lily
The sick feeling in Lily’s stomach had nothing to do with the rocking of the rowboat. She tried to breathe deeply, to focus on the lights of the Ketterdam harbour disappearing behind them and the steady splash of the oars in the water. Beside her, Regulus adjusted his mask and cloak, while Barty rowed with relentless and aggressive speed, driving them closer to Terrenjel, one of Kerch’s tiny outlying islands, closer to Hellgate and Mary.
Fog lay low over the water, damp and curling. It carried the smell of tar and machinery from the shipyards on Imperjum, and something else – the sweet stink of burning bodies from the Reaper ’s Barge, where Ketterdam disposed of the dead who couldn’t afford to be buried in the cemeteries outside the city. Disgusting, Lily thought, drawing her cloak tighter around her. Why anyone would want to live in a city like this was beyond her.
Barty hummed as he rowed. Lily knew him only in passing – a bouncer and an enforcer, like the ill-fated Pettigrew. She avoided the Slat as much as possible. Regulus had branded her a snob for it, but she didn’t much care what Regulus Black had to say about her tastes.
She glanced back at Barty. She wondered if Regulus had just brought him along to row or because he expected trouble tonight. Barty was dangerously clever and fearsomely determined, and most importantly, he never shied away from a fight.
Of course there will be trouble. They were breaking into a prison. It wasn’t going to be a party. So why are we dressed for one?
She’d met Regulus and Barty at Fifth Harbour at midnight, and when she’d boarded the little rowboat, Regulus had handed her a blue silk cape and a matching veil – the trappings of the Lost Bride, one of the costumes pleasure seekers liked to don when they sampled the excesses of the Barrel.
He’d had on a big orange cape with a Madman’s mask perched atop his head; Barty had worn the same. They looked ridiculous, Lily thought, suppressing a laugh. All they needed was a stage, and they could perform one of those dark, savage little scenes from the Komedie Brute that the Kerch seemed to find so hilarious.
Regulus gave her a nudge. “Lower your veil.” He pulled down his own mask; the long nose and bulging eyes looked doubly monstrous in the fog.
She was about to give in and ask why the costumes were necessary when she realized that they weren’t alone. Through the shifting mists, she caught sight of other boats moving through the water, carrying the shapes of other Madmen, other Brides, a Mister Crimson, a Scarab Queen. What business did these people have at Hellgate?
Regulus had refused to tell her the specifics of his plan, and when she’d insisted, he’d simply said, “Get in the boat.” That was Regulus all over. He knew he didn’t have to tell her anything because the lure of Mary’s freedom had already overridden every bit of her good sense. She’d been trying to talk Regulus into breaking Mary out of jail for the better part of a year. Now he could offer Mary more than freedom, but the price would be far higher than she had expected.
Only a few lights were visible as they approached the rocky shoal of Terrenjel. The rest was darkness and crashing waves.
“Couldn’t you just bribe the warden?” she muttered to Regulus.
“I don’t need him knowing he has something I want.”
When the boat’s hull scraped sand, two men rushed forward to haul them further onto land. The other boats she’d seen were making ground in the same cove, being pulled ashore by more grunting and cursing men. Their features were vague through the gauze of her veil, but Lily glimpsed the tattoos on their forearms: a skull with a snake coming out of its mouth– the symbol of the Death Eaters.
“Money,” one of them said as they clambered out of the boat.
Regulus handed over a stack of kruge and once it was counted, the Death Eaters waved them on.
They followed a row of torches up an uneven path to the leeward side of the prison. Lily tilted her head back to gaze at the high black towers of the fortress known as Hellgate, a dark fist of stone thrusting up from the sea. She’d seen it from afar before, when she’d paid a fisherman to take her out to the island. But when she’d asked him to bring her closer, he’d refused.
“Sharks get mean there,” he’d claimed. “Bellies full of convict blood.” Lily shuddered at the memory.
A door had been propped open, and another member of the Death Eaters led Lily and the others inside. They entered a dark, surprisingly clean kitchen, its walls lined with huge vats that looked better suited to laundry than cooking. The room smelled strange, like vinegar and sage.
Maybe people came here to scrub the floors and walls and windows, to honour Ghezen, the god of industry and commerce, with soap and water and the chafing of their hands. Lily resisted the urge to gag.
