The Second Lie (Immortal Vikings Book 2) by Anna Richland Read Free Book Online

but he must’ve stuck out a leg, because suddenly she was on the floor and she knew she hadn’t made it.
    Then a hand grabbed her hair and yanked.
    She screamed, because
it hurt
to be pulled to her feet by her hair.
    “Stop it, Wend.” The order came hard and fast, not like the smoothly mocking cadences of her imposter, but it was his voice. “Let her loose.”
    The dark man spun her away from the door, and she couldn’t contain a whimper. She’d lost. She wasn’t getting away.
    They faced the other two. Nose bleeding, the one with the eye patch pressed a short but wide-bladed knife into a spot above Stig’s or Geoffrey’s or whoever he was’s bow tie. A red line marked the skin above his wing-tip collar. Beginning by the corner of his jaw as a thin scratch, she watched drops of blood well from the incision closest to the knife point.
    Held like this, all she could do was pant and fight to keep the contents of her stomach in place, try not to panic, not to scream.
    Geoffrey’s eyes locked with hers, his head tilted, his eyebrows raised in the center and eyes drooping to the outside as if combining regret and admiration. Despite the knife at his neck, he adjusted his watch band and realigned his cuffs and tuxedo sleeves.
    He could remain unflustered, but she was flushed with the hot fury of denied freedom and sick with fear at the same time. The frustration inside her gut needed to escape, but she couldn’t move because even the skin of her face was pulled back into taut immobility by the fist gripping her hair.
    She knew her lips curled away from her teeth as she put her anger into the glare she threw at the one-eyed man. At this point, anger was her only refuge. Without anger, she’d collapse, shatter to the floor. She knew that.
    “Feisty.” The one-eyed man spoke without removing his knife from Stig’s neck. “You can pick them. Too bad you never could keep them.”
    “Our memories differ. ’Twas always thus.”
    She felt hyper-focused on the man with the knife, and she saw the back of his hand flex, perhaps only the shift in the light reflecting in a way that signaled his hand had moved, but then a wider trickle of red slipped under Stig’s collar. The blood left a visible progress map in the places his white shirt clung to his skin, translucent and crimson.
    The knife at his throat was like a kick to her stomach. If her head hadn’t been yanked backward past her spine, and she’d had the space to lean forward, she would have thrown up. She breathed through her open mouth, the sound loud in the room, but it was the only way to keep her bile down. One whiff of the room, crowded now with the sweat of four people and blood and fear, and she’d be retching.
    “Skafe.” The man clutching her hair spoke. “Enough. Not in front of her.”
    “You’ll come with us now, won’t you, Stig?” The one called Skafe withdrew his knife point and laughed as he wiped it clean across the front of Stig’s shirt. “For her sake. You always want to save the women, don’t you.”
    Bait. She was bait. Let her get out of this, and she’d show up at Saint John’s every Sunday.
    Skafe kicked her heels across the floor to her. “We’re going.”
    The tight leather of her shoes was the least of her concerns now. Novenas for her mother and Big Frank every week, Wednesday nights too, and she’d give ten percent of her income to the church, and another ten percent to the food pantry and volunteer as a mentor...She ran out of bargains to offer.
    She shut down inside then, because the next thing she understood was that she was stumbling down the auction house steps, nearly dragged by Wend’s grip on her upper arm, with an alarm ringing behind her.
    “Bloody stupid to use the front door,” Stig muttered.
    “Pardon us for not being master thieves,” Wend replied without loosening the hand fastened on her bare skin.
    Someone had to be around on the street, had to see, and help.
    They stopped at a black car parked