The club’s heavy pulse dissolved in screams. Blurs of people scattered and fled. Another gunshot, and another. They grew louder, getting closer, and Anna could only hope she had her skirt on straight. Her mind couldn’t process the gunman, even if her racing heart betrayed fear colder than anything she’d ever felt. Time itself felt like an oddity, a sore on the face of reality.
“Charity!” she screamed over the crowd. “Charity!”
“No time.” Her dance partner snatched her by the arm and dragged her toward a door she had never seen before. Anna tripped over her feet to follow him, her pulse buzzing and mind spiraling down a corridor lined with questions. He’d known her name. Oh God, he’d known her name. Now he led her under the stairs and through a sea of panicked arms and legs.
Lightning fired from a gun no one saw.
At last, Anna sensed the effects of fight or flight bursting under her veins, and her instincts always chose fight. Ten years of kickboxing flooded to the surface, and before she allowed time for another thought, her leg bent upward and connected swiftly with her captor’s gut, giving her the chance to wrench her arm free and bolt hard in the other direction.“Charity!”
“Anna!”
The voice didn’t belong to Charity. Anna’s heart jumped but she didn’t turn around. God, every time she allowed her defenses down, something terrible happened. If it wasn’t getting tossed out of her first boyfriend’s dorm after giving him her virginity, only to suffer the humiliating consequences of having been a conquest of a fraternity pledge, it was this: animal magnetism shared with a stranger. A stranger who knew her name, who had touched her in ways she hadn’t allowed herself to be touched in years with nothing more than a wink and a smile. She didn’t know what had gotten into her, only knew she would have let him do anything.
Anna kept moving, eyes frantically searching for her friend. It took hearing her name in another voice to freeze her tracks. It didn’t sound like her stranger. It sounded like someone else altogether. A new stranger with a shiny gun she suddenly found aimed between her eyes.
Flight or fight kicked in again, but this time both responses stirred, clashed, cancelled each other out and rendered her motionless. “Oh God,” she whispered.
“Anna!” That was her stranger screaming. She looked over her shoulder in time to see his dangerous eyes and a gun in his hand, and the night’s weirdness took a nosedive into the downright bizarre.Oh God. This had to be a nightmare.
“Hit the ground!”Anna dropped to the floor, flattening herself against cold, dusty concrete, the air above her exploding. She had no idea how long the gunfire blasted, but at the first reprieve she wasted no time leaping to her feet again. A cold male gasp met the silence, and she knew, somehow, its owner was not her stranger, rather the other gun-wielding maniac. Good. In these instances, she always preferred the devil she knew.
Her stranger found her immediately, jerking her hand with his. She didn’t want to consider how her skin sizzled at the touch. Chalk that up to the non-reality. She usually didn’t feel too big on guys who carried guns or ones who knew her name without needing to be told.
Anna managed to find her voice. “Is this the part where you say, ‘come with me if you want to live’?”
He offered a flat grin. “Wouldn’t think of it.”
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