Chapter 8 James
James
I swear, this girl is going to be the death of me.
Shit, she’s already been the death of me.
Fuck.
My footfalls hit the ground with increasing intensity even as I remind myself not to sprint in the storm. The winds are only
picking up, sending sheets of rain at a diagonal aimed directly at my feet. With my luck I’ll manage to fall and snap my neck
before Rosabelle even gets a chance to kill me—and this girl is definitely going to kill me. She’ll either break my heart
or bury a knife in it; one way or another, my life is in her hands.
There’s something very wrong with me.
I can think of no other reason why I happen to be deeply, alarmingly attracted to a girl who murders people for a living.
Sorry, correction: a girl in a cat costume who murders people for a living. I can’t believe this is actually happening. I
can’t believe this is my real life right now: I’m running after a girl wearing a child’s cat costume, watching her little
tail swish as she darts from one building to another.
Fuck me.
Idiot. Idiot. Idiot. The word echoes in my head with every footfall as I chase after her, audibly groaning as I watch her move in the direction
of a distant airplane hangar.
I swear to God, if she thinks she can fly a plane in this weather—
I briefly lose my footing, nearly tripping on a grate buried in a puddle. By the time I steady myself, water is sloshing in
my shoes, and Rosabelle has gained twenty more feet. I’m wearing the wrong gear for this. I should’ve been wearing boots;
instead, I’m wearing a pair of low-tread, low-top sneakers. Clearly, I didn’t wake up this morning thinking I had to dress
for an undercover chase through a rainstorm.
Worse: Rosabelle is faster than she looks.
Quiet, too. If this is how she operates running on little food and no sleep, I can only imagine what she’s like when her tank
is full. I have no clue what she’s thinking right now. I only know her well enough to know that this girl doesn’t do anything
without a plan.
“Rosabelle,” I hiss, trying not to raise my voice.
She doesn’t turn around.
“Rosabelle,” I try again, a little louder this time.
Again, her little tail swishes.
Suddenly I can hear Adam’s voice in my head—I can practically read the fear in his eyes when he suggested I see a professional for the unresolved trauma that’s leading me to make poor and destructive choices.
Yeah, well.
I might have to revisit that.
I wasn’t sure how I’d feel if I saw Rosabelle again; I thought maybe I’d come to my senses, that I’d see her and realize everyone was right—that I’d romanticized her in my head; that I’d experienced momentary insanity; that everything I’d once felt for her was a result of some weird fever dream.
Nope.
Apparently, I have a shitty imagination, because I wasn’t imagining her well enough. It’s not just that she’s gorgeous; it’s
not that simple. With Rosabelle, her beauty is just the beginning. Her brain and body are so vividly connected that I can
always see her mind working. She’s like a tightly coiled current, a live wire sparking dangerously, even though she lives
in a breathless sort of stillness. There’s some sort of alchemy in all this that makes her arresting in person; she’s physically
striking. When I see her I feel like I’ve been knocked off a cliff.
And the way she looks at me—
Those fucking eyes. Those sleepy, soft, blinking eyes. I swear she only looks at me with those eyes.
It makes me want to take her to bed.
I should probably pick out a tombstone instead; get my affairs in order; leave all my stuff to Gigi and Roman and my little
niece- or nephew-to-be.
At that sobering thought, I almost slow down, losing my rhythm. My left foot lands hard in another deep puddle, splashing
water up my jeans.
Guilt batters me in waves.
The reminder of Juliette’s impending due date is a blow. No one knows the gender of the baby; she and Warner wanted it to
be a surprise. Personally, I think Warner didn’t want to know because he didn’t want to get too attached. The truth is, we
still have no idea whether the baby will survive the birth.
The truth is—
Shit, the truth is, Kenji was right. Warner’s been under crushing levels of stress lately, and I’ve done nothing but make
things worse. And if I let Rosabelle escape when I had a chance to bring her in, Warner will never trust me again. He’ll think
I let her go on purpose. Forget handing out pamphlets in a hot dog costume; my life as I know it will be over.
He might charge me with treason.
I was the one who brought Rosabelle here to begin with; this is my mess to clean up. The least I can do is finish what I started,
and right now, trying to disguise anything about this shitshow is pointless. Rosabelle might be wearing dark, inconspicuous
clothing, tail and all, but I’m wearing a windbreaker with reflective stripes that form an obvious V right down the middle
of my chest. I practically glow in the dark. There’s a zero percent chance we haven’t already been spotted. It’s only a matter
of minutes before—
Shit.
