Page 82 of Such a Feral Little Lamb
“Why thefucknot?”
Dane turns to face me fully. Fuck. I never should have trusted a word out of his fucking mouth. It’s clear now, with that feverish light in his eyes and the grin stretching across his face.
“I’ve got something to show you.” He tips his head to one side. “And if you want to see that useless bitch or the sneaky little shit you’ve been fucking, you’ll come with me and won’t do anything stupid.”
I stare at him for a moment. He’s still holding the knife. I like my odds, but Dane’s strong too, and now he’s… unhinged.
I lower my bat but don’t let go. Dane smiles like he never expected me to.
“Good boy,” he says, and I tighten my grip on my bat until my hand hurts. “Come on, now. Let’s finish this once and for all.”
Chapter Twenty-Three
Ineverletgoofmy bat as I follow Dane out of the church and into the town below. We skirt around the town centre, and Dane doesn’t have to tell me that it won’t end well if I alert anyone else to what he’s planning.
I’d ignore him. I’d kill him.
But he’s the only person who knows where Mason and Autumn are, and considering they’ve been fucking impossible to find up until now, I really can’t risk it.
“Why’d you kill Otto?” I mutter. We’re heading far away from the church, wandering down narrow streets.
Dane shrugs. “Pissed me off,” he says. “Besides, he couldn’t go back. You know that.”
I do. I’d been optimistic, far more hopeful than I should ever be. “You didn’t have to kill him. Not like that.”
“He wasbitten, Isaac.”
“They healed him.”
Dane scoffs. “Doesn’t matter. He still failed. He was too weak to survive.”
I scowl, tapping my bat against my leg to fight the urge to swing it at Dane’s skull. When he looks at me, his eyes glitter.
“Do it if you want. You’ll never find them.”
I don’t, of course. And I duck into an alley with him when we see Sal further down a street, waiting in silence until he turns the corner and walks away.
“You can be so good when you have an incentive, Isaac,” Dane purrs. I shove past him and out onto the street.
“You have something to show me?”
Dane shrugs like he doesn’t care. He slips past me and keeps walking.
It takes the better part of half an hour to get where he wants to go. At the back of my mind, a clock is ticking. The train is coming. We still have a few hours. I can’t let Dane go back there.
Did they know this about him, back at the Citadel? Did they know he’d do this?
Whywould he do this?
He takes me to the primary school, the building Mason and I searched the other day. I come to a stop.
“We searched here. I was here last night.”
Dane comes up close. “I know,” he says. “I was here, too.”
“You can’t have been.No onewas here. Mason didn’t—”
Dane snorts. “You think the Citadel sent us all here defenceless?”
