Page 19 of Poisoned Promise
Reese leans on the railing and gazes back at the car where Toph waits, his head bumping to whatever music he’s turned on to enjoy during his minutes of solitude. I approach the door, knock three times and wait.
Scuffling rises up from behind the door as well as a distant voice from deeper in the apartment, then the lock slides back and the door swings open with a clatter of a chain knocking against the wood.
A woman stands before me dressed in a simple pink t-shirt and light blue jeans.
Stripey sneakers cover her feet with the tongue forcing the hem of each jean leg to bunch up around her ankles.
I lift my gaze and flash her a smile.
The well-practised lie that I spin when facing civilians I need information on rests heavily on my tongue, but it doesn’t make it past my lips because the second I lock eyes with this mysterious woman, everything freezes.
I can’t breathe.
It’s like all of the air has suddenly been sucked out of the space between us and I’m left with nothing at all to breathe.
My heart lurches powerfully into my throat like I’ve been punched in the gut, and begins to beat wildly like I sprinted here all the way from my penthouse deep in the city.
I can’t breathe.
The woman before me freezes in the same half-second I do.
Her beautiful hazel eyes, warm like smoky quartz, glitter with the fire of the setting sun just behind me.
Set against fair, golden skin, they squint ever so slightly as she lifts a hand and tucks a blonde strand behind her perfectly-shaped ear.
Everything moves in slow motion; from her long blink and brush of her dark lashes against her cheek, to the shift of the strands of her warm blonde hair as they settle behind her ear, and the slow, careful shift of her plump, dark lips as they move to form words that don’t even reach me.
My heart is pounding far too loudly in my ears.
Dove.
It’s her.
How the fuck is it her?
A face I know better than my own. A smile I worshiped every day it was given to me.
She’s older now, with a few fine lines around her eyes and the cute curl between her brows that I used to tease her about has deepened.
There’s weight in her eyes now and slight creases around her lips but it’s her.
It’s fucking her.
Dove.
How is she here?
How is this fucking possible?
Pain blooms in my chest like every passing second is fracturing my ribs because my shock has nowhere else to go.
I’m staring at a ghost on the doorstep of an apartment I’ve never been to, in a part of the city that doesn’t belong to me.
But it’s her.
In the next half-second, a collision of emotions in my chest brings time back to life again. Hot anger fights for space with shock and unbelievable pain. The woman I mourned, the woman whose death fueled the last fifteen years of my life, is alive.
“Hi,” she says, and her voice stabs right through me like the slice of a blade. “Can I help you? You’re not the pizza guy, right?”
