CHAPTER FOUR
Ican’t tell if I’m processing everything in hyperspeed or slow motion, holding the details in my mind like shards of a broken vase that won’t fit back together. A second ago I was being kissed like my lips held the secrets of eternal life, and now I’m on the receiving end of a death stare.
It hits me like a train. Jack’s scowl. His fist around the knife. This is not some strange, silly accident.
This is actual, on-purpose, attempted murder.
My first instinct is to shriek “WHAT?!” The sound splits the air, cracking the suspended moment like glass as time hurtles to catch up.
Jack struggles to pull the knife from the encyclopedia it’s lodged in, hefting his weight against the shelf for leverage. I’m paralyzed for one surreal, blood-chilling second—terrified that my self-defense instincts, hard-won in the gym, have abandoned me in the face of real danger.
And then, it hits me: Do not let him get to his weapon. Just like that, my body is mine again.
I square up and punch him in the groin, knocking him off-balance as he doubles over.
The knife clatters to the floor and ricochets out of reach as Jack collapses on top of me.
I twist under him, straining to reach the knife before he can, but my frantic fingertips only manage to knock it farther away.
Jack wrenches my wrist back and pins it against my chest, crushing me with the same arms that embraced me thirty seconds ago.
Sprawled awkwardly over me, he goes for the knife. I take advantage of his misplaced focus, sliding my pinned arm out from under him and jerking my legs free, then using them to heave him off me in the opposite direction. His head slams into a shelf and he yells out in pain.
“Bitch,” he spits out.
It shouldn’t hurt me. Sticks and stones and death-by-stabbing and all that. But hurled from lips that were just kissing mine, the word cuts deep.
With a sharp breath, I scramble to my feet. The knife glints from its dark corner and I feel the urge to dash for it, but Uri’s voice plays in my head: GTFO ASAP. So I turn and run.
I tear out of the alcove, into the hall, and down the marble stairs.
The regal stone lions that guard the stairwell are threatening now, emblems of the den of terror behind me.
My heart leaps as the front doors come into view, the faint streetlight gleaming in unbroken.
Until a lanky figure darts out from the shadows, and I jerk to a halt.
“You! Wait!”
The library employee. The guy Jack knows, who helped coordinate this little surprise.
I dodge him, veering toward the corridor instead.
Heavy footsteps echo from the stairs now, faster than mine.
I fly into the courtyard, past the table with its smoking candle and half-eaten food, into the adjoining foyer.
I hear Jack. He’s catching up. In fractions of a second he’ll have me in his sights and chase me out the door. Or, at least, that’s what he expects.
I make a snap decision and duck to my left, hoping to throw him off my trail long enough to get help. His footsteps echo in the main lobby now. I sprint into the fiction section and crouch behind a shelf, praying he doesn’t come this way.
I hear him slow to a plod before stopping, and he lets out a roar of frustration that shakes the empty lobby before stalking off in the wrong direction.
My hands tremble as I fumble my phone out of my pocket. I can’t call anyone and risk him hearing me. What do I do, google how to escape a murderer? Can you text 911?
I have every intention of finding out when my phone unlocks and a face on the screen stops me in my tracks.
Instagram is still open from earlier this evening, refreshed to reveal a new post—a photo of Anna Matthews.
She’s perched between white pillars on the steps of her London town house, wielding a sassy little I know something you don’t know smile.
But it’s the first line of the caption, really, that sucks the air from my lungs.
You heard it here first, my loves: I’m back, I’m writing, and I’m throwing caution to the wind with my new book—a crime thriller called KISS OF DEATH.
It’s as if everything is snapping into place and exploding into splinters at once.
There’s no way.
There’s no. Way.
And yet, the would-be killer hunting me would seem to argue: there might be a way.
I skip and scan through as Anna extols the virtues of leaving one’s comfort zone and pushing one’s boundaries and pissing off one’s agent by blabbing about a book that’s not even fully written yet.
I don’t care. All I want is one morsel of information to tell me this isn’t happening, that it’s all just a bizarre coincidence or, hopefully, some kind of delusion.
You’re going to love this protagonist. She’s an extraordinary ordinary gal just looking for love—until she ends up in the wrong place at the wrong time. She may be a romantic at heart, but when it comes to the question of whether she’ll live or die, she’s all fight.