They could scrub all they liked. Beneath that wholesome scent was the indelible stench of mildew, urine, and unwashed bodies. It might take an actual miracle to dislodge it.
They passed through a dank entry hall, and she thought they would head up into the cells, but instead they passed through another door and onto a high stone walkway that connected the main prison to what looked like another tower.
“Where are we going?” Lily whispered. Regulus didn’t answer. The wind picked up, lifting her veil and lashing her cheeks with salt spray.
As they entered the second tower, a figure emerged from the shadows, and Lily barely stifled a scream.
“James,” she said on a wavering breath. The Suli man wore the horns and high-necked tunic of the Grey Imp, but Lily recognised him anyway. No one else moved like that, as if the world were smoke and he was just passing through it.
“How did you even get here?” Lily whispered to him.
“I came earlier on a supply barge.”
Lily ground her teeth. “Do people just come and go from Hellgate for fun?”
“Once a week they do,” said James, his little imp horns bobbing along with his head.
“What do you mean once a—”
“Keep quiet,” Regulus growled.
“Don’t shush me, Black,” Lily whispered furiously. “If it’s this easy to get into Hellgate—”
“The problem isn’t getting in, it’s getting out. Now shut up and stay alert.”
Lily swallowed her anger. She had to trust Regulus to run the game. He’d made sure she didn’t have any other choice.
They entered a tight passageway. This tower felt different from the first, older, its rough-hewn stone walls blackened by smoking torches. Their Death Eater guide pushed open a heavy iron door and gestured for them to follow him down a steep staircase. Here the smell of bodies and refuse was worse, trapped by the sweating moisture of salt water.
They spiralled lower, into the bowels of the rock. Lily clung to the wall.
There was no banister, and though she could not see the bottom, she doubted the fall would be kind. They didn’t go far, but by the time they reached their destination, she was trembling, her muscles wound taut, less from exertion than the knowledge that Mary was somewhere in this terrible place.
She is here. She is under this roof.
“Where are we?” she whispered as they ducked through cramped stone tunnels, passing dark caves fitted with iron bars.
“This is the old prison,” Regulus said. “When they built the new tower, they left this one standing.”
She heard moaning from inside one of the cells.
“They still keep prisoners here?”
“Only the worst of them.”
She peered between the bars of an empty cell. There were shackles on the wall, dark with rust and what might have been blood.
Through the walls, a sound reached Lily’s ears, a steady pounding. She thought it was the ocean at first, but then she realised it was chanting. They emerged into a curving tunnel. To her right were more old cells, but light poured into the tunnel from staggered archways on the left, and through them she glimpsed a roaring, rowdy crowd.
The Death Eater led them around the tunnel to the third archway, where a prison guard dressed in a blue-and-grey uniform was posted, rifle slung across his back. “Four more for you,” the Death Eater shouted over the crowd. Then he turned to Regulus. “If you need to leave, the guard will call for an escort. No one goes wandering off without a guide, understood?”
“Of course, of course, wouldn’t dream of it,” Regulus said from behind his ridiculous mask.
“Enjoy,” the Death Eater said with an ugly grin. The prison guard waved them through.
Lily stepped under the arch and felt as if she’d fallen into some strange nightmare. They were on a jutting stone ledge, looking down into a shallow, crudely made amphitheatre. The tower had been gutted to create an arena. Only the black walls of the old prison remained, the roof long since fallen in or destroyed so that the night sky was visible high above, dense with clouds and free of stars. It was like standing in the hollowed-out trunk of a massive tree, something long dead and howling with echoes.
Around her, masked and veiled men and women crowded onto the terraced ledges, stamping their feet as the action proceeded below. The walls surrounding the fighting pit blazed with torchlight and the sand of the arena floor was red and damp where it had soaked up blood.
In front of the dark mouth of a cave, a scrawny, bearded man in shackles stood next to a big wooden wheel marked with what looked like drawings of little animals. He’d clearly once been strong, but now his skin hung in loose folds and his muscles sagged. A younger man stood beside him in a mangy cape made from a lion’s skin, his face framed by the big cat’s mouth. A garish gold crown had been secured between the lion’s ears, and its eyes had been replaced with bright silver dimes.
“Spin the wheel!” the young man commanded.
The prisoner lifted his shackled hands and gave the wheel a hard spin. A red needle ticked along the edges as it spun, making a cheerful clattering noise, then slowly the wheel came to a stop. Lily couldn’t quite make out the symbol, but the crowd bellowed, and the man’s shoulders drooped as a guard came forward to unlock his chains.
