My gaze skipped to my phone, but Bodie kicked the booth’s door shut and dragged me toward the elevator.
“Bodie! Let me go!” I tried to stand my ground, but my high-heeled shoes had no traction on the marble floor. “Help!” I yelled, hoping that somebody somewhere in the building would hear me.
Bodie clamped a hand over my mouth and yanked me on board the elevator. I flailed and struggled, desperate to get away before the doors closed. He held me in place with ease and kept his hand over my mouth. Until he flung me against the elevator’s side wall. I gasped in pain when my hip smacked against the handrail and my head bounced off the faux wood paneling.
I lunged for the doors as they closed, but Bodie caught me and locked an arm around my neck. The doors shut.
It felt like they were sealing my fate.
Bodie hit the button for the top floor.
“I’m sorry to say we’re not going back to the party,” he said, as if I hadn’t already guessed that. “They’ll have to mix their own drinks.”
The elevator climbed up and up. I needed to get away, but Bodie was ridiculously strong—from way too many hours spent at Ultimate Beast—and panic had scattered my mind.
I fought through the haze of fear and remembered a self-defense move I’d learned back in high school. I raised up one foot and stomped down, grazing the inside of Bodie’s leg before smashing the heel of my shoe into his foot.
At least, that’s what I meant to do. He moved his foot out of the way just in the nick of time.
“Don’t make this harder than it needs to be,” he said. “You’re no match for me. I saw you at the gym. You’re pathetic. Cute, but pathetic.”
A sparking-hot cloud of rage built inside of me, muffling some of my fear.
He was a murderer and a liar, and he was callingmepathetic?
He thought he was going to take me away from Livy?
At the thought of my beautiful, sweet niece, my rage morphed into something hard and solid.
Livy wasn’t losing another loved one.
Not if I had anything to do with it.
I wanted to talk to Bodie, to distract him while I came up with a plan to save myself, but he’d clamped his hand over my mouth again. I tried to bite his fingers, but he managed to keep them curved enough that I couldn’t sink my teeth into his flesh. When the doors opened to the fifth floor, he dragged me off the elevator.
I couldn’t move my head much, but I glanced up and down the hall, trying to will someone to appear. Someone who could help me.
The corridor remained empty.
Bodie half dragged and half carried me to a door that led to a narrow staircase.
I knew where we were going. And I knew why.
I struggled and flailed again.
Bodie shifted from cold calm to red-hot anger in a flash.
He slammed me against the wall of the stairwell and pressed a forearm against my throat so that I could hardly breathe.
“Bodie! Stop!” I wheezed in a faint voice that sounded nothing like me.
He brought his face right up to mine. “You wantmeto stop? You’re the one trying to ruin everything. All I needed was some money. I’m drowning in debt, and my car’s about to get seized. Those bottles of whiskey were my ticket to an easier life, but then people had to get in my way. First Freddie, then that dude with the messenger bag, and now you. I don’t want to hurt you, Emersyn, but you’ve brought this on yourself.”
Tears pricked at my eyes as black splotches blotted out my vision. “What would your sister think?” I rasped. “If she could see you now?”
“My sister is alive and well and living her perfect life in Boston. I didn’t want to lie to you, Emersyn, but I needed you to trust me so you wouldn’t poke holes in my alibi.”
“Alibi…” I couldn’t get enough oxygen to say more.