I mean, that could be anyone. That doesn’t prove anything.
I can’t wait for you to meet Roxie Mitchell!
My mind cuts to staticky TV snow.
Okay, then.
Not a coincidence.
And not at all how this was supposed to go.
A sick parade of regret courses through my mind, showing me every mistake that led me here.
I should have walked right past the Gifter.
I should have picked any other romance author for book club.
I should have rejected Jack and punched him in the face for good measure.
In a hundred different ways, this is my fault.
But it’s also Anna’s; this should be a rom-com. I don’t think I’ve ever even cracked open a crime novel before.
I am truly, madly, deeply doomed.
Thump.
Where did that come from? Upstairs? My heart rockets out of its momentary shock and hysteria sets in. The Gifter’s words loom over me. Unless you die. If you die in the dream, you die for real. My shaking fingers begin typing frenzied comments beneath Anna’s post.
I AM ROXIE MITCHLEL
WILL SHE LIVE OR DIE ANNA????
TELL ME!!!!!!!!!!!1!!!!!!
Another thump—sharper. Nearer. I freeze.
A loud sigh echoes from above—right by the romance section, where we met.
There’s a thin, fluttering crash, and I peer through a gap in the shelf to see the light blue paperback he’s chucked down from the mezzanine.
I shrink down, willing myself out of his sightline.
“Come on, Roxie,” he croons. My name on his lips, once intimate, is violating now.
“Don’t hide from me. Don’t end it this way.
” Another crash, another book thrown. He’s traipsing slowly along the railing, making his way toward the stairs like a king preparing his grand entrance.
I press a hand over my mouth, forcing my rattling breath into silence.
He lets out a world-weary, mocking sigh as he starts down the staircase.
“Look, I’m sorry I didn’t tell you about this whole murder thing before.
It’s just that when I lead with it, girls tend to freak out and run.
” He pauses, then Frisbees a hardcover directly at one of the spherical overhead lights.
I flinch as it shatters. “But when I met you,” he says, stepping leisurely down the stairs, “I knew you would be worth the chase.”
As slowly and quietly as I can, I tuck my phone back into my pocket and slide the heaviest book I can find off the shelf. I clutch it to me like a shield, waiting.
I can see him now, just a sliver through the shelf in front of me. He sighs as he eases down the last few steps, his footsteps slowing.
Step.
Step.
Step.
He stops at the bottom.
“You’re the one, Roxie,” he professes to the ceiling. My skin prickles. “I chose you.”
Now.
I spring to my feet, hoisting up the heavy volume in my hands.
“You chose wrong,” I grit out, then launch the book at him with all my strength.
His head whips toward me, his lips curled in a sneer, but the book’s corner catches him across the cheek and he goes down hard.
I make a break for it, banishing the image of his bleeding face, fighting my rising nausea as I charge toward the glass doors.
I scrabble for the lock and launch myself onto the street, gasping the night air into my lungs.
I’ve left Jack behind. The street is ahead. I know what’s happening and why—that’s good news.
The bad news is literally everything else.
· · ·
I DON’T KNOW where I’m going, only that I’m running faster than I thought possible. Jack hasn’t followed me out of the library, but it’s only a matter of time. A book to the face—even the absolute doorstopper I chucked at him—won’t keep him down long.
Everything is churning—legs, mind, stomach.
The world jostles, city lights streaking across my vision like a long-exposure photo.
I dart across Boylston Street while fragments of the night scream through my head.
The thunk of the knife missing its mark.
The howling blackness of Jack’s stare. The book cover slicing his cheek.
Adrenaline tangles with all of it and suddenly, I can’t hold it off any longer. I make a beeline for the trash can on the corner and land instead on my new rock bottom: puking heartily on the sidewalk while clinging to my life by a thread.
But, hey. At least this will be immortalized forever in the pages of a book.
When I finally come up for air, dragging the back of my hand over my mouth, I look down the street and my blood turns to ice.
He’s just outside the library doors, looking for me.
He sees me.
He moves.
It almost seems pointless to run. He’s relentless and unnaturally fast. I’ll run and he’ll catch me and this book-come-true will turn into a depressing, anticlimactic short story.
But then I notice it—a white sedan at the stoplight before me. Music blaring, driver oblivious and, more importantly, not seat-belted.