Page 33 of The Perfect Illusion (Jessie Hunt #39)

Jessie could hear the panic in his voice but chose to ignore it.

Instead, she focused her attention on the half-wall that blocked her view of where Thompson had gone. But with time running short and water spraying everywhere, she didn't have the luxury of caution.

Without hesitation, she dived past it, rolling into a somersault and popping up, her gun in front of her.

But Thompson wasn’t there. What she saw instead was a false bookshelf built into the connecting wall.

It had swung open to reveal a darkened narrow stairwell, which seemed to be a secret route upstairs.

Jessie pulled out her phone and turn on the flashlight as she made her way carefully up the steep stairs. She couldn't see anyone. As she neared the top, she turned off the light. She didn't need to give Thompson any extra warning that she was close.

She knelt down so that any knife swing coming her way would hopefully go over her head, then shimmied to her left once she reached the landing.

In the dull light, she saw that the hallway she was facing was empty.

She stood up and moved forward through the threshold of the doorway, realizing that this too was a faux bookshelf that served as a hidden entry point to the stairs from the second level.

She looked down and noted that the floor was carpeted.

It was soaked from the sprinklers. Even though that might muffle her footsteps, she slid out of her shoes and continued barefoot, listening for any sound beyond the sprinkler heads spraying water and the squishing of her toes on the damp carpeting.

She passed two closed doors on her left.

Light streamed under them. She assumed it was from the sunlight coming through windows in the rooms. Then, without warning, the sprinklers stopped.

Jessie took a moment to regroup, letting the newfound silence settle in around her.

Then she resumed walking down the hall. When she got to the third door, she noticed something.

The light was partially obscured, as if there was something, or someone, near the door, blocking it.

Jessie took another step closer. But to her dismay, she landed on a creaky spot on the floor.

Deciding that she’d lost the element of surprise, she decided to go a different route: brute force. Without pausing to think, she reared back, then slammed into the door with her shoulder. It shot open before banging into something hard and flying back toward her.

Before she could lift her hands to protect herself, the door smacked her, knocking the gun out of her hand and smashing into her right temple. Though slightly dazed, she tried to stay focused as she stepped into the room.

Even as her skull rattled in pain and her eyes watered, Jessie quickly took in the situation.

When she had smashed into the door, she had knocked it into Thompson, who must have lost her balance.

The woman was on the floor in front of an old-fashioned four-poster bed.

The gun was nowhere in sight. The hunting knife was on the ground a few feet away.

The two women locked eyes. Then, at the same time, they scrambled for the weapon. Thompson—closer to it and seemingly not concussed—got there first. She grabbed it and rose to her feet, making a wild swing with the knife just as Jessie got to her.

Jessie reached her before the blow could land, diving headfirst and slamming her shoulder into Thompson's chest. They both flew back onto the bed, with Jessie landing on top of Thompson before her momentum sent her rolling past her and off the bed entirely.

She landed with a hard thud as her upper back and neck bore the brunt of the fall.

Trying to ignore the sharp twinge of pain, she forced herself upright. In the meantime, Thompson had rolled over and was now on her knees on the bed, still clasping the knife. Her eyes were wild with fury.

"You're as bad as the rest of them," she snarled. "You talk a good game, but you're just another grasping, money-grubbing bitch."

Even slightly woozy, with blood dripping into her eyes from the collision with the door and a stinging sensation that ran down her back, Jessie felt anger rise in her gut.

She pictured Patricia Hollinger, who had expanded a homeless shelter, dolled up in her tiara and sash, with a gaping hole in her neck.

She thought of Carrie Walters, the model turned kindergarten teacher whose only financial request of her husband was to start a foundation for underprivileged kids, lying on a sofa with a giant slash across the entire length of her throat.

She wasn’t a grasping bitch. She was just a woman who wanted to teach little kids.

And Rachel Thompson had snuffed her out.

Thompson was a menace, one who wouldn’t be stopped on her own.

One who had to be made to stop. And if Jessie didn’t do it, who would?

Her hands clenched into tight fists as she stared at the woman in front of her.

Her vision was shaky and Thompson appeared as vibrating twins in a halo of light.

But Jessie didn’t care. This killer had to go down.

“Are you sure you’re not the grasping bitch?

" she growled, not so much because she expected an answer but because she hoped the question would throw Thompson off guard.

It seemed to work slightly as the blurry doubled faces of the woman took on an expression of surprise.

In that moment, Jessie launched herself between the twin Thompsons, throwing up her forearm to block the woman's arm as it came down toward her, knife in hand.

She felt a sharp pain in her arm as she slammed into Thompson, sending her back on the bed. She was on top of the woman now, her knees pinning her attacker's waist in place. The knife was still in Thompson's hand, and as she brought it up, Jessie caught her wrist and twisted hard.

The knife fell onto the bed beside them, but Jessie didn't let go of Thompson.

She looked at her own arm, blinking the blood out of her eyes, and saw where the knife had sliced into it, midway between the top of her wrist and the crook of her elbow.

Blood was streaming out, but it didn't hurt as much as she expected.

Thompson let a loud snarl and flung herself upward, seemingly trying to headbutt Jessie.

But before she made contact, Jessie slammed her left forearm into the woman’s chin, sending her back down to the bed.

The force of the movement made Thompson’s left wrist slip out of Jessie’s blood-soaked grasp and land again on the hilt of the knife.

