Page 110 of Passions in Death
Until she didn’t.
Back in the club, with Crack at the bar and the holo-band playing wild. Her friends, Erin Albright’s friends, mixed and merged into one colorful, drunk, girl party.
Why was she back here? Eve wondered. Nothing new here.
She’d stayed sober, she thought. Getting married tomorrow.
“I guess I should’ve stayed sober, too.” Beside her, Erin looked over the people, the color, the movement as Eve did. “But we weren’t getting married until the weekend. And we were all having so much fun.”
“You couldn’t have known what was coming.”
“You didn’t know, either.”
“Yeah, true enough. But even if you’d been cold sober, you’re not trained. An ambush like that, from behind? You didn’t have a chance.”
“I love her so much.” Tears gathered in Erin’s eyes as she watched Shauna dance onstage. “She’ll never go to Maui now. It’s ruined for her. They killed me, sure. But they killed something in her, too.”
“Might’ve been the point.”
“If I had it to do over, I’d know who to trust and who not to.”
“You don’t, and you didn’t. Why the hell am I back here?”
“Don’t ask me. I’m dead.”
Looking for something she missed? What the hell could she have missed in that small room?
But she followed the dream, walked out of the club area, down the hallway, and turned into the privacy room.
Casto jumped her, the syringe full of the drug Immortality in his hand. To protect himself, he’d take her down. He’d take her out.
He managed to get a trace in her, but as she told him, she hadn’t been drinking. She was getting married in the morning!
He hurt her, blackened her eye, pounded her ribs, but that training, her determination to survive, met his head-on.
And she took him down.
A little woozy from that trace, she cuffed him. She started to stumble her way to the door.
The wire went around her neck, biting into her skin. Blood trickled warm down her throat as she gasped for air.
Unlike Erin, she didn’t claw at the wire, but threw her body back against the attacker, added an elbow jab.
For a second, just an instant, the wire loosened. But as it tightened again, she felt herself weaken. Pain, cutting pain. No air, her mind starting to slip into the gray.
She thought of Roarke, waiting for her. Thought of the people in the club celebrating both of them. Thought of the life she’d never know.
Roarke pulled her up.
“You wake up now. You wake up, damn it, and breathe. Eve, breathe!”
She sucked in air like a drowning woman, let it out with a shudder. Still on the edge of the dream, she lifted a hand to her throat.
No wire cutting into her, no blood sliding down.
“Jesus, Jesus, that was too fucking real.”
With his arms around her, with the cat butting his head against her hip, she dropped her head on Roarke’s shoulder.
