Then, they would eat something.
No.
Food first.
Then the speech.
Lost in her hopeful dreams, Cora almost missed the scuffle of feet behind her until a loose stone clattered across the pavement. The appearance of other hikers on the path were too normal for her to worry about it, but something about the prickle along the back of her neck had her glancing over her shoulder.
It was a guy. Just one. Dressed in a leather jacket and dark jeans. The hood on his pullover was drawn over his head, obscuring her view of his face, but she could just make out long, dark hair peeking out around the sides.
For a second, she thought it was James, but the build was all wrong. This guy wasn’t tall enough, built enough. He was too hunched. His shoulders were pulled too high around his ears.
James walked with confidence, with authority.
He dominated his strides.
Nevertheless, Cora scooted off to one side of the path, giving him plenty of space to stalk past her.
Only, he didn’t.
He came up right behind her, slowing down so he remained there.
Cora felt his hot presence slither down her spine. It didn’t fade even when she quickened her pace.
He quickened his.
Heart rampaging in her chest, she stopped and faced him.
“What?” she demanded. “Did you need something?”
It was a stupid question, one that invited all manner of stupid answers. Her companion was no different.
“Hand over your wallet.”
Cora gaped. “Are you serious? Does it look like I have a wallet?”
He hadn’t been expecting that, because he seemed to hesitate as if not sure what he was supposed to do next. Cora hoped he’d just leave. No one got hurt. There was no point sticking around.
“Then give me the bracelet.”
Cora looked down at her wrist, at the bracelet James had given her the day before.
“No.” She cupped her hand over it. “My husband gave me this and it’s mine.”
Her companion recoiled, surprised by her refusal.
“Are you stupid?” He stuffed both hands into his pockets. “I said, give it to me!”
A switch blade was unearthed from the folds of his coat. The blade glinted as it was snapped open with a flick of his thin wrists.
Cora did the only thing she could think of that didn’t involve pitching her bracelet in his face. She spun on her heels and ran. Her captor yelled at her, and when she didn’t stop like he wanted, he sprinted after her.
In the midafternoon sunlight, there should have been plenty of hikers making their way through the park during their lunch break. The park was normally full of people, except when she actually needed someone to save her.
The path was empty. Not a single soul to hear her scream, not that she could when all her energy and oxygen was going into pumping her legs. Fire burned in her lungs. Stitches tore open along her sides, feeling like her insides were going to spill out. She could feel herself slowing down, could feel the momentum leaving her. She would have cried out, except there was nothing, no air, no energy. She was going to die.
“Just give me the fucking bracelet!” the guy panted, voice high pitched and shrill with his labored breaths.
“No!” Cora doubled over, wheezing. “You’re going to have to kill me.”
The guy shook his head. “What’s the matter with you, lady?”
“I’ve been wondering the same fucking thing,” came a familiar, booming voice from behind Cora.
The world spun when she did to face the newcomer. Her already thundering heart clapped with a new insistence at the sight of him, tall, dark, beautiful coming towards her with that familiar gait she loved so much.
“James.”
The phone in his hand was stuffed into his coat pocket. His gaze shifted away from the knife wielding nut job to her. It was a flick, a barely feasible once over before he went back to her companion.
Without missing a beat, or a stride, he reached behind him and unholstered the gun from the back waistband of his cargos.
He shot the guy.
The explosion ripped through the afternoon, clouding it with the stench of gunpowder and blood.
The guy dropped to the dirt, howling like a wounded animal and clutching at the clean hole just above his kneecap. Blood seeped through his fingers to gush across the pavement.
James had definitely hit an artery. And he wasn’t finished.
He aimed a second time.
Higher.
His face a mask of cold, brittle rage.
Cora leaped in his path.
“What are you doing?”
Without uttering a word, he shoved her aside and fired again.
The bullet went straight through the man’s shoulder, ripping leather, muscle and bone to embed into the ground behind him.
His scream was excruciating, no longer man or animal but a shredded howl that sent chills down her spine.
“James!” She grabbed his arm. “Stop!”
Still not speaking, he grabbed her arm and dragged her after him, leaving the guy bleeding and sobbing on the hiking trail. His wails followed them for almost a mile before it vanished into the background. The only sound then was her labored pants as she fought to keep up with him dragging her like a disobedient child back to the apartment. His fury roiled off him in thick plumes of heat that made her think of a campfire. It singed her skin, yet filled her with an icy dread that made her queasy.
“James?” she whispered.
He said nothing.
They reached the apartment much faster than she anticipated. He hauled her up the stairs and straight into the living room.
She thought he’d toss her on the sofa and start screaming at her. She wished he would scream, yell, rant, rave, throw something. His eerie silence, the rabid and violent rage swelling off him was so much worse.
So much more terrifying.
“James?” she tried again, her voice a tiny squeak slathered in fear.
He grabbed her in powerful hands and whipped her around. The momentum stole what little air she could suck in just before it was torn out by the punch of something solid coming up against her abdomen.
