Hearts Still Beating by Brooke Archer

Author:Brooke Archer [Archer, Brooke]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Young Readers Group
Published: 2024-04-02T00:00:00+00:00

20

Rory

We hear them coming up the street five minutes after I’ve pulled the rug over the crawlspace hatch. It’s nearly a repeat of the other night, but now it’s me with my sword and Isaac with the spiked bat I’m glad I brought from the mainland. A parent and the eldest child of the Blake family, wreathed in death. What a family photo that would be.

Mal’s posse is small, and missing Carter. I’ve been kept in the house as much as Mara, but Isaac let it slip that Mara’s sister has been cooped up in Fatimah’s infirmary since the “incident.”

Twelve soldiers behind him. I recognize each one—twelve faces supposedly committed to protecting the Island. Protecting me.

Their weapons outnumber us four to one, but we won’t give up easy.

“Don’t make this a problem. Bring the Tick out, and we’ll take it off your hands,” Mal says, palms stretched up as if in surrender. The weapons behind him indicate anything but. He wants war, and he knows how to stoke its fire.

“She’s not here,” Isaac snaps.

A smile ghosts Mal’s lips, and he gives a casual shrug, snapping a finger.

“We gave ’em a chance, didn’t we?” he calls. “Can’t say we didn’t.”

“Can’t say, boss,” someone coos. My stomach churns.

“I said Mara isn’t here,” Isaac calls, authority booming. He doesn’t raise his voice often, but when he does, people listen. “She fled with the Joshi boy the other night. Took a kayak and paddled across the bay.”

Mal narrows his eyes. He has always looked carved from stone to me, like the statues in old museums, a towering boulder of a man. I’ve never been convinced a bullet to the heart could take him down. He might even survive a shot to the head through pure will.

“You think I’m going to believe that heaping crock of shit?” he asks, and his laughter has my skin crawling. It takes considerable effort not to shudder at the sound. “The Tick left alone. Or tried to leave.”

“My children are in this house, Mal,” Isaac says.

“Children were brutally murdered by the Alliance’s little monsters a few nights ago. That thing will pay for what it did.” Mal’s eyes find mine, and I know he’s talking about how we killed Juliette. How I killed her. He jerks his chin at us. “Restrain them.”

Bodies leap into motion, splitting into groups to apprehend us. Three of Mal’s people take Isaac. He’s tall, strong despite a wiry frame, and more ruthless than they are prepared for, and while he gets at least two broken noses in, he ends up cuffed.

A middle-aged woman named Tara, a girl my age named Lily, and another whose name I never bothered learning rush me. Mal’s favorites. All silent and fast and underestimated as women, they are the most dangerous of his collection.

None deadlier than Carter, though.

I lift my sword, but Lily is swift and disarms me with ease, the blade clattering to the concrete three feet away. Her onyx eyes spark with bloodlust as she swipes out

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