The Steel Rogue: A Valor of Vinehill Novel

by K. J. Jackson

  She looked up. Reiner.

  He hadn’t seen her, already turning back into the battle, his eyes hungry for the next attack. The man did look like a wolf stalking his prey. Maybe there was something to the Wolf Duke epithet.

  Her look darted from the battle to the stone ledge just beyond her toes.

  She’d sworn from heaven to hell to Logan that she would stay safe in the ship, far away from being seen and from whatever may happen. And then she’d sworn the same thing to Reiner. Then she’d sworn the same thing to Sienna and Rory.

  The least she could do was avoid the swinging swords.

  For she was going after Roe, no matter what.

  { Chapter 20 }

  Torrie jumped to the ledge of the foundation, her toes landing on the stones and her fingernails digging into the rough wood planks that lined the wall. Flattening herself against the building, she attempted to calm her breath. Shuffle. Shuffle. Shuffle to the right.

  Her left foot slipped, her toes losing grip on the crumbling stone ledge. She yanked her left foot up, squashing as hard as she could into the wood planks.

  Balance stable, she set her left toes back on the ledge and continued to shuffle, dragging smaller steps across the stone. Seconds later, she reached the window.

  Closed.

  Blast.

  She tugged the bottom of the sash up. Damn. It didn’t budge.

  Swearing to herself, she twisted her hand down to the top band of her skirt and yanked free the pistol Logan had insisted she keep on her person once they had tied to the pier. She’d never broken through glass before, but there was a first time for everything. How hard could it be?

  She drew her elbow back and sent the butt of the pistol flying forward. It banged into the glass, coming to a dead stop.

  Apparently, harder than she imagined.

  Pain vibrated up her arm and she ignored it, fury at the uncooperative glass sending her wrist back and the butt of the gun flying once more.

  The glass shattered this time, spraying in all directions, into the pores of her face, cuts slicing across the back of her hand.

  No matter.

  She knocked out the rest of the glass hanging stubbornly to the windowpane with the barrel of the gun.

  After tucking the pistol back into the waistband of her skirt, her arms went inward and she clutched onto the molding lining the bottom of the glass, then yanked herself into the interior.

  She landed with a grunt in a heap on the floor. Staying in a ball on the dusty boards, she popped her head up, looking about the interior of the wide room.

  For all the noise outside, the inside of the building sat eerily quiet.

  Barrels and crates snaked out in rows across the large room.

  But not a sound in the cavernous space.

  She was sure she saw Roe being dragged inside.

  She stood, moving to her right and staying in the shadows that side of the warehouse afforded her, far from the line of hanging lanterns by the sliding doors. With each row of crates and barrels she passed, she searched. No men hiding amongst them. No bodies.

  She got to the far end of the room and a crash thundered above her.

  Screaming, shouts, a boom. A boom of a pistol.

  Her heart in her throat, she found the staircase against the adjacent wall and ran to it.

  Please let that gunfire be outside. Please. Outside.

  Her feet slow, too slow up the rickety stairs, she poked her head up into the cut-through in the floor above, her look frantic.

  A wide open room lit by several simple chandeliers hanging from the ceiling. One body on the ground. Motionless. Bockton standing five paces away from the body looking at a gold watch dangling from an obnoxiously long chain attached to his jacket.

  Another body on the floor. This one twitching.

  Roe.

  Roe lay flat on the middle of the floor—his left leg unnaturally bent. His face so badly bruised and cut, she barely recognized him.

  A boot swung at Roe’s face.

  It connected, smashing his jaw and sending him flying across the floor. Blood splattered across the wood planks.

  She jerked back, hitting the wall and cringing so hard she almost slipped down the staircase.

  The smell reached her before she could open her eyes. Before she could run to Roe.

  Fire.

  Fire somewhere below her.

  Before she could react, an explosion ricocheted through the building below.

  The force of it sent the wall behind her shoulders vibrating, the staircase below her feet shaking, splintering, Hell, it was crumbling. Crumbling beneath her heels.

  The blast echoing in her head, muting everything around her, Torrie leapt upward, swinging her right leg up onto the floorboards and scrambling onto the safety of the second floor just as the staircase below her crashed to the ground.

  She rolled onto what she hoped was solid floor and opened her eyes just in time to see Roe swinging a dagger up into the belly of the brute that had just smashed his head with his heel. Roe twisted the blade viciously, gutting the man in under a second. The brute fell back, staggering, dropping far slower than the death that was just handed to him.

  Roe watched him drop, not knowing behind him Bockton had pulled a sword, lifting it above his head as he stalked his way across the room to Roe.

  Murder in Bockton’s eyes. Nothing but murder.

  She shrieked, more to draw attention to herself than from a need to do so, and she scrambled to her feet, wedging free from her skirt the loaded pistol.

  She slid it across the floor to Roe as she ran at an angle from him, aiming for Bockton.

  “Tor—no!” Roe’s agonized bellow cut through the ringing in her ears, but she ignored it. Roe wouldn’t have the pistol ready in time and his dagger was still stuck in the gut of the brute that had fallen.

