Page 47 of Twin Deception

Once more, for the second time tonight, I climbed up a stairwell. Gun in hand, heart pounding in that regular uptick of pending action, I stuck to the wall as I hurried up the exterior staircase. Metal shook and pieces ground together, but I placed my feet as quietly, carefully, and strategically as I could.

Relying on stealth, I crept up close to the two men arguing in an apartment right at the top of the stairs. Their voices weren’t reaching me clearly enough for me to understand what was being said, but I intended to find out what was going on.

Answers were within my grasp. I felt it. I tasted the anticipation of finally getting some damn solutions and clues.

I set my foot down on the last step, getting to the landing, and a loud creak sounded.

Goddammit!

The voices stopped. They’d heard.

Fuck this.I was a sitting duck out here. They’d run or shoot, which meant I had to beat them to it. I pulled off both, running and slamming the closed door open as I fired.

Someone else fired a gun too, but it wasn’t me who bled.

The man the hooker had described staggered back. His hand was pressed to his chest as he tried to stem the blood from where my bullet had punched through him.

“What is this?” the other man roared. He was lankier and taller, but no less effective of a foe.

He turned his gun to me, and within the small apartment, too many shots were fired at too close of a range. We fought, two against one, until I killed the sniper who’d fired at Isabel on the beach. I wanted to keep him alive for answers, but it was impossible in this tight mess of fighting off both of them without being killed myself.

I ended up taken down, caught trapped against the floor as the taller man tried to choke me out. My gun lay inches from myhand as I struggled to keep him from squeezing my throat and ending my life.

Muttering and grinding his teeth, he stared down at me. Muscles bulged in his arms as he shook with the force of trying to overpower me, to override my will to survive.

I groped for my gun, swearing to myself that this couldn’t be it. I’d only just found Isabel. I’d only just found something to fill my days with, to resist this loneliness that crept into my mind far too often.

I couldn’t die. Not like this. Not yet. I had to live to protect her. To?—

“We need to end her. End Flores’s woman.”

Trying to balance the urgency of fending off this man and listening to what he said, I felt torn in two.

What?

What did he just say?

I stretched further to grab my gun. The barest brush of metal touched the swipe of my fingertip.

“Need to end his femme fatale,” he muttered.

Black dots danced in my peripheral vision. My body screamed for oxygen.

In a desperate last thrust of my arm, I shot up to get my gun. The instant it was in my hand, I turned it on him and shot him in the head. Once. Twice. He flung back, and I gasped and coughed, wheezing for air as I scooted aside.

For good measure, as I sat on the floor and dragged in ragged breaths and deep sucks of air, I shot him once more.

Staring at him and realizing I’d done it, I’d survived, I thought back to what he’d muttered.

Louis’s woman? Like a girlfriend?

His femme fatale?

I shook my head as the most obvious answers hit me.

Isabel.

Was he talking about Isabel?

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