Page 43 of Secrets in the Dark
Someone slid behind her.
Someone who warned, “There’s a knife in your ribs, my lovely!”
Her first thought wasn’t fear; she was furious with herself. Furious that she hadn’t heard or felt the man behind her.
But she could feel the knife.
“Really?” she asked. “How clever of you. Stab me in a cemetery. No one will notice? I’m an FBI agent on special international assignment. Do you think this is smart?”
“You were after me!”
“To question you. And my team knows that I’m here—”
“Yeah, yeah. And that fellow is with you, but you think you’re so tough. He’s not here now, is he? He’s looking for me in the wrong place. You two gambled and lost.”
“We don’t gamble. But I can promise you this—stab me here and Special Agent Mason Carter will find you within minutes.”
“I’m not leaving you here. You’re going to walk with me to my car.”
“You think?” she asked.
“You can’t feel the knife?”
“Yes, I know the feel of a knife.”
He started to laugh. “You’ve had a lot of knives in you, have you? Well, I can see that. You are a beautiful woman, but...what a bitch. Of course, most of you are bitches. Or worse. I could tell you what you really are, but that would rather ruin things.”
“Why? What do you intend?”
“You’re just going to have to wait and see. And do what I say, of course. Because everyone is the same. Everyone wants to survive. So, you’ll do what I order you to do, thinking that if you do, you’ll get the chance to escape me.” He leaned his face close against her neck and ear and whispered softly, “To live! To survive! You may just keep thinking that, my lovely! But you’ll obey me, and I am so, so sorry, but hope all that you might. You will die!”
Mason reached an area where the monuments and stones were low enough to allow him to see far ahead.
He’d lost the man, but then, of course, that’s why they’d split. Della would be on him. He needed to run hard to the right now, into an area that was a veritable maze of graves and funerary art. As he neared one angel, he could hear a man talking.
“We need to move. Now. Actually, it’s a shame that I can’t take the time to play with you more here and then kill you—right here! Just a murder in a cemetery. How fitting. A dead woman—among the dead. There’s little I can do to make it proper, but then you FBI people are so predictable. You thinksignatureall the time, and, well...sometimes, there are people who just need to go! Then again, maybe we’ll have some time.”
“Time with you? Wow,” Della said dryly.
Mason moved carefully and drew his gun, grateful that François Bisset had made the arrangements for their task force to be among the specialized law enforcement allowed to be armed in the United Kingdom. He came around to see who was holding Della.
But even as he did, Della was taking matters into her own hands. Mason saw first that the man had slipped silently behind her, sliding one arm around her while holding a knife against her ribs with his free hand. But even as he appeared before them, Della slammed back an elbow with strength and determination—catching the man in the ribs, possibly cracking one of them. Her would-be killer was taken entirely by surprise and was sent back a few feet, staggering in pain. Della swung around instantly—knowing that she couldn’t depend on him being down—and approached him with a leap and a sound kick that might have felled a far bigger man. He was slammed up hard against another angel.
Ironic.
Mason moved forward with his Glock aimed at the man’s chest.
“Don’t kill him—we need him!” Della cried.
“Only if I have to, you know that,” Mason said.
“I’m wounded! That bitch attacked me!” Hudson cried.
Mason stared at the man against the angel.
“Of course,” he said, shrugging to Della, “it won’t bother me in the least to blow out his kneecap and maybe his wrist—if he doesn’t drop that knife right now.”
The man stared back at him. Mason wasn’t sure if he was surprised or not that the attacker was the barman, the man that they’d just met that morning.
