Total pages in book: 32
Estimated words: 32532 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 163(@200wpm)___ 130(@250wpm)___ 108(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 32532 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 163(@200wpm)___ 130(@250wpm)___ 108(@300wpm)
No one except me.
“Stop!”
My rescuer’s voice is harsh, commanding, but my legs are already moving.
I’m not thinking as I run.
All I know is that—
“STOP!”
It’s too late to stop.
I’m already sprinting toward her, my sneakers slipping on gravel, my heart pounding so loud it drowns out everything else. I don’t have a weapon. I don’t have a plan. All I have is the desperate, stupid hope that maybe I can distract them long enough for—
Bang! Bang! Bang!
All three shots find its targets.
Bodies drop to the ground, the girl stumbles free with a sob, and then my rescuer is there, grabbing my arm hard enough to bruise, shoving both of us toward the car.
“Get in. Now.”
The girl scrambles into the back seat. I’m shoved into the front. The doors slam, the locks click, and we’re moving before I can even catch my breath.
But before we tear out of there, my rescuer turns to look at me.
And the expression on his face makes my blood turn to ice.
Cold.
Deadly.
The kind of look that promises consequences I don’t want to imagine.
“Never disobey me again.”
Four words.
That’s all.
But they land like bullets, and I find myself nodding before I can think, my voice stuck somewhere in my throat.
He holds my gaze for one more heartbeat.
Then he faces forward, and the car screams into the night.
I’m shaking. I realize this distantly, like I’m observing myself from somewhere far away. My hands are trembling in my lap, and there’s blood on my cardigan, someone else’s blood, and my heart is pounding so hard I can feel it in my teeth.
In the back seat, the girl is crying quietly. I want to turn around, to comfort her, to tell her it’s going to be okay. But I don’t know if that’s true. And I don’t think I can make my body move right now even if I wanted to.
The clock on his dashboard glows green.
3:08 AM.
Eight minutes. All of that chaos, all of that death, and it’s only been eight minutes.
I turn to thank him, the words already forming on my tongue, and that’s when he pulls off his mask.
Oh.
Gold hair. The coldest blue eyes I’ve ever seen, like shards of ice that could cut you open or freeze you to death. A jaw sharp enough to slice paper. Features so sharp and symmetrical they’d be boring to draw.
Except his wouldn’t be.
He’s as beautiful as he’s terrifying, and my brain immediately short-circuits into territory that is completely inappropriate given the circumstances. I love how his hair is like silken sunlight, his eyes remind me of skies turned into crystals, and his lips are the most kissable—I mean, smoochable, I mean—oh, stop it, Mira!
Distraction comes in handy as my rescuer blasts through the woods, and I can do is hang on for dear life as the car eats up the darkness like it was built to conquer the night. Trees blur past the windows. The world outside is nothing but shadows and speed.
The girl seated behind us starts to cry, but his hands, which look impossibly large on the steering wheel, remain remarkably steady.
“What is it?”
Since he doesn’t turn to me as he asks this—
“I...”
My rescuer must have felt my gaze on him, and my cheeks warm ever so slightly at the realization.
I...
Can’t believe you’re real?
Want to know if you’re single?
Think I’m in love?
I shake all the crazy thoughts away and manage to croak out something sensible.
“Thank you.”
To which, he responds not as sensibly...with a grunt.
Huh.
I have no idea how to decipher that. Is that a ‘you’re welcome’ grunt? An ‘I didn’t do it for you’ grunt? A ‘please stop staring at me, strange blood-covered girl’ grunt?
Jassy would know. Jassy would have already figured out his entire backstory based on the way he holds the steering wheel and the micro-expressions he probably isn’t even making because his face is about as expressive as a glacier.
But since I’m not Jassy, but just Mira who develops crushes at the most wildly inappropriate times—
“Are you...” I try again, grasping for something, anything, to ground this situation in reality. “Are you FBI? CIA? Interpol?”
“None of those.”
My courage nearly wilts at the curtness of his voice, but I tell myself to press on.
“Then—are you some kind of vigilante? Are you like those guys behind STRAKH?” I know I’m rambling, but the silence in this car is suffocating, and if I don’t fill it with something, I’m going to start thinking about all the blood I just saw, all the bodies, all the ways this night could still go wrong.
“Wait, let me guess—are you like a warrior prince like Sheikh Altair Al-Atassi? Or an antihero—”
“I am not like any of them.”
Oh, finally, an answer.
“But if I have to describe myself—”
His cold blue gaze slides to mine, just long enough for me to see something glitter in their depths.