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 reachfor 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.”
CHAPTER13
Bray drove us to his place, an apartment complex across town by where we’d had coffee the day before. He parked outside a building with an outdoor staircase, and I hoped he lived on the first floor. We climbed out of the car.
“Let me help you,” he said when I took a painful step toward the stucco building hedged with greenery and pink flowers. The property was beautiful; even nicer than mine. I assumed a good chunk of his rent went to landscaping.
“I’m fine,” I said through gritted teeth. My ankle felt both like it was on fire and like it was full of shards of glass grinding against each other with each step. I wondered if the man had pulled and twisted it hard enough to effectively sprain it.
“No, you’re not,” Bray said and rounded the car’s hood toward me. “You can barely walk, and we have to go upstairs.”
I closed my eyes and sighed. “Of course we do,” I muttered.
“What?”
I would have let it slide, but the cooling adrenaline in my blood and everything that had just happened had my mood sharper than normal. “I said,of course we do. Of course you live on the second floor of this building where I need to go hide so some whack job from ten years ago doesn’t find me and try to kill me!Of course!” I whirled on him, arms out andbalancing on one foot, and glared. “What were you even doing there, Bray? I told you I was going to handle Brittany on my own.”
He recoiled like I’d slapped him, looking incredulous. “Uh, don’t you meanthank you?” His face pinched into an affronted scowl. “I’m pretty sure I justsaved youfrom some guy—who apparently wants to kill you—trying to snatch you off the street!”
He was completely right, but admitting it felt like treason.
I glared at him and turned for the stairs. “I didn’t need to be saved.”
