Page 10 of The Rook’s Obsession

I buckle. My knee hits the floor, and I hear myself make a sound somewhere between a grunt and a roar. She’s already moving, going for the desk, for her weapons. If she reaches them, this is over.

I force my eyes open. Everything is a blurred, watery mess, but I can see enough. The shape of her lunging for the gun gets me off my good leg so I can hit her at the waist. We go down together, hard, knocking the desk chair sideways when we crash against it. She fights me like a cornered animal, all elbows and knees, the heel of her palm aimed at my throat.

She’s vicious. She’s efficient. She’s been trained to kill, and she’s trying like hell now.

But I’m bigger, and size matters. In pain or not, blind or not, I’ve been fighting since I could walk, and I outweigh her by eighty pounds. I pin her wrist to the floor, throw my weight across her hips to stop her legs, and use my forearm across her collarbone to hold her down. Her teeth are bared as she bucks and twists underneath me. For a second, I think she’s actually going to bite me.

“Stop,” I urge through gritted teeth. My thigh is on fire, and I can feel wetness soaking through the bandage, meaning she’s popped at least a couple of stitches. “Stop fighting, goddammit.”

“Get off me,” she snarls, bucking her hips.

“Not until you stop.”

She thrashes one more time, hard enough to almost throw me off, then goes still. She isn’t calm—every muscle in her body is coiled and ready to strike the moment I let her up—but she’s still. Waiting like a snake, ready to strike.

“I will let you up,” I agree, “if you stop trying to kill me.”

“No promises.”

In spite of the burning eyes and the bleeding leg, and the fact that I’m pinning down a trained assassin who would very much like to end my life, I almost laugh. The response is so Laura. Defiant to the bone, even when she’s obviously outmatched.

I walk her back to the bed, where the handcuff dangles nearby. It takes a few seconds of calculation, but I figure it out, letting my weight do the work of pinning her to the floor while I use both hands to cuff her wrist again. Only then do I let her up. She sits on the bed with her back to the wall, her cuffed wrist resting in her lap, watching me limp to the bathroom to rinse my eyes and check the damage to my leg.

Two of the stitches tore. It’s not ideal, but it’s not a catastrophe either. I clean the wound, retape it, and rinse my eyes roughly a hundred times before they finally feel somewhat normal again. One look in the mirror shows how bloodshot and swollen they are. I’m going to feel that for a while.

When I come back out, she’s where I left her, still watching me. Her expression has changed. There’s less fury to it now, more of something I can’t quite read. Maybe it’s respect. Maybe it’s the grudging acknowledgment that I can take a hit and keep swinging.

“You fight dirty,” I tell her.

“I fight to win.”

“Fair enough.” I bite back a wince as I lower myself into the chair, and I look at her. She looks back. The silence between us is thick and electric. It feels like we’re back in our first encounter, waiting for the other to make a move.

“So,” she finally says. “What now?”

I hold her gaze. My eyes are still burning. My leg is throbbing. I’m tired as hell, I’m bleeding again, and I’m sitting across from a woman who’s tried to kill me twice in the space of three days. She’s a woman I’ve loved for almost half my life. A woman who doesn’t remember what we were to each other.

There’s only one answer to her question.

“I’m taking you home.”

IVY

I hear the water running in the bathroom. He went back in there a while ago, after letting me think over the whole “going home” thing, as if there’s anything to think about, like he’s giving me any say in this.

So that’s the next step in his plan. Abducting me.

At least I have a minute to think now. Maybe the first real minute I’ve had since waking up cuffed to this damn bed like his prisoner. How did I let this happen?

I flex my fingers around the metal of the cuff to test it for maybe the twentieth time since I woke up. Solid. The headboard is strong, too. It doesn’t give when I pull on it. He planned for this. He planned for me, which means he’s been thinking about this from the beginning. He wouldn’t have handcuffed me to the headboard if he didn’t know it was strong enough to hold.

That should worry me more than it does. What worries me instead is the thing I can’t stop going over in my head. It’s been nagging at me since he caught me from behind and put me down with a needle instead of a bullet.

He could’ve killed me. He didn’t.

I replay it in my head the way I replay every encounter, breaking it down into components. The grab from behind. The arm around my waist. The needle in my neck.

At every step, he had the option to use lethal force. At every step, he chose not to.