Page 4 of Marked By the Devil

You’ll never get away.

2

WREN

Rough bricks scraped my skin as I edged through a narrow part of the alley. Avoiding the dumpster to my left that reeked of decaying filth, I hugged the wall and inched along. The course exterior of the building made my skin raw. My hair snagged on the corners of the bare brickwork, but I ignored the pain. I dismissed the agony.

Fickle, minor discomforts didn’t matter. They couldn’t. Not when that man was stalking me through the city.

I dared to look over my shoulder as I cut through this slimmer side of the dumpster next to the wall.

Fuck.

He was still there, following me.

I didn’t need to look over my shoulder and check.

I felt it.

I felt the searing pressure of his attention on me.

Scampering through the alley like this, I couldn’t have been more like a pathetic little mouse, hurrying and trying to be as small as possible to slip away.

But it didn’t matter if I ran ahead. It didn’t make a difference if I hid and twisted around objects in this crappy alley of garbage chutes, dumpsters, and stacked construction apparatuses. Piles of empty pallets weren’t going to offer me camouflage to save me.

He’s still there.

Like he had a homing device, a magnetic tether to me, that dark, tall shadow of a man stayed on my heels.

I forced a hard swallow, trying my damnedest not to panic, not to let the fear claw up my throat and literally choke me into some locked-down status of immobility.

I had to stay running and pray I could find some avenue to rush down and lose him.

Staying still seemed stupid. The fight-or-flight instinct in me screamed at me to sprint out of here. But in the back of my mind, that nagging, insistent voice of anger bubbled up and distracted me.

That wasn’t supposed to happen.

That it did meant something far more than my having a shitty night of luck in the city where Lady Luck was supposed to rule supreme.

I’d just been transferred to the Las Vegas department for the FBI. My first day was only two days ago. Tonight was intended to be my foray into doing serious detective work.

A simple stakeout, my ass.

My supervisor was either full of shit or oblivious. Agent Tony Smithson had explained this assignment like it was a piece of cake. Nothing hard. Just a run-of-the-mill exercise of keeping an eye on what the members of that financial meeting had to do and say.

I tripped over a strip of loose gravel, left there from whatever utility project had happened last. Turning back to look over my shoulder cost me precious seconds that I didn’t have to lose, but I caught myself against the unforgiving scrape of the wall again.

Shit. That burns.

I had to focus. I had to get a hold of this terror clutching at me. And I had to save the self-recrimination and what the hell was that about? kind of self-reflection for later.

All I had to do now was evade this huge man following me, someone who had taken up pursuit as soon as that shot was fired.

Well, one of the shots.

I’d noticed the activity down on the street. Those Mafia men were coming in, and I saw the street performer chick fall back against the wall, her face a bloody mess. It clicked instantly that a sniper from across the alleyway had taken a shot at them, but by the time I’d lifted my face to peer at where the sniper was, another shot had been fired.

At me.