  Just as Bockton recognized her intention to tackle him and veered his sword to cut down upon her neck, she dropped, flattening herself long and lunging straight at his legs.

  Too low for his swing.

  She rammed into Bockton’s shins with the full force of her body and he crashed to the ground next to her, his legs taken out from under him.

  But he still held the sword. The blade he was already swinging at her belly with enough power to slash her in two.

  Crack.

  A deafening shot filled her ears, her head.

  Bockton’s arm slowed, the sword flinging from his grip and clattering onto the floor just past her.

  He slumped. Slumped to nothing. A bullet hole in his head.

  She couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think until she twisted and scrambled across the floor to Roe, her hands manically going to his face, his body, his leg.

  Blood. So much blood on her hands it was impossible to grip him.

  His mangled shin bone stuck out through his bloody trousers.

  “Your leg.”

  “You’re here.” His voice not his own, the words seeped through a jaw that wouldn’t open.

  “Your leg.” She looked up at his face. Only one of his grey eyes focused on her, accusing, his left eye swollen shut.

  “You’re here.”

  “I am.”

  The anger palpitating from his one eye scorched her. “What in the bloody devil are you doing here, Tor?”

  She moved back up to his face, her hands shaking, wanting to touch him but not wanting to cause more injury to his face, to the gaping wounds across his cheeks, his temples. “Helping.”

  “Tor.” The tortured anguish in his grey eye, in her cracked name, cut her to her core.

  She set her hands onto his mauled face, ignoring the pain it must have caused him. She needed to touch him. Touch him fully in that moment. “I run after the people I love, Roe. I run like hell into hell.”

  His one eye closed, his mouth slightly agape as he drew an anguished breath into his chest. “You’re going to kill me.”

  “Or save you.”

  His right eye opened
and he looked at her face for only a moment before his gaze flew off of her, looking behind her. “Shit.”

  Her heart dropped into her gut.

  The fire.

  She had to force her head to turn, to look behind her, even though she knew what she would find.

  Fire.

  A wall of fire already licking up the far wall, attacking the ceiling.

  An explosion below them shook the building, sending sparks flying up through the cut-through in the floor where the stairs had been.

  Hell. No. No. No.

  Not again.

  She spun in a circle on her knees, searching, searching for an escape.

  They couldn’t go back down through the opening, not with barrel after barrel waiting to explode below them. A wall of fire was eating across the floor toward them—Bockton’s body had already caught aflame.

  A fat ember landed on her shoulder, singeing through her dress, sizzling into her skin.

  No.

  Not again.

  Not again.

  The ember in her shoulder burned hot, but she couldn’t lift her hand to smother it, to shake it off.

  Drowning. Drowning in the haze of smoke and sparks and heat filling her nostrils, filling her lungs.

  She lost all sense of time. Of place. She collapsed to her backside, her body drawing into itself, her legs folding against her chest, her arms wrapping across her shins, her eyes closing tight.

  Shutting down. Away. Away to the darkness. She couldn’t go through this again.

  “Hell no, Torrie. No.” Roe slapped her face, grabbing her cheeks between his thumb and fingers and shaking her head. “I said no. You stay right here with me.”

  The fury, the brutal order in his bellow shook through her head. His voice a far-off sound, but echoing through the darkness that had swallowed her mind.

  He slapped her face again. Hard, soft, she couldn’t tell. “Get back here to me this instant, Tor.” Screaming. Screaming in her ear. Still far away.

  But maybe. Maybe if she opened her eyes.

  Her eyelids cracked open.

  Roe was in front of her, his mouth moving crooked, angry—angry words that she couldn’t hear. A litany of them, tumbling from his askew mouth.

  He shifted, heaving himself up onto the knee of his one leg that was still intact.

  Why was he moving? The flames were coming. There were too many. He should be holding her. Holding her when they came.

  Instead, his hands wrapped around her shoulders and he shook her, her whole body rocking under the power of it. “I can’t do this, Tor. I can’t. Not without you.” His words were screamed, she could see the cords along his neck straining, but he still sounded so far away. “I can’t get up. I need your help—you have to get up, Tor. Dammit, just get up, Tor. I need your bloody help. I need your legs.”

  Help.

  Help.

  Help.

  Roe needed her help.

  In that instant, the world around her came crashing in, the explosions below, the cracking of wood, the snapping of beams. All of it rushed into her head, her hearing back. Her eyes opened. All of her senses firing.

  Roe needed her help.

  Her eyes wide, her hands grabbed his forearms.

  “We need to get out of here, Tor.” He yelled over the inferno around them, his words staccatoed with coughs.

  The thick haze of smoke was in front of him now. Between them.

  That would not do.

  “You can’t stand?” She found a way to make her tongue move and pulled herself closer to him.

  “No. I need you as a crutch. There are windows on the back wall, but they have panes so we’ll need to crash through them.”

  “Crash through them? We’ll die hitting the ground.”

  “That is the sea side. We get through the glass, and we have a chance of landing in the water.” He grabbed her face between his hands. “We’ll get through it.”

  She nodded and scrambled to her feet and grabbed his arms, helping him to stand on his still solid right leg, then steadied his balance.

