Page 97 of Run, Little Rabbit

I‘d shot the man, for Christ’s sake. Right through his fucking chest.

“An old acquaintance,” I manage to say between the hazy breaths leaving my lungs. I need to focus. Need to find a way to stop, but I’m frozen. Just like I had been back then.

I can feel his presence suffocating me, robbing me of my ability to breathe, and I will my fingers to move over the keys of Max’s laptop, but the fear cripples me.

Cypher’s back.

He’s going to finish me.

He’s going to take revenge.

“Hey.”

Hands clasp my face, and auburn hair and blue eyes fill my vision.

Veon.

“Deep breath for me, Sphinx.” He takes a deliberate breath, and I copy him, mine a hell of a lot shakier than his.

Fuck. My fingers are trembling, and my skin is all clammy.

“Good boy,” he mutters, and I’m gone. Drowning under the soft syllables leaving his mouth.

Why the fuck do those two words have such an effect on me?

“Now take another breath,” he commands, and the room around me fades into the background. Veon kneels on the floor in front of me, his gaze steady and sure. “That’s it.”

A few moments pass, I don’t know how many, but I don’t feel like I’m going to pass out any time soon.

“Th-thank you,” I manage to mumble.Eloquent, Sphinx. Real eloquent.

Veon shrugs as if it were nothing; maybe to him it was. Maybe he was just being a good person and helping, but I’ve had nobody to help me through a panic attack before. I used to have loads back when I was first on my own, and I thought I’d gotten over them when Cypher died.

Apparently not.

I look away from Veon before I do something stupid, like confess that he’s actually amazing and that I want to suck his dick and turn my attention back to the laptop.

The code evolves even as I watch it stream across the page. It really is beautiful.

And I have no hope of solving this here within what I’m sure is going to be a very tight window of time.

The screens flash around the dancefloor, and a face appears wearing a mask. One of those creepy ones with the ‘X’s’ for eyes. Cypher did always love to be dramatic. “To those of you who are here for the fun, I salute you. The phone in question is now sharing a live location. Mr Walker was a sensible man and put in a system on the phone that would broadcast its location if he failed to enter a code every seven days. Now, I’ve generated several new codes which you’ve all received. Should one of those be entered, the live location will cease to be broadcast, and you can keep the secrets.”

“Did we get a code?” Max asks Angel, but the blonde shakes his head. That would have been too easy. Cypher must have worked out who has the phone or some kind of way to identify people whodon’thave the phone and send them the invite to this murder party.

Part of me thinks Cypher set up all the sophisticated encryption on Bennie’s phone in the first place. Fuck, maybe there is a whole file on Cypher in the damn phone, but I don’t know his real name, and there is way too much data to comb through even if I wanted to try and discover it. It would be like searching for a very small needle in a ridiculously large haystack.

I take a quick glance down at the dance floor and see several people have already started to leave. There are a few who are watching the screens with interest, but I’m sure they’ll be running out when the ‘real fun’ starts.

The masked man laughs manically, the sound weird and distorted through the voice modulator. It sounds wrong and makes my stomach churn uncomfortably. How could I have failed to kill this maniac? How the hell did he survive?

A few ominous-looking people clad all in black start moving across the dance floor, pushing past the lingering partygoers who eyeball them with caution.

“May the odds be ever in your favour,” Cypher says with a laugh. “I’ve always wanted to say that. Did I do it justice, Sphinx?”

My face burns as I feel several stares graze against my skin like a physical touch, but I do my best to ignore them because any doubt I might have had that this mysterious masked man was someone else vanishes with that one little question.

Cypher cocks his head to one side, and I can imagine the face behind the mask. The piercing green eyes, the black hair probably now peppered with streaks of grey, and his mouth that was always so harsh.