras were bright, frenzied. Thorn’s feet shifted, but he suppressed the urge to move his hands. It wouldn’t do any good to try with the iron bands holding him pinned to the wall.
“You almost had it that time.” Thorn lifted his shoulder as high as it could go to give Diable leverage. He knew Rune had sent him; she was his guardian angel. If she hadn’t, he’d be alone and useless, contemplating worst-case scenarios for the masquerade going on hundreds of feet above him and unable to do anything constructive to help.
Now, he could possibly climb out and make a difference.
The cat’s body stretched, hind feet settled on Thorn’s right shoulder while one front foot planked his forearm and the other dug with extended claws at the keyhole in the locking mechanism.
Thorn’s glass case was flush to the wall and a few feet from the operating table, to give him a bird’s-eye view of Rune’s torment, and her a bird’s-eye view of his fatal predicament. His stomach knotted. Erik had knocked him out with gas before he left. A tribute to his deviant sense of humor, since he’d been wearing a gas mask himself. When Thorn roused, he was strung up in only his scrubs, feet stripped of his boots, although Erik left him his socks. That, too, was a strategy to play on Rune’s sentimentalities.
All along, this had been his plan. To use Thorn as the bait that would convince her to give up her voice. That’s why he’d allowed Thorn to woo the music in her, to bond with her. She might’ve chosen Thorn’s life over the music even before they had the unity ritual. But now, it would be physically impossible for her to let him die. By trying to protect her, Thorn had damned her.
But there were three things Erik hadn’t counted on: One, he was walking into a trap himself; two, he’d left Thorn within reach of the lever that would release the dams and flood the apartment—Erik’s very own trap. It was on the wall, level with Thorn’s head, no more than two feet away. And since the glass case only came to his chest, if he could free his right arm, he could stretch far enough to trigger the self-destruction sequence. And three, although the cord between twin flames would never snap, it could be severed if one of them died. Thorn was willing to meet a drowning death, for Rune’s freedom.
Erik had lost sight of that detail, since he’d never shared the ritual with Christine. Since she left him forever after she found out he didn’t bury their daughter at all . . . after she wandered into the lab a few nights postbirth, and saw her half-dead, premature infant being treated like a science experiment. Erik had been so desperate to keep their child alive he never considered he might lose the love of his life in the process.
Thorn averted his gaze from the cryogenic chamber and its pulsing yellow light on the other side of the room. Even now, he couldn’t look at her perfect, tiny form. The nameless baby that would’ve been his sister. He hated what destroying this lab would do to her. What it would do to Erik. Total obliteration of his dream for a family and unconditional love.
Why? Why could Erik never see he already had that? It was the very reason Thorn had looked away from the depravity for so long, to bring some measure of happiness to his father’s broken soul. Had Rune’s arrival here not forced Thorn’s eyes open, who knows what he might’ve done . . .
If Rune could manage the same awakening for Erik, she could sway his dark side and reach his humanity. She had the power. As long as nothing or no one intervened.
The ribbon tattoo beneath Thorn’s iron cuff stung at just the thought of her, alluding that something had gone wrong. He’d do anything to be up there with her now.