Page 140 of Criminally Yours

His heart hammered in his chest, and panic clawed his throat as he bolted down the street.

Adrenaline honed his focus, even as red fuzzed at the edges of his vision.

He couldn’t lose Millie now.

CHAPTER 60

Millie

Millie stared at the path leading up the cliff. Rocky shards stuck out in haphazard ways, and at every angle, she imagined a painful and bloody death.

Beside her, Randolph paced, throwing his hands in the air as he talked about Hugo ruining his plans. “He’s as thick as pig shit. He forced me to beat him as a child. Sometimes, I locked him in a cupboard.” He cackled. “He’s going to hate his jail cell.”

She remembered Strike giving her brother a future and getting him into rehab. A sob rose in her throat, but she pushed it down.

She must give herself a chance to get back to Strike.

“I have to exist around idiots. Strike doesn’t like me. He refused to be my bodyguard on foreign trips. In South Africa, he nearly walked in on me paying a kid for drugs. I told him the lad had tried to mug me. So fucking gullible.”

“You’re clever,” she said, fiddling with the things in her pocket. All she had was the squidgy stress ball and a broken fidget tool in her royal jumper. She hadn’t worn this hoodie since the shooting at the police station.

She dug the sharper edge of the fidget tool into the stress ball. The ball contained a weird foam, like a combination of flour mixed with water and something else. If she could make a hole in the rubber, she could shove the weird, gloopy concoction in his face. It wasn’t toxic, but it would delay him. And if she was lucky, it would go in his mouth and he’d suffocate on it.

“You’ve climbed the ladder in the government.”

He leaned back. There were flashes of the man she’d seen lead political debates. “You have no idea. I’ve spun stories about drugs and criminals for years. And offshore, I’ve got money to live off. I was this close to being Prime Minister.”

He held his shaking finger and thumb millimetres from her face. She continued to work the toy into the rubber, trying not to cheer when she felt it give.

Slowly, she ran her thumb over the ball, her heart hammering. The innards oozed out.

“Just tell me one thing,” she said, lowering her voice as the increasingly aggressive wind howled in her face. Randolph leaned closer. With a snap of her wrist, she grabbed his shirt collar with one hand and yanked the ball from her pocket. Triumphantly, she squeezed the wet foam concoction directly in his eyes. “Why don’t you go fuck yourself?”

She darted up the hill, but rain fell in thick drops, dogging her progress. Her dragging feet were soaked from where seawater sloshed through her trainers.

Waves bashed the rocks below the cliff, and the wind roared around her.

Her knees were sore from her fall at Randolph’s house the day before, but she forced herself to keep moving.

Terror laced through her veins as she snagged her foot on a rock.

Her eyes flicked back and forth between the path and theedge.

Randolph shouted at her, roaring his rage. He was faster than her, but she was logical.

The cliff edge jutted in, and she nearly fell. She held her glasses against her face, terrified that one trip and she’d lose them into the water.

Bushes and small bumps were in front of her. She could hide behind something and wait. But then there was the town.

In her panic, decisions crowded her mind, making it impossible to decipher her choices.

The wind pushed her toward the edge.

Heavy rain clouded her vision as she fought the elements.

She knew not to look behind her, yet Randolph’s sudden silence offered her hope he’d fallen.

She swiped a glance over her shoulder.