Page 25 of It Runs in the Family

I picked up my phone, keeping my gaze on my cousin. “I’ve gotta go.”

“I still have fifty seconds left,” he protested.

Ignoring him, I grabbed my phone and bolted from the table, running after her. She was with a guy in a black suit and dark hair, but his back was to me, and I couldn’t see his face.

“Selena!” I shouted, but my voice got swallowed up in the hum of the crowd and the music.

I pushed my way through the people until I reached the exit, just in time to see Selena climb into the back of a black sedan parked at the curb.

She glanced over at me as she reached for the door, then hesitated a moment before she closed it.

And that’s when the vision slammed me hard.

I was back in that awful warehouse.

The man from the convenience store was shouting orders. Men scurried around us as he shouted for them to get the product into the truck, saying he’d shoot them in the head if they didn’t move faster.

Then he turned to me, rage filling his eyes as he spat out, “This is all your fault.”

Only I wasn’t me. I was whoever had inspired this vision.

Terror filled me as he grabbed my arm, his fingers pinching my skin, and started dragging me through a door.

I dug my heels into the concrete floor, but it barely slowed him down.

“Come on, Selena,” he snapped as he pulled me hard enough to make my teeth clack. “I don’t have time for your bullshit games.”

I started to sob. “Don’t kill her! I’m begging you! Please don’t kill her.”

He stopped in his tracks and gave me a look so dark my blood ran cold. He pulled me across the warehouse floor, past shelves, and toward the back corner.

Vision Iris was sitting on the floor with her hands tied behind her back. Her hair was a tangled mess. Vison Iris’s gaze lifted to Selena before she turned to the man and demanded, “Let her go.”

The man let out a vicious laugh. “You’re both so concerned about each other it’s kind of sweet.” Then he pulled a gun out from behind his back, and before either of us had time to react, he shot Vision Iris in the forehead.

Vision Iris fell onto her back, blood streaming out of the circular wound and onto the concrete floor.

Selena screamed, and then I was jerked back to the present, watching the black sedan pull away from the curb.

“He murdered me,” I said. I started to shake.

“Hey,” Boone said behind me. “You okay?”

I was still standing at the exit, blocking the path from a few people who were trying to leave. But I couldn’t move. I was frozen in place, still seeing my dead body in my mind’s eye.

“We’re gonna need you to step out of the way,” a beefy bouncer said in a firm voice.

I turned to face Boone, still trying to figure out what to do. At least I knew Selena was alive, but I was still going to die, and the man in the convenience store was definitely the man who’d pulled the trigger. Was he the man Selena had been with? Why was she dressed like that?

This was Mesquite and Dalton County, Texas. People didn’t climb into fancy black sedans here. They got into pickup trucks. And they sure didn’t dress like they were going to the opera before visiting a country bar.

Selena was getting herself into serious danger and there wasn’t a damn thing I could do about it.

Boone stared down at me, but something in his eyes had changed. From appreciative to appraising. “I take it you know those people?”

“That was my cousin Selena.”

He nodded slightly, then pulled me to the side, out of the exit path. “Who was she with?”