I risk a glance over my shoulder, peering through the rain as a pair of distant headlights flash through the storm.
There’s no time.
I pick up speed, shoving wet hair out of my face as I push my body harder, risking stability in exchange for lengthening my
strides. My longer legs soon eat up the ground between us and I’m close enough to throw myself forward, practically tackling
her to the ground.
She cries out as I catch her.
I tuck her against my chest and roll over as we fall so her head doesn’t hit the ground, but by the time we stop moving we’re both breathing hard and I’ve got her half-pinned beneath me.
Rainwater drips from my face to hers, and she blinks up at me in the ghostly light, a flare of some unfathomable emotion flashing in her eyes.
For a moment I nearly forget myself. Suddenly we’re just two people alone in the dusk, and I can feel every inch of her under my body.
I nearly lose focus.
She recovers before I do, her eyes shuttering as she pushes uselessly at my chest. “Let me go—”
“No.”
“James—”
“Listen to me,” I say, raising my voice as a roll of thunder breaks across the sky. “There’s no point in running. They’re
going to shoot you just to take you out, and then they’ll heal you and dump you right back in prison—”
“I’m not going back to prison—”
“You keep saying that like you can make it true. I realize there are some philosophical differences between us, but where
I come from, you don’t get a paycheck and treat when you kill people. You go to jail.”
“Then why aren’t you in jail?” she argues. “You kill people all the time.”
I open my mouth, then close it.
“You’re a hypocrite,” she says. “You’re all hypocrites.”
“That’s not”—I frown—“I’m a soldier—”
“So am I,” she hits back.
She squirms beneath me and I take a sharp breath, suddenly fighting for my life. Even now. Here. In the rain.
“Okay, I need you to stop moving like that or this is going to get really embarrassing for one of us.”
She pushes at my chest again, then drags her hands angrily down my body. “Let me go—”
I take another breath. “Me. Just me. Really embarrassing for me.”
“James—”
“I’m sorry, I just, you know, when I imagined this moment in my mind I really thought it would go differently.”
“This isn’t funny,” she snaps.
“I never said it was funny.”
She bucks upward, the effort gaining her an inch of leverage. She manages to get one of her legs scissored around me, but
it’s the way she grabs my hips as she torques her body that leaves me a little lightheaded.
“Okay, Jesus,” I say, my chest heaving. “I tap out, okay? I swear I’ll let you go. I just need you to promise not to run.”
“No,” she says angrily. “I don’t have time to go back to prison. I left for a reason—”
“You don’t have time?” I repeat, grateful for the chance to reset my head. “You mean you would if you could but your busy schedule just won’t allow
it?”
“That’s exactly what I’m saying.”
“Wait— What?”
She glances at something behind me, then takes a shaky breath, licking rainwater from her lips. “I’m sorry,” she says. “I’m
really sorry. You don’t understand—I have to get home before it’s too late—”
I gasp.
The pain is immediate and shocking, and in the seconds my body contracts in response, she rolls us over and quickly pulls the knife out of my side.
My knife.
That she stole off my body.
“I’m sorry, I’m really sorry,” she says in a rush, wiping the blade on my jeans before getting to her feet. Rosabelle looms
over me like she did the day she slit my throat, but at least this time she has the decency to look upset. She flips the blade
closed. “No vital organs, I promise.”
“You’re so fucking mean to me,” I say, grimacing to exaggerate my pain. “And I’m always so nice to you—”
I grab her ankle and pull.
She cries out, free-falling as I launch badly upright, wincing for real as the pain in my side screams; still, I catch her
before she falls, then spin her against the wall of the airplane hangar, the metal reverberating as the two of us collide.
I stare at her, breathing hard, water dripping off my nose. “You’ve got a lot of nerve, you know that?”
She’s looking at me with something like panic. “James,” she says desperately. “I’ve still got your knife.”
My eyes widen a fraction.
“Goddammit,” I bite out, staggering backward as fresh pain explodes in my thigh. I yank the knife out of my leg with a muted cry, flipping
it shut before stowing it in a safer place. By the time I look up, Rosabelle’s already fifty feet into the darkening distance,
and now I’ve got a limp. But when I hear the rising rush of footfalls, I know I’m well and truly screwed.
Minutes.
We’ve got less than minutes.