Page 52 of Safari Murder Party
He pressed his hand against Waylon’s chest, but Waylon flexed his fingers back until Other Brian pleaded for mercy with shallow breaths. Mercy Waylon gave him, whether he deserved it or not. Other Brian wilted, cradling his hand, and Waylon stepped over him. “Sorry if I wasn’t clear. I said, get away from her.”
“Come any closer, and I shoot,” Brian seethed.
He pressed the gun tighter against Fletcher’s chest. It would have been plenty to make a girl nauseated on its own, but combining that with trying to avoid looking at the way his eyelid flopped around aimlessly without an eyeball to protect really put the whammy on Fletcher’s digestive system.
Thankfully, Waylon halted. She exhaled with gratitude. All he had to do was stop moving, and she was ready to sing his praises. The bar for men was so low.
“You really don’t have to do this,” Fletcher said to Brian’s forehead. She couldn’t convince herself to look into his eye. “You said it yourself. Bertram wanted me alive. If you kill me, why wouldn’t he kill you two right after?”
Brian glared, uncompromising. “Because the team would never hit our CTR goals without us.”
“News flash, buddy,” Waylon said. “If you’re gone, the company will just hire another naive new grad they can pay less and work more.”
Other Brian, from his heap on the floor, whined, “That’s not true. We’re supposed to scale our team soon. I talked to Molly about it already.”
“We camehereto get promoted to hiring managers,” Brian said.
“And how’s that going for you?” Fletcher asked.
Brian crushed the tip of the gun against her sternum, hard enough to bruise. “That’s enough out of both of you.”
He was going to shoot her, that much was clear. Acting on instinct and shaky adrenaline, Fletcher pushed her palms flat against the barrel, straining against the metal to point it up and up and up. Brian’s finger, heavy on the trigger, pulled.
The shot zipped toward the ceiling. Speared through the chandelier. Glass shattered around them, raining sparkling crystals. Lights twinkled. The chandelier swayed uneasily—a creak, a groan.
Then she saw it: the link the dart broke on its way up. A sliver of delicate chain, precariously near the top, had been severed. The light fixture didn’t stand a chance.
Suddenly, something smacked into Fletcher’s chest. Not something. Someone. Waylon. He tackled her, arms wrapping around her torso. Her pith helmet flew off, somewhere in the vicinity of the fireplace. But instead of slamming her head against the ground and smashing all of her bones beneath the wide expanse of his chest, Waylon pivoted mid-fall, rotating so that she landed on him.
For a second, maybe two, they stared at each other. Chests heaving. The smell of mint and tobacco on his breath, summer grape onhers. His eyes swirled the same shade as the seas around Lydell, like his birthright was etched into his DNA.
The kind of details a person noticed right before she got crushed to death by a light fixture. When time slowed down and your seconds stretched like saltwater taffy, capturing every last sweet memory.
Of course, Waylon would be hers. Irritating her into the afterlife.
The crash of the chandelier, crystals breaking into smithereens, brought Fletcher back to reality. One that did not and would not ever involve dissecting the color of Waylon’s eyes, because she wasn’t dead.
She wasn’t dead. She was—
Touching Waylon. Everywhere. A knee slotting between his legs. His arms banding around her waist. Their hearts beating out of sync, their lungs out of rhythm.
The sudden knowledge of all the ways their bodies pressed together put Fletcher at serious risk of spontaneous combustion.
She heaved herself upright. Standing, she felt each step crunch with cut glass. A puddle of dark blood inched toward her heels. Dim without the chandelier, the room had lost its former charm. It took her vision a few blinks to adjust.
All that ornate crystal easily weighed a hundred pounds, and Brian hadn’t moved in time. His body crumpled beneath the fixture, too still.
“Oh shit.” Other Brian paled. Whether that was from the shock or the blood loss, Fletcher couldn’t tell.
She and Waylon moved toward the door, but unfortunately, they’d been so distracted by trying not to die, neither of them noticed the commotion had drawn an audience.
“What do we have here?” Bertram’s baritone drove a stake of dread through Fletcher’s chest.
The SVP of Marketing waddled into the study, vision glazed red. He was a forty-eight-year-old unmarried marketing exec, but the way his face morphed with calibrated ire was more Trained Assassin than Big SEO Nerd. (Although his striped tie and boring button-down screameddesk job.)
Behind him stalked Deepti. Clothed, blessedly. Whatever alliance they’d struck, Fletcher doubted it would last any longer than Deepti’s other flings. The CFO was nothing if not efficient. She got what she wanted and cut her losses.
Either way, Deepti planted her feet in front of the door, holding her ground and also a Taser.
