His eyes are shadowed, looking down at me in what can only be described as disbelief.
My gaze follows the strong line of his neck, sweeps across his broad shoulder and along his muscled arm until I see his hand, clenched against the bookshelf above me.
And the knife it has buried there, exactly where my chest was half a second before.
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 andricochets 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. TheguyJack 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 throwhim 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, googlehow 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 littleI know something you don’t knowsmile. 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 calledKISS OF DEATH.
It’s as if everything is snapping into place and exploding into splinters at once.
There’s no way.
There’sno.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.