The armrest on the sofa bent her in two. The weight of her body pinned her arms beneath her, tangled and restricted by the bulk of her coat. Her nose brushed the velvet cushion. Her toes barely brushed the floor. She was restrained without anything actually restraining her. She gasped as the blood rushed to her face.
Her sweats were torn open. The material was forced down around her ankles. She tried to protest as cold air licked exposed skin, but it was nothing compared to the burning slap of something long and wooden kissing her cheek. The first one, she had no time to react, no time to process. The stinging pain was overshadowed by shock.
But the second one...
Holy fuck the second one burned. It ripped skin. It seared with a biting gnaw that could never be explained. The third one made her scream and thrash uselessly with no escape. By the tenth one, she was sobbing. He was no longer even aiming for her ass, but had started on the backs of her thighs. Her skin radiated heat as though he’d lit her on fire. It blazed with a pain she couldn’t even see straight.
At fifteen, he stopped. But it didn’t matter. All she wanted to do was curl up in the corner and die.
Instead, hands fisted in her coat and she was lifted gently. He lowered her face down on the sofa and left her there. She heard his boots fading somewhere into the distance, heard him leaving. Then silence.
The welts on her ass had risen to an intensity of pain that prickled like a third degree burn. All she wanted to do was scream, but all she could do was cry into folded arms.
Something ice cold draped over her ass. The conflicting sensations made her jump.
He’d draped a dishrag over her wounds and placed bags of peas overtop. Nothing was offered for her thighs.
Then he took a seat across from h
er in an armchair and said nothing. He barely moved. His pale eyes bore into hers, still bright with livid intensity. On the arms, his fingers curled and uncurled absently.
Between them on the coffee table, one of her wooden stirring spoons from the kitchen lay taunting her on the glass. Her parents had never spanked her, not even a swat on the butt as a child. They’d sure as hell never used a spoon.
Cora hiccupped.
The sound seemed to stir him. His gaze flicked away from her to something across the room.
Neither of them uttered a word for what felt like hours.
He broke it.
“What were you thinking?”
Cora’s wet lashes lifted until she could see him over the bend in her arm. She didn’t speak. He didn’t seem to need her to.
“Do you have any idea what could have happened to you?” Silver flames sparked in her direction. “You could have broken your neck climbing down that death trap. You could have been captured. You could have gotten lost or hurt. You could have been stabbed over a fucking bracelet.” Anger boiled in his voice, growing in intensity with every word he chewed out through clenched teeth. “Why wouldn’t you give it to him? Why would you choose to be killed, even encouraging him to do it over something I can get a thousand of for you?”
Because it’s mine, she wanted to whisper, but found no energy to summon the words.
“Do you have any idea how fucking scared I was thinking I might not get to you in time, that I might lose you over a fucking bracelet? A worthless piece of fucking metal. Does it really mean that much to you?”
“Yes,” she whispered, the single words no more than a numb movement of her lips.
James’s jaw flexed. His fingers twisted into fists on the armrests.
“Well, it means nothing to me,” he bit out. “Not a fucking thing without you. Nothing does.”
She peered across the distance at him, through the dim light shadowing the room, through the steady leak of tears she couldn’t stop, to where he sat staring at her, no longer with ferocity, but ... terror. Fear. So much fear it nearly destroyed her.
“I’m sorry,” she murmured.
James closed his eyes, switching off their burning glow and casting her into darkness. Their absence cut some invisible cord inside her and she dissolved into a new river of tears. The same two words rotated over and over again in between gasping pants that ripped up her insides. But she couldn’t stop.
The cushions dipped and she found herself encased in his arms, smothered into his chest. His fingers curled into her hair and he gripped her to him with an urgency that left fresh bruises. His full length aligned alongside hers in a solid cocoon of strength and heat.
“You’re going to be the end of me, sweetheart,” he murmured into the top of her head. “I don’t even know that I care anymore.”
Something about those words had her fingers tightening in the folds of his sweater, as if worried he might pull away and leave her abandoned there alone.
“Don’t leave,” she pleaded in a tiny, helpless voice that sounded nothing like her. Even to her own ears it rang with vulnerability and an insecurity the normal her would never have willingly revealed.
Not to him.
Not to anyone.
He kissed her temple. “Not going anywhere.”
A heavy curtain of dusk layered the apartment when Cora opened her eyes again. It shimmered around the sofa, in the air like tiny speckles of dust in the light. It settled on intertwined limbs closed together in a fierce embrace and stung her eyes.
Cora blinked to chase away the burn, but the sensation persisted, following her from dream to reality and the sweltering heat dampening her skin with sweat.
She gasped, trying not to shift too much and wake James. She just needed to shake off her coat and shoes, maybe pull her pants up. They’d both fallen asleep still fully clad in all their outside clothes and the bulk made leaving the confines of his encirclement a task.
But that wasn’t the thing that had woken her.
