Page 10 of Shadow Strike
And then her stomach growled, reminding her she hadn’t eaten anything since breakfast.She heaved the garbage bag into the dumpster, dusted her hands on her jeans, and turned toward her car.
It sat under the single working light at the far end of the lot.She’d been meaning to get the other two bulbs replaced for a month, which was one more item on a list that kept growing faster than she could work through it.
She was fishing in her purse for her keys when the arm came around her from behind.
It happened fast.One second, she was alone, and the next, she was off the ground, her back slammed against a chest that felt like a wall.The arm locked across her collarbone, squeezing.Her purse hit the ground.Her keys skidded across the asphalt.
“Easy,” a voice said, close to her ear.Low, male, deliberate.The voice of someone who’d done this before.“Stop moving, and this goes quick.”
She stopped moving for approximately one second, and then she drove her elbow back as hard as she could into his ribs.
He grunted, but his grip only tightened.
She stomped down on his instep, threw her head back toward his face, got a handful of the arm across her chest, and dug her nails in.He cursed, low and vicious, and shifted his grip from her collarbone to her throat.
“I said stop.”
The pressure on her throat was immediate and terrifying in a way that her brain catalogued even as the rest of her kept fighting.She clawed at his forearm.Kicked backward.Got enough of a connection with his shin to earn another curse, but not enough to matter.
He was too big.She’d known it the moment he lifted her.She was five-six, fit, and fighting as hard as she knew how, but it wasn’t enough.That knowledge arrived with a cold clarity that was worse than the fear.
“Here’s how this works.”He wasn’t even breathing hard.“You’ve got until Friday to have the money ready.Eight hundred, cash, in an envelope for me to pick up at the back door at nine p.m.You do that, nothing happens to you or your mother.”
Mom.
“You—” she started.
He tightened his grip, and the words cut off.The world went narrow and gray at the edges.
Her fingers found skin, found the edge of something—a jacket collar, a chain—and yanked.He grunted, and his grip shifted just enough that she got half a breath.
“Be a shame if something happened to a nice lady like your mom,” he said.
Regan saw red.She got her chin down and bit his forearm.
He swore, loudly this time, and the grip loosened even more.She sucked in air and screamed.
The arm came back to her throat harder than before.She was off the ground again, and the gray at the edges came back.She didn’t stop fighting, though, her hands scrabbling at his forearm, legs kicking.
The stars blurred.
Mom.
She thought of her mother asleep in the dark house up on the hill, no idea that this was happening.She had no idea that this was where Regan’s months of investigation, her stubborn refusal to pay, and her absolute certainty that she could handle it had landed them both.
I’m sorry.I’m so sorry.I should have?—
She heard a man’s voice—not her attacker’s—and a solid thud.Her attacker released her, but as she fell, the world went black.
CHAPTERFOUR
Shadow Point Security Compound
He’d donehis field assessment in the truck.
Airway clear.Pulse fast, but present.No obvious head trauma, no blood.Throat red and already bruising along the right side where the attacker’s grip had been tightest.
Regan hadn’t regained consciousness yet, which he didn’t like, but her breathing was steady.Her color was off, but in the way of someone whose blood sugar had bottomed out rather than someone whose brain had been deprived of oxygen for any meaningful length of time.