The prisoner cast them aside into the sand, and a second later Lily heard it – a roar that carried even over the excited baying of the crowd. The man in the lion cape and the prison guard stepped hurriedly onto a rope ladder and were lifted out of the pit to the safety of a ledge as the prisoner seized a flimsy-looking knife from a bloody bunch of weapons lying in the sand. He backed as far away from the mouth of the tunnel as he could get.
Lily had never seen a creature like the one that crawled into view from the tunnel. It was some kind of snake, its thick body covered in diamond-patterned green scales. It moved slowly, sinuously, its body sliding lazily over the ground.
“What is that thing?” Lily asked.
“Nagini,” said James with disgust. “The Death Eaters’ favorite. Her poison is lethal.”
“She seems pretty slow.”
“Yes. She seems that way.”
The prisoner lunged forward with his knife. The snake moved so quickly Lily could barely track it. One moment the prisoner was bearing down on it; the next, the snake was on the other side of the arena. Bare seconds later, it had slammed into the prisoner, then lurched forward, mouth wide open, killing the prisoner a few seconds after.
The creature dropped its weight on the prisoner with a sickening crunch.
The crowd was booing.
Lily averted her eyes, unable to watch. “What is this?”
“Welcome to the Hellshow,” said Regulus. “Voldemort got the idea a few years back and pitched it to the Hogwarts Council.”
“The Council knows?”
“Of course they know, Lily. Dumbledore has never been one to turn down money, has he? No matter how many people get hurt.”
Lily dug her fingernails into her palms. That condescending tone made Regulus so slappable.
She knew Dumbledore's name well. He was the reigning king of the Barrel, the headmaster of Hogwarts - a school for “troubled youth”, as they called it. When Lily had arrived in Ketterdam a few years ago, she’d been young, friendless, penniless, and far from home.
She’d spent the first week in the Kerch law courts, dealing with the charges against Mary. But once her testimony was complete, she’d been unceremoniously dumped at First Harbour with just enough money to book passage back to Ravka. Desperate as she’d been to return to her country, she’d known she couldn’t leave Mary to languish in Hellgate.
She had no idea what to do. She had been welcomed to Hogwarts with the assurance of safety and lodging. They gave her hot food and a bed. Who dared to say no to such an offer?
She’d said yes, signing a contract which assured she would pay back the school for their generosity. If she was smart with her money, Lily might actually pay off in a year or two.
She only stayed there for a week until one night, James had crawled through her window on the top floor with a proposal from Regulus Black in hand.
Lily never could figure out how James had managed to scale six rain-slick storeys of stone in the middle of the night, but the Order’s conditions were far more favourable than what she had come to discover would be her life at Hogwarts. Hogwarts, a symbol of peace and protection for impressionable young children, did not especially care about the safety of the children and was not hospitable to its occupants.
Regulus had sent the right person to argue his case – a Suli boy just a few months younger than Lily who had grown up in Ravka and who had spent a very ugly few years at the Menagerie.
“What can you tell me about Severus Snape?” Lily had asked that night.
“Not much,” James had admitted. “He’s no better or worse than most of the bosses in the Barrel.”
“And Regulus Black?”
“A liar and a thief. But he’ll keep to any deal you strike with him.”
Lily had heard the conviction in his voice. “He freed you from the Menagerie?”
“There is no freedom in the Barrel, only good terms. Umbridge’s staff never earn out of their contracts. She makes sure they don’t. She—” James had broken off then, and Lily had sensed the vibrant anger coursing through him. “Regulus convinced Snape to pay off my indenture. I would have died at the Menagerie.”
“You may still die in the Order.”
James’s dark eyes had glinted, grinning. “I may. But I’ll die on my feet with a knife in my hand.”
The next morning, James had helped Lily sneak out of her room.
They’d met with Regulus Black, and despite his cold ways and those strange leather gloves, she’d agreed to join the Order.
Lily had trusted James, and she hadn’t been sorry for it, though right now she just felt furious with everyone. She watched a group of Death Eaters prod Nagini with long spears. Apparently, the snake was sated after her meal; it allowed itself to be herded back to the tunnel.
The crowd continued to boo as guards entered the arena to remove the prisoner ’s remains.
