My foot hits something soft.
The man holding me lets out a pained sound.
“Bitch,” he snarls. Then he slams me against the wall hard enough to force all the air from my lungs.
The other man jogs over to join him. He snickers. “She gotcha good, huh?”
The hand covering my mouth slips a little, but I don’t have the breath left in me to scream. All I can do is gasp for air.
But the pepper spray. The alarm.
Yes.
I need a distraction. Just long enough to make it to the street. Long enough to find someone to help me.
The hand firms over my mouth again, fingers digging painfully into my cheeks and jaw. Dark eyes bore into me, filled with malice. The rest of his face is concealed by a black knit mask. “Shouldn’t have kicked me,” he hisses.
With my uninjured arm, I reach for my messenger bag, still miraculously looped over my shoulder. As I rummage around for the pepper spray or alarm, I curse myself for the mess inside.
If I get out of this, I’ll clean it out, I vow. I’ll buy extra pepper spray. Extra alarms. Anything. Just please let me get out of this.
My fingers wrap around something hard and smooth.
Hope flares.
The alarm. The one the ads claimed would alert anyone within a five hundred yard radius.
“Hurry up,” the other man grumbles. He’s also wearing a knit mask that hides his features. In his hand glints something metallic, but I can’t tell what it is.
A knife? A gun?
My sweat-slicked fingers fumble for the little button on the alarm.
The man holding onto me flings me to the ground.
I smash onto the pavement, my body exploding with pain.
My head raps hard against it. My teeth clack down on my tongue, filling my mouth with blood.
As I suck in a desperate gulp of air, he leaps on top of me. Covering my mouth and nose. Smothering me.
Fear threatens to take over everything.
Then I find the button.
And I press it.
An eardrum-shattering shriek splits the air.
The man above me curses.
The other grits out, “Shit!”
Just as I’m about to press the button again, my head is slammed into the ground.
Flashes of white fill my vision.
Bile burns my throat.
