Chapter 12 #2
I had to be dreaming. I knew I was dreaming. It was impossible.
The man who’d held a gun to my head that night in the hotel room a decade before—the man my father had shot and killed—was standing right in front of me.
He had the same nearly invisible blond hair cut close to his scalp.
His face was pocked with more signs of age, but the unmistakable scar that slashed across his right eye in an angry, puckered welt was as prominent as ever.
“Hello, princess,” he said in the voice that had haunted my dreams since that night.
The way my body began trembling at the sound, a reflex as if no time had passed and we were back in the hotel room, told me I was not dreaming.
His thin lips turned up into a sinister grin and he stepped toward me. “I believe you have something of ours.”
At those words, my insides liquified. I shoved my wallet in my pocket and turned to run. He was blocking my path, so I peeled back around the end of the aisle and headed up its other side. He was halfway to the other end of it already and stepped out to grab me as I dashed for the front door.
He lunged and got a grip on my left arm, knocking the books loose. I let them fall and let my instincts kick in.
In a blink, I whirled on him and drove the heel of my palm into his nose with a sharp uppercut.
He never saw it coming. When his head snapped back, I swung the side of my rigid hand into his exposed throat.
I could have cracked his windpipe with the right pressure, but the thickness of his meaty neck spared him.
Still, he stumbled and gasped, clutching at his face and now struggling to breathe.
It allowed me to free my other arm from his grip.
The woman shopping for romance novels screamed and threw her hands over her mouth.
Brittany ducked behind the counter. I’d lost sight of the teen shopping for YA books and prayed he wasn’t live streaming the whole scene from his phone.
I threw myself out the shop’s door without a glance back and ran like all get-out up the sidewalk.
My mind was near blank with panic. How he’d finally found me, I didn’t know—how he was alive, I didn’t know. All I knew was I had to get away.
I flew past all the fancy shops, turning heads and forcing myself not to look back.
Turning to look would only slow me down, I knew from experience.
I also knew from experience he was following me.
The bad guys always followed unless you knocked them down.
All I’d succeeded in doing was pissing him off and giving him watery eyes and maybe a nosebleed.
I might as well have poked a grizzly bear with a sharp stick.
I heard gasps behind me as I sprinted past the hair salon, and knew he was following. A woman with a dog on a leash appeared in my way, and I leapt over the goldendoodle like a hurdle.
I’d stayed in shape for a decade for this precise reason: escape.
The loud scrape of a café table being thrown aside and dishes shattering on the pavement followed by shocked screams almost made me turn around to look, but not quite.
I kept sprinting, my pounding heart pumping blood to my limbs, and lungs pulling air.
He was gaining on me; I could sense it. He was much larger and swallowed up huge sections of the sidewalk with each step.
Thought of his size took me back to the hotel room when he’d grabbed me and held the gun to my head.
He had felt like a brick wall with arms behind me, towering over my teenaged body, which hadn’t been much smaller than my adult body was now.
The row of buildings ended up ahead, with a gap before another row started.
An alley.
Short of diving into one of the shops, it was my best bet.
I turned the corner wide, my feet smashing the concrete as the smell of trash bins and damp pavement hit my nose. A fence blocked the alley at the other end, of course it did.
I began breathing deeper, prepping my legs to launch me up over the fence in a climb for my life because I knew if he caught me, he would kill me.
The end of the alley felt miles away with every step closer he came. I heard him gaining on me, his breath heavy and thick.
I’d hopped many fences in my life, so I knew exactly where to aim. I assessed the chain-link screen coming closer by the second and knew to get one foot above the crossbar and reach for the top. It was all in the jump. Stick that, and everything else was easy.
My feet scraped the pavement, and I took a breath like I was diving into the sea.
My thighs burned as I propelled myself off the ground without stopping and threw my right knee as high as it could go to come down with my foot on the crossbar.
I felt the horizontal piping solid beneath the sole of my shoe and jammed my fingers between the metal diamond cutouts.
The fence swayed and bucked under my weight as I scrambled for the top.
Thank God there was no barbed wire waiting for me.
I hadn’t stopped to think, hadn’t taken a breath that wasn’t desperate air flowing into my lungs, and I could do neither until I was on the other side and out of his reach.
I crested the top and threw one leg over.
The other suddenly felt like I was wearing a lead boot when the man caught up and reached for my ankle.
He gripped my bones hard enough to crush, and I screamed.
I kicked and thrashed, high-centered on the fence and trying to get loose.
He was pulling me down with ten times my weight.
I got one solid kick to his face, loosening his grip, before his hands slipped and peeled off my shoe.
I hurled my free leg over the fence and jumped down the other side.
We stood with the fence between us, me rigid with nerves and ready to bolt, and him holding my shoe in one hand and his injured face in the other.
His paw of a hand covered the side of his face without the scar, leaving him glaring at me through the angry pink worm of a welt.
We stared at each other, heaving breath, until a car came to a screeching stop behind me.
I turned, expecting to see a windowless van, which would be my demise, but instead saw a familiar cruiser with a very welcome face behind the wheel.
“Get in!” Bray shouted through the lowered window. He reached across the front seat and threw open the passenger door.
I had never been so happy to see anyone in my life.
I looked back at the alley before I turned to run, and the man was gone.
My ankle screamed in protest when I dashed for the car. The hard concrete pushed gritty rocks into my sock, and I tried not to limp. I threw myself onto the front seat, and Bray hit the gas before my door was even closed.
“What the hell was that? Who was that guy?” he shouted as he sped off. We were still in quaint downtown Del Rio and attracting attention in his loud, powerful vehicle.
I pulled my injured ankle up on the dash. “Just drive,” I told him with a wince.
“Oh, shit. Are you okay?” he asked when he saw it.
I’d pulled my sock down to reveal mottled purple in the shape of a handprint circling my ankle. It was already starting to swell.
“I’m fine.”
Bray took a quick left turn, which rocked me against the door. “That doesn’t look fine. Let me take you home so you can ice it.”
“I’m not going home,” I said, my heart finally starting to calm.
“What? Why not?”
I replayed the past five minutes in my head to make sure I wasn’t hallucinating. All of it had actually happened. Which meant they’d found me. They knew where I was. Finally.
I sucked in a breath and winced at the pain throbbing in my ankle. “You know that classified part in my file? Well, it has to do with him. He knows where I live. He was outside my window last night, and he wants to kill me.”