The killer's eyes gleamed as she realized what was under her gloved fingertips.

In a flash, she grabbed the knife and brought it upward again.

Jessie managed to reach out with both hands and snag Thompson's arm before she made contact.

The two of them struggled for several seconds as if in a deadly game of arm wrestling.

Jessie placed her fingers on top of Thompson's, twisting the knife away from herself and back toward the woman who was trying to kill her.

Her head was pounding and her eyes watered as she tried to force the knife away from her.

Her back and neck were screaming. Her vision was clouded by the blood dripping from her temple.

She could feel wooziness starting to creep around the edge of her consciousness and shook her head in an attempt to fight it off.

But that only made her skull explode in pain.

She feared that she might pass out at any moment, making her easy pickings for the woman underneath her, whose mouth was twisted in the same rage that Jessie felt. Then, without warning, Thompson spit in her face.

The shock of the act gave Jessie a brief moment of clarity.

But sensing that she didn’t have long before that vanished, Jessie allowed all the wrath bubbling up inside her to boil over, channeling it into a last gasp of fury that gave her an unexpected surge of strength as she plunged the knife downward.

Her vision went blurry as she felt Thompson, still trapped beneath her, tense up briefly before every part of her went slack. Jessie, unable to hold on any longer, collapsed. Her head landed on Thompson’s chest as everything around her went black.

***

Jessie’s eyes popped open.

It only took her a couple of seconds to process where she was. Her head was still resting on Rachel Thompson’s chest, with her nose just inches from the hunting knife, which was jutting out, right where the woman’s heart was.

Her first thought—an odd one in retrospect—was that she had probably only been unconscious for a few seconds.

That conclusion came from the fact that blood was still gurgling up out of Thompson, spilling onto her chest around the knife blade.

That suggested that the woman’s heart may have only just stopped beating.

The feel of the warm liquid on her left cheek and her lips snapped Jessie out of whatever haze she’d been in and reminded her what her focus should be on.

She pushed herself upright, ignoring the throbbing in her head, neck and back, as well as the sharp stinging sensation in her right forearm.

She used the back of her left hand to wipe some of her own blood out of her eyes as best she could.

Then she looked down at the carnage underneath her.

Rachel Thompson was dead. Her eyes were wide, the rage that had filled them seconds earlier, replaced with a glassy emptiness.

Her gloved fists were still wrapped around the hilt of the knife, but the fingers had unfurled slightly, now kept in place by gravity rather than intent.

Jessie stared at the scene, trying to process what had just happened.

She had killed Thompson. She’d had to. The woman was trying to kill her and if Jessie hadn’t acted, she would have passed out, leaving herself vulnerable to whatever horrors Thompson wanted to inflict upon her. It was self-defense. Wasn’t it?

For the briefest of moments, Jessie flashed back to the pure rage she’d felt as she plunged the knife into Thompson’s chest. That fury had given her the last bit of strength she’d needed.

But was her act of self-defense inevitable?

Did she really have no choice? Or, Jessie wondered as she wiped Thompson’s salty blood from her lips, was this what she’d been after all along?

She forced the thought from her mind and instructed herself to focus on more immediate concerns. Brady was downstairs with Amanda. He needed her help. She had to get moving.

With what little reserves she still had, Jessie slid off the bed, landing hard on her butt. At least it wasn’t her head. She grabbed one of the bedposts and pulled herself to her feet. Once she was upright, she noticed how quickly the blood was dripping off her forearm onto the floor.

As quickly as she could under the circumstances, she stepped over to the head of the bed, grabbed a pillow, yanked off its floral-patterned pillowcase before tightly wrapping it around her arm, tying it off with her left hand and her teeth.

Then she left the bedroom, choosing not to look back.

She returned back down the hallway the same way she’d come.

When she got to the steep, narrow, hidden staircase, she slid into a crouch, then made her way down it on her backside, taking one stair at a time.

In the distance, she thought she could hear sirens.

When she reached the bottom, she pushed herself up with just her left hand and stumbled around the corner, past the half wall, and into the living room.

Brady had moved Amanda from the chair to the floor, where she was lying on her back.

He was pressing a small sofa pillow into the wound on her right side, trying to stem the flow of blood, which was seeping through.

“How’s she doing?” Jessie asked, her voice dry.

Brady looked up at her, and his eyes filled with horror.

“What happened?” he gasped.

Jessie moved over to the chair that Amanda had been tied to and plopped down onto it.

“Long story,” she muttered before nodding at Amanda. “Is she still alive?”

“Just barely,” Brady said, starting to get up.

“No,” Jessie instructed. “Stay with her. I was only sliced once. She has it far worse.”

“You look like you suffered a lot more than just a knife wound, Jessie,” he said, apparently trying to sound calm but unable to keep the concern out of his tone.

Jessie sighed.

“I did slam my neck and back a little.”

“What about your head?” he asked. “You’re bleeding from your temple.”

“Oh yeah,” she said. “I had a little run-in with a door.”

Jessie saw Brady's face contort from concern into all-out fear. She wanted to ask him why, but before she could, her skull seemed to split open in pain. Lights flashed before her eyes. She felt herself losing her balance.

And as the lights stopped flashing and her vision cleared, she noticed that the living room floor seemed to be rushing up to meet her face.