“Why are they complaining?” Lily asked angrily. “Isn’t this what they came here for?”
“They wanted a fight,” said Regulus. “They were expecting him to last longer.”
“This is disgusting.”
Regulus shrugged. “Only disgusting thing about it is that I didn’t think of it first.”
“These men aren’t slaves, Regulus. They’re prisoners.”
“They’re murderers and rapists.”
“And thieves and con artists. Your people.”
“Lily, love, they aren’t forced to fight. They line up for the chance. They earn better food, private cells, liquor, jurda.”
Barty cracked his knuckles. “Sounds better than we got it at the Slat.”
Lily looked at the people screaming and shouting, the barkers walking the aisles taking bets. The prisoners of Hellgate might line up to fight, but Voldemort made the real money.
“Mary doesn’t … Mary doesn’t fight in the arena, does she?”
“We aren’t here for the ambience,” Regulus said.
Beyond slappable. “Are you aware that I could waggle my fingers and make you wet your trousers, Black?”
“Easy, Heartrender. I like these trousers. And if you start messing with my vital organs, Mary Macdonald will never see sunshine again.”
Lily blew out a breath and settled for glowering at no one.
“Lily—” James murmured.
“Don’t you start on me.”
“It will all work out. Let Regulus do what he does best.”
“He’s horrible.”
“But effective. Being angry at Regulus for being ruthless is like being angry at a stove for being hot. You know what he is.”
Lily crossed her arms. “I’m mad at you, too.”
“Me? Why?”
“I don’t know yet. I just am.”
James gave Lily’s hand a brief squeeze, and after a moment, Lily squeezed back. She sat through the next fight in a daze, and the next. She told herself she was ready for this – to see him again, to see Mary here in this brutal place. After all, she was a Grisha and a soldier of the Second Army. She’d seen worse.
But when Mary emerged from the mouth of the cave below, she knew she’d been wrong. Lily recognised her instantly. Every night of the past year, she had fallen asleep thinking of Mary’ face.
There was no mistaking the dark brows, and the round face framed by long, curly dark brown hair.
But Regulus hadn’t lied: Mary was much changed. The woman who looked back at the crowd with fury in her eyes was a stranger.
Lily remembered the first time she’d seen Mary in a moonlit Kaelish wood. Her beauty had seemed unfair to her. In another life, she might have believed Macdonald was coming to rescue her, a shining saviour. But she’d known the truth of her by the language she spoke, and by the disgust on her face every time her eyes lighted on her. Mary Macdonald was a drüskelle, one of the Fjerdan witchhunters tasked with hunting down Grisha to face trial and execution, though to her she’d always resembled a warrior Saint.
Now she looked like what she truly was: a killer. The very structure of her body had changed. Mary gave the wheel a powerful spin that nearly toppled it off its base, her face distorted with wrath as she glared at the audience.
Tick tick tick tick. Snakes. Tiger. Bear. Boar. The wheel ticked merrily along, then slowed and finally stopped.
“No,” Lily said when she saw where the needle was pointing.
“It could be worse,” said Barty. “Could have landed on the snake again.”
She grabbed Regulus’s arm through his cloak and felt his muscles tense. “You have to stop this.”
“Let go of me, Evans.” His gravel-rough voice was low, but she sensed real menace in it.
She dropped her hand, “Please, you don’t understand. She—”
“If she survives, I’ll take Mary Macdonald out of this place tonight, but this part is up to her.”
Lily gave a frustrated shake of her head. “You don’t get it.”
The guard unbolted Mary’ shackles, and as soon as the chains dropped into the sand, he leaped onto the ladder with the announcer to be lifted to safety. The crowd screamed and stamped. But Mary stood silent, unmoving, even when the gate opened, even when the wolves charged out of the tunnel – three of them snarling and snapping, tumbling over one another to get to her.
At the last second, Mary dropped into a crouch, knocking the first wolf into the dirt, then rolling right to pick up the bloodied knife the previous combatant had left in the sand. She sprang to her feet, blade held out before her, but Lily could sense her reluctance. Her head was cocked to one side, and the look in her brown eyes was pleading, as if she was trying to engage the two wolves circling her in some silent negotiation. Whatever the plea might have been, it went unheard. The wolf on the right lunged. Mary crouched low and spun, lodging her knife in the wolf’s belly. It gave a miserable yelp, and she seemed to shudder at the sound. It cost her precious seconds. The third wolf was on her, knocking her to the sand. Its teeth sank into her shoulder. She rolled, taking the wolf with her. The wolf’s jaws snapped, and Mary caught them. She wrenched them apart, the muscles of her arms flexing, her face grim. Lily squeezed her eyes shut.
