Page 7 of My Dark Ever After
Fatigue started to eat away at the adrenaline, leaving room for fear to bloom in its wake.
I wasn’t going to make it.
Behind me, my pursuer was starting to close the gap, and I still had four floors to go.
I thought of my parents finding out in the morning that I’d been killed in the office. Of the last words my dad and I had spoken to each other. Of them grieving the loss of their last living child.
Of the fact that if I died, I would never see Raffa again even if I wanted to.
Thinking quickly, I slammed open the door to the fourth floor and threw my bag into the hall. Then, on light feet, going much more slowly than I wanted to but without making any sound, I slunk down the stairs, keeping to the wall so that I wasn’t visible from above.
My heart beat in my throat as I crept down, waiting for my chaser to hit the fourth floor and, hopefully, take the bait.
His loud footsteps stuttered at the fourth floor, and then there was a bang as he wrenched open the door.
I pushed my tired body off the wall and sprinted down the last three flights of stairs without worrying about noise.
He’d taken the false lead.
When I practically fell out the door into the marble lobby, I was already yelling for help through gasping breaths.
No one responded.
I pinched at the cramp in my side and walked forward to peer around one of the thick pillars obscuring my view of the security desk.
The only sight that greeted me was a pool of lacquered blood seeping out from behind the desk and across the polished marble floor.
I sucked in a breath of shock a moment before the cold kiss of metal pressed into the base of my skull.
“Did you kill him?” I asked, surprised by the firmness of my voice.
The man behind me, presumably Kirkpatrick, though that was obviously a fake name, shifted his weight as if caught off guard by my reaction to being held at gunpoint.
“Who?”
“The night guard,” I said. “His name is Pedro. He has two daughters.”
He made a noise of scorn in the back of his throat and gripped my shoulder so hard it ached before marching me toward the elevators.
While we waited for one to arrive, he turned me to face him, readjusting the gun to press into the soft meat on the underside of my jaw. His expression shuttered when he saw the wound to my temple.
I hissed when he touched it gently, his fingers coming away red. Now that the adrenaline was receding, I could feel the hot throb of pain at the side of my head and the sticky wetness like drying paint along my cheek, jaw, and neck.
“You should not have run,” he repeated with a cluck of his tongue, the way a mother might reprimand a child. “They will not be happy with this.”
“Who?” I demanded, stepping closer despite the weapon at my throat.
Kirkpatrick scowled at me, but the elevator doors opened before he could respond, and the second man stepped out. He was sweat slicked and disheveled, still breathing hard as he shot me a furious look.
“They said you were sick,” he snapped in heavily accented Italian.
“Who?” I asked again, but they were wedging me between them and pushing me into the elevator.
Even though I tried to resist, I was a five-foot-three, 110-pound girl against two six-foot-plus muscle-bound gangsters. There was no way, now that they’d caught me, that I could break free.
Still, the moment the elevator doors closed, I gathered the last of my strength and went absolutely berserk. Leveraging my weight against their hands locked on my arms, I kicked up my legs against the metal doors and gave a mighty push, shoving both men into the back wall. My nails, honed to pretty, sharp points and painted Raffa’s favorite red, dug into the skin of the hands holding me, puncturing the flesh and raking up to the wrists.
“Porco Dio,” Kirkpatrick cursed, releasing me with one hand only to lash out with the other and slap me hard across the side of my face.
