Page 11

MARISELA

I ’d let my hormones get the best of me.

Not that it was the first time. I’d inherited this impulsive streak from my mother.

Or so my father liked to remind me every chance he got.

He also liked to remind me what happened to impulsive women .

Told me all about the procedure his surgeon friend performed on Mama the last time she tried to run away.

She was never the same after that. Almost like she’d had the life drained out of her, her eyes vacant and unseeing and her expressions stiff and emotionless.

She was compliant, sure. But her spark was gone.

She didn’t sing or dance anymore. She barely looked up whenever someone entered a room.

She was nothing more than a bag of organs and bones packaged up in a pretty flesh suit. Alive but no longer living.

And I refused to follow in her footsteps despite the loveless marriage that was hanging over me .

Climbing out that window was foolish. Seeking comfort in this man, fucking idiotic. Especially as I watched him wrap his heavy hand around my pocketknife and drag it up towards my navel. Pressing the tip close enough for me to feel the pressure but not enough for it to pierce skin.

I held my breath, waiting for the sting that was sure to come. But didn’t. Then I watched as he pivoted the blade back into the handle, tucked it into the inner lining of his coat pocket, and pushed to his full height to tower over me again.

I didn’t need to see past the mask to know that he was grinning. I could just tell by the way he held himself. His head slightly cocked to one side and his posture relaxed as he rocked back on the heels of those same stupidly expensive shoes.

“If you want it back, you’ll have to come find me, little lamb.”

“And if I don’t care enough to go looking?” I narrowed my glare in his direction while crossing my arms over my chest. “I have a dozen of those in my nightstand.”

This seemed to give him pause. But only for a moment. “What else do you have in that nightstand, Marisela?” he asked, reminding me he somehow knew my name and I still didn’t know his.

“Pepper spray and brass knuckles,” I hissed, and my shadow man let out an amused laugh.

He thought I was joking. I wasn’t. If someone crept into my bedroom in the middle of the night, thinking they’d do to me what they did to my mother, they were in for one hell of a surprise. In the form of burning tear ducts and bruised egos.

I’d sooner jump out the window head-first than let some quack scramble my frontal lobe with a brain pick.

“Fair enough.” He shrugged. “But you know what they say about curiosity?”

I rolled my eyes. “It killed the?—”

Before I could get the words out, my shadow man was tsking his tongue. The sound amplified by the emptiness of the alleyway. “ It’s the cure for boredom. And something tells me you are exceptionally bored, Marisela.”