Page 122 of Gone Tonight
“This is who you are, Ava. This is who you’ve always been.”
I shake off his words. I cannot let him overpower me psychologically.
I lunge at him again. But this time, my knife meets air as he feints to the side and grabs my wrist with one hand. His grip is so powerful that my hand feels immobilized. I hold on to the knife as long as I can, but when he shakes my wrist, it slips from my fingers and clatters to the pavement.
James kicks it away as he draws me to him, his wounded arm snaking around me. He crushes me against his body.
Then he leans down and kisses me, his mouth greedily covering mine.
I bite down hard on his lip. He pulls back his head and smiles.
“That’s my girl,” he whispers.
Then he headbutts me.
My legs give way and I fall back on the pavement, my ears ringing. Pain crescendos through my body. James straddles me, his knees on either side of my rib cage, his hands tightening around my throat.
“Look up at the stars, Ava. They’re still our stars.”
I twist and thrash, trying to knock him off, but I’m no match for his weight and power. My lungs are burning.
I see a blue vein bulging in James’s neck as he increases the pressure. White bursts of light explode in front of my eyes.
I stretch out my arms and feel around on the cold asphalt, trying in vain to touch the gun or knife. Then I arch up desperately, putting all of my strength into my back, but I can’t even shift James off-balance.
My lungs scream for air. Strength ebbs out of my body. I have almost no fight left.
James is staring deeply into my eyes. He must want to watch the life drain out of them.
But I no longer see James.
Instead, I see Catherine as a baby, sleeping in my arms, her dark lashes resting on her cheeks, her pudgy hand wrapped trustingly around my pinky. I see her as a five-year-old, sitting on a stool and coloring while I close up at work. I see her as a ten-year-old, running through a grassy park, the red-and-white-striped kite I bought at the Dollar Store sailing through the air behind her.
Then I see Catherine rise up like a dark shadow behind James.
She’s clenching a thick white pen in her fist. She jabs it into the vein in James’s neck, then silently dances backward and disappears from view.
James jerks his head to the side in an annoyed gesture, as if he has been bitten by a mosquito.
He reaches up with one hand to touch the spot but keeps his other hand pressing down on my neck.
I frantically suck in a sip of air.
James shakes his head and wraps his hand back around my neck. But now the pressure he exerts is weaker.
Catherine appears out of the darkness a second later, jabbing at James’s neck again. This time he swings an arm back as she makes contact, catching her in the side, sending her flying onto the hard pavement.
James shakes his head again.
“What did you do to me?” he whispers.
He winces, then slowly blinks a few times.
I claw at James’s arm, digging my nails into the cut I inflicted with the knife.
His upper half slumps to the side, as if he’s lost control over his limbs. His hands fall away from my neck.
I desperately suck in oxygen, hyperventilating. The blackness slowly recedes from the corners of my vision.
