Page 148 of Yours to Keep
The man turns at the sound of us hitting the beach. His eyes widen. For the first time since I started hunting him, Adrian looks surprised.
Good.I hope he’s fucking terrified. The hunter has become the hunted, and I know he can feel it. Death is coming for him.
“DROP THE FUCKING WEAPON!” Deck roars, his gun raised. “NOW!”
He doesn’t. But his hand shifts, and the gun swings toward Eli. Toward the man I love, frozen in the sand, exhausted, barely holding himself together.
Everything inside me fractures.
“NO!” The scream rips out of me.
Adrian smiles, and he pulls the trigger.
The second shot cracks through the night.
Eli flinches.
The bullet tears into the sand beside him. A deliberate miss. He fuckingmissed.
For half a second, relief tries to rise in me.
Then I see Adrian’s face. And I understand. This isn’t hesitation or mercy. This is pure control.
A fucking game.
He wants Eli to feel it. To know exactly how close it was. To sit in the fear of the next shot, waiting, breaking under the possibility of it. The final mind fuck.
My stomach twists as clarity locks in. He isn’t trying to kill him yet; No, he wants to break him first. But another truth hits harder, one Adrian knows I’m fully aware of: he only needs one more pull of the trigger, and that one bullet will find Eli.
And that thought nearly destroys me.
But Eli is still there. Still kneeling. Still trapped in a nightmare he fought too hard to escape. And Adrian is standing over him, playing with his life as though it belongs to him.
Not anymore.
Eli is mine.
And Adrian is about to learn what happens when you touch what’s mine.
* * *
“This fucker is playing with us,” Deck says beside me, his voice deadly quiet as we move toward the two men.
Deck is too far for a clean shot. He knows it, I know it, but he raises his gun anyway. I don’t hear the shot he takes, but Iknow it’s a warning, enough to pull Adrian’s attention off Eli for a second.
I watch Adrian slowly turn his head toward us, the gun still trained on Eli. Eli has his back to me, but the tremor in his body guts me. He’s been holding himself together with nothing but terror and willpower.
We keep moving. Closing the distance. Step by step.
“DROP IT!” Deck calls out.
We don’t slow. We don’t stop. Each step gives Deck a better angle, a better chance.
Adrian takes a step back, then turns again toward Eli, the gun still raised, still locked on him as if nothing else exists.
Then he laughs, the sound wrong and unhinged, broken around the edges. “You don’t understand!”
We keep moving.
