Total pages in book: 114
Estimated words: 108483 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 542(@200wpm)___ 434(@250wpm)___ 362(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 108483 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 542(@200wpm)___ 434(@250wpm)___ 362(@300wpm)
“I got it,” Nixon says, his voice eager. He shifts his weapon on his shoulder. “That political show Beltway. That’s where I saw her. She was talking about her book.”
Abe tilts his head, the blue eyes narrowing with interest and speculation.
“Politics, Ms. Moon?” Abe asks, I’m sure deliberately misnaming me. “The plot does thicken.”
I wish he’d stop toying with his food and just bite so I can know what I’m dealing with. “Let him go,” I say.
Before I can draw my next breath, he grabs me by the neck, lifts me clear off the ground, and, with a few powerful strides, takes me to the edge of the road. He dangles me over the side of the mountain by one strong hand. Hundreds of feet sprawl beneath my frantically kicking legs. Lush jungle, the curvature of a rushing river with rocks like fangs jutting from the water sprawls so far below they look like game-board pieces. Breathing is impossible, not just because of the huge hand cutting off my air supply but because of the helplessness and fear scrambling up from my belly, anaerobic and nauseating.
“Stop!” Wallace shouts from the back of the truck. “You’ll drop her!”
He’s silenced. I can’t tell by what or whom, but his raised voice is swallowed in abrupt quiet.
“I don’t care if she falls,” Abe says, the cheeks of his mask lifting with a smile that infects his blue eyes with a diabolical gleam. “I’ll hold her here until she learns who’s in control or dies.”
This is power at its worst. A madman who, by loosening his fingers, could end my life, hurling me to certain death. By tightening them, he could do the same, choking the very breath from me.
He squeezes, sick pleasure flooding his bluebell eyes. The irrepressible sound of me fighting for air, for life, fills my own ears. My hands fly to his arms involuntarily, even though if he drops me, I’m dead. I can’t stop them from begging for relief from the iron manacling my neck.
I’m going to die.
The thought sprints through my head so fast I can barely catch it. I envision him dropping me, and my belly hollows out like I’m already falling.
The thick muscles of his arm bulge and strain with the effort of keeping me suspended. Despite his obvious strength, he’s struggling to hold my weight, and I feel his fingers on my neck slipping. His skin peels under my clawing nails. Tears fall over my cheeks, my body’s desperate response to the torturous grip at my throat.
My strength fails and my arms drop. Thoughts, images flood my mind. My father bent over his papers, glancing up, love in his eyes, to find me standing at his office door. Mena sprinkling sacred pollen across my cheeks and plunging me into the cold, cleansing river. Kimba and Vivienne, stretched out under spring sunshine, our laughter floating over the Amstel River.
Maxim.
Oh, God, Maxim.
“Doc.”
His name sputters over my lips on a choking moan. Sobs rack my thrashing, gasping body dangling over a fatal fall. The tangled brush of the landscape below tilts as my consciousness surrenders. Behind my eyes dawns an unlit sky, a blanket of darkness that smothers all sight and every sound. A thousand images my mind and heart have hoarded tattoo themselves behind my eyelids as they fall closed.
Meeting Maxim for the first time amid a spray of rubber bullets in the Arizona desert. Finding him again on a moonlit night in Amsterdam. Lost with him, found with him in a labyrinth of hedges, rediscovering us after years apart. A squandered decade. Will I ever get to make up for lost time? To tell him I love him? God, I love him so much, and he doesn’t even know.
And now… Now it’s too late.