There was a sickening crack. The crowd roared.
Mary kneeled over the wolf. Its jaw was broken, and it lay on the ground twitching in pain. She reached for a rock and slammed it hard into the poor animal’s skull. It went still and Mary’ shoulders slumped. The people howled, stomping their feet. Only Lily knew what this was costing her, that she’d been a drüskelle. Wolves were sacred to her kind, bred for battle like their enormous horses. They were friends and companions, fighting side by side with their drüskelle masters.
The first wolf had recovered and was circling. Move, Mary, she thought desperately. She got to her feet, but her movements were slow, weary. Her heart wasn’t in this fight. Her opponents were grey wolves, rangy and wild, but cousins to the white wolves of the Fjerdan north. Mary had no knife, only the bloody rock in her hand, and the remaining wolf prowled the arena between her and the pile of weapons. The wolf lowered its head and bared its teeth.
Mary dove left. The wolf lunged, sinking its teeth into his side. She grunted, and hit the ground hard. For a moment, Lily thought she might simply give in and let the wolf take her life. Then she reached out, hand scrabbling through the sand, searching for something. Her slender fingers closed over the shackles that had bound her wrists.
She seized them, looped the chain across the wolf’s throat, and pulled, the veins in her neck cording from the strain. Her bloody face was pressed against the wolf’s ruff, her eyes tightly shut, her lips moving. What was she saying? A drüskelle prayer? A farewell?
The wolf’s hind legs scrabbled at the sand. Its eyes rolled, frightened whites showing bright against its matted fur. A high whine rose from its chest. And then it was over. The creature’s body stilled. Both fighters lay unmoving in the sand. Mary kept her eyes closed, her face still buried in the creature’s fur.
The crowd thundered its approval. The ladder was lowered, and the announcer sprang down, hauling Mary to her feet and grabbing her wrist to raise her hand in victory. The announcer gave him a little nudge, and Mary lifted her head. Lily caught her breath.
Tears streaked the dirt on Mary’ face. The rage was gone, and it was like some flame had gone out with it. Her eyes were colder than she’d ever seen them, empty of feeling, stripped of anything human at all. This was what Hellgate had done to her. And it was her fault.
The guards took hold of Mary again, pulling the shackles from the wolf’s throat and clapping them back on her wrists. As she was led away, the crowd chanted its disapproval, clamouring “More! More!”
“Where are they taking her?” Lily asked, voice trembling.
“To a cell to sleep off the fight,” Regulus said.
“Who will see to her injuries?”
“They have mediks. We’ll wait to make sure she’s alone.”
I could heal her, she thought. But a darker voice rose in her, rich with mocking. Not even you can be that foolish, Lily. No Healer can cure that girl. You made sure of it.
She thought she would leap from her skin as the minutes burned away. The others watched the next fight – James and Barty avidly, speculating on the outcome, Regulus inscrutable as always, scheming away behind that hideous mask. Lily slowed her own breathing, forced her pulse lower, trying to calm herself, but she could do nothing to mute the riot in her head.
Finally, Regulus gave her a nudge. “Ready, Evans? The guard first.”
She cast a glance at the prison guard standing by the archway.
“How down?” It was a Barrel turn of phrase. How badly do you want him hurt?
“Shut eye.” Knock him out, but don’t actually hurt him.
They followed Regulus to the arch through which they’d entered. The rest of the crowd took little notice, eyes focused on the fighting below.
“Need your escort?” the guard asked as they approached.
“I had a question,” said Regulus. Beneath her cape, Lily lifted her hands, sensing the flow of blood in the guard’s veins, the tissue of his lungs. “About your mother and whether the rumours are true.”
Lily felt the guard’s pulse leap and sighed. “Never can make it easy, can you, Black?”
The guard stepped forward, lifting his gun. “What did you say? I—” His eyelids drooped. “You don’t—” Lily dropped his pulse, and he toppled forward.
Barty grabbed him before he could fall as James swept him into the cloak Regulus had been wearing just moments before. Lily was only mildly surprised to see that Regulus was wearing a prison guard’s uniform beneath it.