There was a smell, an odd odor that was making her head hurt and her lungs ache.
“James?”
He jerked awake to the sound of her quiet murmur. His arms tightened around her instinctively as he squinted at the darkness pooling around them.
“What?”
Cora lifted her head from its nestled place against the warm flesh of his neck. “Something’s wrong.”
He pushed upright into a sitting position and glanced around the room. The movement sent her off him onto two bags of defrosted, mushy peas. But she didn’t notice.
Nothing was out of place.
Even the silence was familiar.
But the air was different.
It was thicker.
Hotter.
It seemed to shimmer slightly.
James raised his chin, the familiar movements of a wolf picking up a scent. Dark brows furrowed over narrowed, searching eyes. He bent and placed a flat palm on the floorboards between his feet.
“Fuck.” He bolted upright and grabbed her. “We need to get out of here.”
She didn’t ask. She allowed herself to be pulled up and made to stand while he dragged her sweats back around her hips. Her hand was captured in a crushing grip that would have made her wince, except she held his tighter.
Together, they sprinted for the front door. James wrenched it open.
Blinding heat wafted up at them in a blinding rush of leaping flames that lashed at their faces. It blazed in a frenzy of hot orange, devouring the stairs and working its way along the walls.
Cora screamed, but James had already shoved her back with one arm. The other heaved his entire weight against the barricade, slamming it closed and keeping the angry demons at bay.
Temporarily.
He spun with her wrist still caught in his hand. His gaze scanned her apartment, searching for another way out.
“We’re trapped,” she gasped.
James’s fingers tightened around her. “No. Not yet. Come on.”
He dragged her into the bedroom. The door was sealed behind them, adding another blockade between them and the inferno giving chase.
She realized what he was doing even before he hauled her to the window and forced the glass open. The fire escape loomed below the sill, a beckoning mockery of a true escape. But it was all they had.
“I’m going to go down first,” he told her, one leg already tossed over. “I want you right behind me, understand? Cora.” He was in front of her when she couldn’t shake herself to answer right away. His unnaturally warm palms cupped her cheeks. “Did you hear me?”
He was right, of course.
They needed to get out and the only other exit in the place was through that window. Somewhere, at the back of her mind, she heard her uncle’s voice insisting she needed a better, safer escape route beyond the front door and fire escape, but that had meant destroying the building’s historic façade. She’d already remodeled so much of it, carving the dusty storage into her little sliver of home. She was certainly regretting that now.
“Cora.” James shook her gently.
The room was getting hot. The fire from below had begun to eat away at the floorboards. Smoke coiled from between the planks, draining the room of breathable air.
She nodded quickly. “Right behind you,” she mimicked.
“Good girl.” He pressed a kiss to her forehead. “Right behind me, okay?”
Again, she nodded, and stepped back when he hoisted his leg back over. He hesitated. His head turned back to her, apprehension burning.
“Right behind you,” she promised.
A muscle twitched along his jaw, but he levied his weight onto the fire escape and made his way downward.
It seemed much more precocious in the dark, Cora noted. The bottom was a vast void of black broken by glimmers of wet asphalt. She wasn’t sure she could find her way down without some semblance of light. A hindrance James had no problem with when he hit the bottom, barely making a scuff
le.
“Cora!”
His low hiss carried up to her, jolting her from her paralysis and the numbing disorientation of being awakened to her apartment going up in flames. She gripped the ledge and struggled to lift her leg over, but her earlier punishment hinder all possibilities. The agitated flesh screamed in protest, bringing tears to her eyes before she managed to vault herself into the frigid air.
She made her way down gingerly, gripping tight to the rusted rungs slick and cold with early morning dew. At the bottom, James’s hands were there, gripping her hips and drawing her safely to the ground.
From within, liquor bottles popped, a succession of rapid fire that reminded her of bullets leaving the chamber of a gun. Beams crashed. Windows shattered. The cacophony of destruction roared through the night, a soul crippling cry of her whole life collapsing around her.
“No!” Cora moaned as everything she’d ever built went up in flames.
“Come on, sweetheart.”
James dragged her away from the building.
Even from blocks away, there was no missing the hot, liquid gold leaping in the darkness in a flurry of joy. Tunnels of black smoke columned into the night sky, churning the navy blue into a slate gray and soaking the air, filling it with the stench of things burning, wood, plastic, fabric.
Everything she owned and cherished.
In the distance, sirens wailed, the sound of approaching rescue, but James never stopped. He gripped her with one hand, a bruising force crushing her fingers, and his gun in the other. His strides were wide, clipped, too long for her short ones to keep in time with. Every one lunge from him was four scurried scrambles from her. But she knew he wouldn’t stop. He was a man on a mission and that mission was getting her as far away from that place as possible.
They rounded several corners, went down a dozen streets, and passed no one. The wee hours of the AM had most normal people confined to their beds. It was probably just as well, she mused, lungs aching. The way they were running, someone might have suspected them of robbing a bank.
Blood Script Page 31
