Just like he’d told Knox, his mind was a maze of fragments. Each shard was a slice of the terror that he’d experienced over the last seven years. One instant he was trapped underwater, blinded by filthy darkness and gasping at mouthfuls of acrid, cold liquid. Then he would be caught up in a surge of people, screaming as booming explosions rained debris on them. Then he would be suspended, weightless and deprived of all sense and feeling apart from unspeakable dread and anxiety that echoed around him.

One moment Williams was being smothered by great, choking forces. The next he was pinned upright, trapped between walls so hot they seared the naked flesh of his arms. Then he was falling to his knees, naked in a blizzard, hard rock cutting at his feet and knees as a gale of ice sliced every inch of the rest of his body.

He fought against invisible hands that held him down, then flung him through a black void, smashing him through his memories. He felt dizzy from vertigo, disoriented as his mind and body were spun, pushed, and pulled in every direction, and crushed and stretched beyond breaking point.

He shouted and railed, his voice piercing and booming, then silent and strangled. He reached out, straining to hold on to something, no matter how nebulous or jagged. But his mind refused him an anchor, and he kept tumbling through hell.

Knox only heard the quiet groans and saw the slight muscle twitches of someone dreaming. He had no idea how much his best friend had endured, the horror he was still being subjected to by his own mind, and how close he was to being completely torn apart. He just saw the man who had been miraculously returned to him, and who he was now being given a second chance to save.

Half an hour after they left Smithfield, they arrived at their destination in Highgate.

Knox nudged Williams awake and watched a look of timid recognition slowly spread across his face. He knew the large, old house that Knox had parked in front of. It was a place referred to ironically in the Service as ‘the cottage’, because it was anything but one. And it was a place Williams had been to countless times in his previous life.

It was Wytchen House, the home of James and Sarah Holland.

Chapter 24

Chapter 24

Bennett avoided indulging in self-pity too often, because when she did it was intense. Her return to London hadn’t been the glorious one she’d spent quite a lot of the last five years hoping for.

She knew she’d screwed up—she’d been cocky, miscalculated how both Williams and Knox would act, and let her asset slip out of her grip. But she didn’t have the luxury of getting to wallow in her failure. She had to fix it. She also had to eat.