Dare

Excerpt

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He smiled like he’d been expecting me.

For a second, the whole room went soundless — no hum in my comm, no air from the vents, no breath in my chest. Just that half-ruined face, the white of his blind eye catching the dim light like a coin on the bottom of a river.

The scent hit next. Not smoke, not cologne, but the phantom reek of oil and iron tangled in vicious knots with the memory of his hands. My fingers twitched, reaching for the weapon I didn’t have. The bag was by the desk, six feet away, a thousand miles.

My brain knew the steps: pivot, distance, draw, strike.

My body forgot every single one.

It was like waking up inside a nightmare I’d already survived once. Muscles I’d trained to obey me just… refused. My knees locked. My breath stuttered. My heart was a hammer behind my ribs and every hit made my vision flare white around the edges.

He took another step. Slow. Deliberate. The way you move toward a frightened animal you think you still own.

“You look good,” he said. His voice rasped like gravel in a glass. “Did you miss me?”

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The words slid under my skin, finding all the old bruises that had never really healed.

I tried to answer, but my tongue was thick, my mouth dry. Somewhere, someone was shouting my name — Bones? Voodoo? — but it was like the sound came from underwater. The comm was still in my ear, and I couldn’t make my hand rise to touch it.

He tilted his head, that smile widening just a little. “Still so quiet. I always liked that about you.”

A flicker of movement — his hand lowering toward his side, not to draw a weapon, just to remind me who’d always had the power.

Something inside me cracked then. Not courage. Not even rage. Just the thin, splintering sound of the line between then and now snapping clean through.

I wanted to run. I wanted to scream. I wanted to remember how to fight.

Instead, I stood there, every nerve raw, and stared at the man I’d thought was gone forever. The one who had taken everything from me — and had the audacity to smile like he’d found a lost pet instead of a person.

He moved ever closer, the limp still there, subtle but real. His shadow reached me before he did.

“You didn’t really think you could escape forever, did you?”

The tremor in my chest climbed my throat. My lips parted, but no sound came out.

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The air was thick, cloying, like it had settled in my lungs without asking permission. I couldn’t think. I couldn’t breathe. My fingers curled into fists, nails biting into palms, but they didn’t reach for anything. Not the desk, not the bag, not the flash drive. They might as well have been carved from stone.

Another step. That blind eye gleamed in the dim light, his scar catching shadows like it was alive. Every step he took made my stomach twist, like the ground itself was betraying me.

I remembered the way he’d touched me. Not just the physical, but the ownership, the hunger to make me small, pliable, obedient. And all at once, months of training, months of planning, months of knowing exactly how to disarm and escape… evaporated.

I was just a lost girl in his presence.

My knees shook. My heart was a jackhammer inside my chest, pounding out a rhythm I couldn’t control. It didn’t matter that I’d killed, snuck, lied, stolen, survived — none of it meant anything here. Not when he looked at me like I was exactly what he wanted. Like he still owned me in some private ledger only he could see.

I wanted to close my eyes. I wanted to shrink into the chair. I wanted to disappear. Every muscle in my body coiled tight, frozen between fight and flight, and yet unable to do either.

“Look at you,” he murmured, slow, satisfied. “You’re even more… beautiful.”

The words weren’t compliments. They weren’t harmless. They were chains. Every syllable wrapped tighter around me, knotting the pit of my stomach. My mouth opened, closed, opened again. Soundless.

I could feel the sweat on my back, the cold of the office seeping through my blouse, my pulse hammering in my ears louder than his voice. The past and present collided, and I couldn’t tell which was which. The months of planning, the team outside, the safe, the drive from Alexandria… it all felt like a dream I had forgotten the ending to.

And then he smiled again. That same twisted curl, the kind that had haunted my nightmares.

“You’ve been a good little pet, haven’t you?”

end of excerpt