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This couldn’t be.
“I’m saying that after I pushed him out to sea, I climbed aboard, and I strangled him, and then I dumped his body overboard.”
Blankness filled my head as everything seemed to jerk into stillness, then I kicked over into horror. He’d killed a man. Just now. A complete innocent. Was this a lie? I stared into his eyes, concerned if I looked away for a second, he would pounce.
“You’re lying.”
“The day my brother died, I ran through the crowd of demonstrators to Aden, my fellow officer, planning to, I don’t know, just stop him. My brother was curled in a puddle of blood at his feet, dead, brains spread out in a splatter. I pulled my pistol and shot Aden’s face off.
“I lost a brother, a country, a wife, and for a long while, my respect for myself, but I’ve come to terms with who I am. Killing is what I do.”
Stated so blatantly. I blinked, my thoughts running about like freaked-out mice. Truth then.
He’d killed a stranger. A fucking stranger.
A dark purpose emanated from him, and his feet moved under him, ready.
His large hands rested on his knees. The damage those could do...if he managed to seize me.
Caged and concealed behind the swayed locks of hair, his eyes lurked. The crack and rustling thump of a palm leaf falling to the sand behind him distracted him not at all. I was his only target.
I was playing a dangerous game with a dangerous man.
“Why?” I croaked. “Why today?” Black specks danced across my vision. My lips numbed. The gun seemed lost in my thick fingers.
“Because I want you.” He rose to his feet, heavy muscles sliding on arms and thighs, ominous as a dread instrument of war about to attack. “Because I will kill to keep you. I will kill a man on the bloody whisper of a suspicion to keep you. That –” He nodded at the rifle. “– an empty gun, will not stop me from taking you back.” He took one step.
All my fears crashed in.
“Stop. Stop there. It’s not empty.” My finger tightened. It couldn’t be empty. He was bluffing. I didn’t want to shoot, but he took another step then leaped for me. One, two strides. Panicked, I pulled the trigger while scrambling back, half tripping, unsure where I was aiming, the barrel swinging in little arc. Click. Nothing. I yanked the trigger madly. Nothing. Nothing.
I stumbled and my heel hit something. Just as I was on the verge of toppling head over heels, he was on me, snarling, one hand on the middle of the rifle and twisting it aside, the other hand had my throat.
“I wanted to see if you’d shoot. Three, four times, you pulled that trigger? You are in so much fokken trouble. Did you really think I’d leave it here loaded?”
Still off balance, but with both hands hanging onto the rifle as if it were a life jacket, I gaped at him.
Terror stampeded my mind.
I had to act. Had to do something. If I let him have this I was done for, his victim again. If I kept it, he was going to half kill me. Frantic, barely able to think, my fingers stayed locked on.
“Let it go. Now.” In the rumbling threat in his words, I could hear the or else like the music cue before the beast eats the teenagers in a horror film.
Something, probably that irrational terror, along with having him snarling down at me like that movie beast, made me attempt to swing the rifle around to bear on him. An empty rifle.
And fuck me, if I didn’t tear it from his hand. It was the left, hurt one, of course. I sat down abruptly.
He ripped the gun from my grasp.
I swallowed past the tightness in my throat, my eyes watering purely from the anxiety of facing him down. “I... I’m sorry, Sir. I didn’t mean to...” But I had.
His eyes narrowed, darkened to what seemed pits-of-hell level.
Doomed, was putting it mildly.
“You spoke.”
The next sorry died on my tongue.