  She looked around, the smoke and the angry orange-red flames filling the air around her. “Where is it?”

  “Back here.” He threw an arm over her shoulder, leaning on her between hopped steps of his right foot.

  They struggled toward the rear of the building.

  “Almost there.” Roe tightened his grip on her shoulders, his words gritted through gasps of pain.

  Torrie yanked up suddenly, her feet freezing. “No. No. No.”

  He looked down at her. “What? No?” He glanced forward then back to her, panic in his voice. “Don’t leave me, Tor. Stay. Stay right here with me.”

  She started to drift, drift away from him again, his words sinking muffled into the smoke around them. She could see the window Roe wanted to crash through. It ran from the floor to the ceiling, glass inset symmetrically into small rectangular wooden panes. Easy enough, except the floor in front of it was on fire.

  A wall of fire between them and the glass and the air outside.

  Fire.

  Her head shook, her feet backing up and sending him stumbling for balance. “I can’t do it.”

  “You can.”

  “I can’t.” She looked to him. “I can’t. Not again. You need to get through there without me, Roe. I can’t do it. Not again.” The last words she squeezed out with what little was left of her breath. Of her life.

  Her body swayed, near to crumpling once more. To retreating. To letting the flames finally have her.

  “Stop. Stop this nonsense.” His scream was thunder in her ears. “Look—look down, Tor.”

  Her left arm was jerking unnaturally in front of her and she looked down. A leather strap—the scabbard that had hung low across his waist—now wrapped around her wrist…wrapped around Roe’s wrist.

  While she was turning numb, he’d been lashing their wrists together. He’d tied their left arms together.

  He jerked their arms up between them. “You want me to live? You need to come with me. I’m not going without you.”

  “Roe—”

  “We do this now, Tor—there’s no choice. This fire doesn’t break you—you break the fire.” He grabbed the back of her head with his right hand, pulling her face tight to his. “If you die. I die with you. And you don’t want me to die, do you?”

  She shook her head.

  No.

  No, she would give anything for him to live.

  Into hell.

  Into hell for this man.

  She looked up at him, her words gaining strength she didn’t know she had. “Let’s go.”

  A smile twisted his swollen lips and he jumped to turn forward, his left arm going over her head and resting on her shoulder again. Her left wrist went up to his arm where they were lashed together—the leather binding her grip to him more easily than how she’d tried to grip his blood-soaked wrist.

  “Go.”

  He barked the order and she ran, every other step of his sending the bulk of his weight onto her shoulder, driving her down into the floor. Her legs held. For once, they held, not wavering at the weight, at what was demanded of them.

  Into the fire.

  At the second she threw her right arm up to protect her face from the fire and the glass, Roe spun in front of her. Wrapping her in his arms, his backside took the brunt of the fire and the shattering glass and splintering wood.

  Into the air…air…air.

  A jolt. Crunch. All lightless motion ceased, water seeping all around her, swallowing her.

  Roe’s hold around her body loosened, his arms going slack, falling away from her.

  The water dragging them downward.

  She shook her arm that was bound to his. His limb flopped lifelessly in the water.

  She kicked, kicked again, kicked toward the surface, while Roe dropped lower and lower beside her.

  Kick, kick, kick. Scratching at the water with her right hand. Yanking at her bound arm—yanking him up
with her.

  Except they weren’t going up. She fought it. With every kick, every stroke of her arm. But still they sank.

  No use. They were both dropping, sinking into the depths, the water sneaking past her lips, into her mouth. Downward.

  Downward.

  A hand. A hand on her neck, on her collar.

  Dragging her upward, a strong hand. Dragging her upward, and with her, Roe.

  Her lungs bursting, she held, held on for air. Air she knew was just beyond her reach.

  Another hand grabbed her arm, yanking her up faster, faster.

  Air.

  She broke through the surface and gasped in air and water, the whole of it sputtering into her chest and choking her. But the air won, the water hacking its way back up her throat.

  She yanked up on her left arm, pulling Roe to the surface as well to suck the air.

  But her hand came up through the water, the dead weight on it, gone.

  The leather strap that bound them together, gone.

  Roe was gone.

  { Chapter 21 }

  Torrie stared out at the darkness—so grey, day had turned into night even though it was still morning.

  Smack.

  A slash of rain—or a rogue wave—crashed into the windows above the bed. The pane in the right top corner cracked, splitting in place.

  Rain lashed at the windows and an acerbic chuckle snaked its way up her throat.

  Of course.

  For all that they’d survived, here, a storm in the middle of the sea was going to sink them.

  The rain kept whipping at the glass above the bed. Furious, threatening to end it all for them.

  She forced her gaze from the glass to Roe’s inert face and she let her eyes wander down his naked torso.

  All the burn marks on his body—burns he took so she didn’t have to. The cuts from the glass.

  Her look shifted further down past the sheet wrapped over his hips, to his left leg open to the air above and the pus-filled stitches where his shinbone had been forced back into his body.

  He hadn’t been awake for it. Small mercy.

  The burn marks, the cuts, his jaw that had been set back into place—none of that worried her now.