“Couldn’t you have just asked him the time or something?” Lily said. “And where did you get that uniform?”
James slid the Madman’s mask down over the guard’s face, and Barty threw his arm around him, holding him up as if the guard had been drinking too much. They deposited him on one of the benches pressed against the back wall.
Regulus tugged on the sleeves of his uniform. “Lily, people love to give up authority to men in nice clothes. I have uniforms for the stadwatch, the harbour police, and the livery of every merch mansion on the Geldstraat. Let’s go.”
They slipped down the passageway.
Instead of turning back the way they’d come, they moved counterclockwise around the old tower, the wall of the arena vibrating with voices and stomping feet to their left. The guards posted at each archway paid them little more than a glance, though a few nodded at Regulus, who kept a brisk pace, his face buried in his collar.
Lily was so deep in thought that she nearly missed it when Regulus held up a hand for them to slow.
They’d rounded a bend between two archways and were in the cover of deep shadow. Ahead of them, a medik was emerging from a cell accompanied by guards, one carrying a lantern. “She’ll sleep through the night,” the medik said. “Make sure she drinks something in the morning and check her pupils. I had to give him a powerful sleeping draft.”
As the men moved off in the opposite direction, Regulus gestured his group forward. The door in the rock was solid iron, broken only by a narrow slot through which to pass the prisoner ’s meals. Regulus bent to the lock.
Lily eyed the crude iron door. “This place is barbaric.”
“Most of the better fighters sleep in the old tower,” Regulus replied. “Keeps them away from the rest of the population.”
Lily glanced left and right to where bright light spilled from the arena entryways. There were guards standing in those doorways, distracted maybe, but all one needed to do was turn his head. If they were caught here, would the guards bother giving them over to the stadwatch for trial or would they simply force them into the ring to be eaten by a tiger?
It took Regulus a few quick heartbeats to pick the lock. The door creaked open and they slipped inside.
The cell was pitch-black. A brief moment passed, and the cold green glow of a bonelight flickered to life beside her. James held the little glass sphere aloft. The substance inside was made from the dried and crushed bodies of luminous deep-sea fishes. They were common among crooks in the Barrel who didn’t want to get caught in a dark alley, but couldn’t be bothered to lug around lanterns.
At least it’s clean, Lily thought, as her eyes adjusted to the gloom. Barren and icy cold, but not filthy. She saw a pallet of horse blankets and two buckets placed against the wall, one with a bloody cloth peeking over the rim.
This was what the prisoners of Hellgate competed for: a private cell, a blanket, clean water, a bucket for waste.
Mary slept with her back to the wall. Even in the dim illumination of the bonelight, she could see her face was starting to swell. Some kind of ointment had been smeared over her wounds – calendula.
She recognised the smell.
Lily moved towards her, out of instinct, but Regulus stopped her with a hand on her arm. “Let James assess the damage.”
“I can—” Lily began.
“It’s okay, Lils. Let me take care of it,” James said reassuringly, casting her a smile. “Here you go, love,” James tossed Regulus the crow-headed cane he must have been hiding beneath his Grey Imp costume. He kneeled over Mary’ body with the bonelight.
Lily crouched down next to James, despite Regulus’ protests, and touched Mary's shoulder gently. “Macdonald,” she said. She didn’t stir.
“Mary.”
A lump rose in her throat, and she felt the ache of tears threatening. She pressed a kiss to her temple. She knew that Regulus and James were watching and that she was making an idiot of herself, but after so long she was finally here, in front of her, and so very broken.
“James, what’s the inventory?” Regulus asked.
“Bruised knuckles, chipped tooth, two broken ribs,” James said. “Third and
fourth on the left.”
“Her left or your left?” Regulus asked.
“Her left.”
“Mary,” Lily repeated.
“Lily?” Mary’s voice was raw but as lovely as she remembered.
“Oh, Saints, Mary,” she whispered. “Please wake up.”
Her eyes opened, groggily. “Lily,” she said softly. Her knuckles brushed her cheek; her hand cupped her face tentatively, disbelievingly. “Lily?”
Her eyes filled with tears. “Shhhh, Mary. We’re here to get you out.”
Before Lily could blink Mary had hold of her shoulders and had pinned her to the ground.
“Lily,” she growled.
Then her hands closed over her throat.