Written on Your Skin by Meredith Duran

as if recognizing the futility, she let her hand fall. It occurred to him to wonder what she had meant when she asked if there was a choice. Perhaps she had not been speaking of his choices. You’ll be alone. That was the remark she’d been responding to.
    “You cannot go with me,” he said.
    She laughed, as if he’d said something very foolish. Perhaps he had. He felt off balance, wanting—something, he was not sure what. He set his foot on the nearest tree limb and cleared his throat. “Today.” He could give her this. “By sunset, I think.”
    She understood at once. Her whole face lit. “So soon? I should kiss you again.”
    The doorknob rattled. “Mina,” came Collins’s voice from the hallway, and her smile stiffened. “Are you in there? Why is the door locked? The doctor is here.”
    She did not look at the door. “Just a moment,” she called. Her voice sounded strong and calm. “Go,” she whispered to him.
    The door shuddered beneath a blow. Collins was not waiting. He was going to break in.
    The disgust climbing Phin’s throat made him feel sicker. He released the tree and stepped back into the room. “Give me the knife.” The floor was swaying beneath him; he had to put a hand to the window frame for support.
    “Don’t be a fool.” Finally she remembered fear; it drew lines around her eyes and made her voice shake. “I’m safe. He won’t hurt me.”
    Another voice sounded from the hallway—deeper, unfamiliar to him.
    “They will have guns,” she said more sharply. “Blast you, I want him arrested!”
    To hell with this. He reached for the blade, intending to wrest it from her—he could manage that, at least—but she tossed it away and shoved him, two solid palms straight into his chest.
    Ordinarily, it would not have budged him. But in the split second that followed, as she fell into him and continued to push, he counted on reflexes, strength, a sense of balance that the poison had burned away. His fingers scraped past the window frame—his head smashed into tree branches—branches crashing up around him, limbs thumping his back like mallets, leaves scraping his cheeks, lashing at his eyes as he fell—
    His hand closed over a tree limb. He hung there for a moment, a few feet off the ground, dazed by his fortune.
    An explosion came from above—the shattering of a lock, the splintering of wood. He looked up and saw her silhouetted in the light. She was watching him, her bright hair lit like a corona, the most unlikely angel of salvation he could imagine. If in her terror she abruptly regretted her decision, if she realized she was risking her life for a man who did not deserve it, then her wisdom came too late; he could do nothing to help her but return her regard, and search her face for some reason not to remember her.
    An arm came around her and yanked her from sight. Another head popped out, male; he peered toward the ground and, as his eyes met Phin’s, lifted a pistol.
    Phin’s fingers opened. The ground thudded into his feet. Time seemed to slow, the moment stretching interminably: the cool night breeze swept over him, scented with roses, and the lawn stretched before him, another gauntlet among too many to remember, and his thoughts piled one on top of another. He did not want to run. He was tired in his bones. Sinking into the earth would be so easy. He would die smiling, here, for it would spite Ridland beyond any imaginable thing.
    But his body had never heeded his brain. Its dumb cunning knew no other choice than survival. The first shot rang out, but as his mind lingered on the room above, on the girl and her laughter and everything about her that made no sense, his feet were already moving.

    Chapter Four

    LONDON, 1884

    It was lovely, so far as prisons went. Mina’s hotel suite at Claridge’s had not been so resplendent. The three rooms were spacious, furnished in Chippendale and Axminster, with Boucher tapestries on the walls and gas jets fringed with crystal.