Текст книги "Lights out"

Автор книги: Navessa Allen

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Текущая страница: 25 (всего у книги 27 страниц)

I blinked and came back to myself. Everyone was heading into dinner, leaving us a moment to ourselves. “Yeah, sorry. I zoned out for a second there.”

She scrunched her nose and dropped her voice. “Sorry about that. I know it must have been awkward.”

I stepped close enough to rub my hand up her arm. “Don’t apologize. You did good. I’m proud of you for holding your ground and not pretending that this is something it isn’t.”

She beamed at me. “Thank you.”

The urge to tell her I loved her was almost too strong to resist, but this was neither the time nor the place. I’d almost blurted it out yesterday over breakfast and the day before that when I caught Aly singing off-key Mariah Carey in the shower, but as much as a large part of me thought she was right there with me, a smaller part second-guessed it, keeping the words in check. It wasn’t that I didn’t think I was worthy of love; I just couldn’t believe I’d gotten so lucky that she was the one who loved me.

Dinner went a little better than cocktail hour. We were too busy stuffing our faces for much conversation, and Aly and Nico were seated far enough apart that they would have had to raise their voices to continue bickering. What brief discussion we had focused on safer topics like how good the food was, how shitty the weather had been, and Moira’s plans to gut their master bathroom and have a custom spa built in its place.

I sat back in my chair afterward, unable to eat another bite, feeling warm and sleepy and sated. No wonder they waited until dinner was over for serious conversation. It would be hard to get worked up when all I could think about was how nice a quick post-meal nap would be.

Aly set her napkin beside her plate and turned to where Nico lorded over us from the head of the table. “Now?”

He sighed. “Yes, fine.”

Moira placed a hand over his. “Coffee?”

His expression softened when he looked at her, and I started questioning myself about the sociopath thing when I saw the warm affection in his eyes. “Yes, please.” He turned toward us. “Would you like any?”

Remembering what Junior said about Nico’s barista-related vanity, I nodded. “I’ll never say no to one of those macchiatos.”

He grinned. “Moira’s even better at making them than I am.” His gaze slid to his wife. “And she’s got a great ass.”

Their sons let out a collective groan and started excusing themselves from the table, taking their plates with them to the kitchen.

Moira, however, looked thrilled. “He can be taught,” she said, leaning in to kiss her husband’s cheek.

Fifteen minutes later, Aly and I joined Nico and Junior in Nico’s office with our coffees. It was the one space in the house I felt like I could relax. The walls were paneled in dark wood. Soft lighting filtered down from a black chandelier. Beneath our feet, a well-worn Persian rug covered most of the slate-gray tile floor. Nico’s desk took up the center of the room, but the two leather chairs facing it looked as comfortable as the dark couch against the far wall, and I decided I’d be happy sitting wherever Aly chose. Leather meant that even if I accidentally slopped a little coffee over the side of my mug, it could easily get wiped up.

Aly decided on the couch, and I settled down beside her as Nico and Junior turned the chairs to face us.

Once he was seated, Nico took a sip of his espresso before lifting his gaze to Aly. “They didn’t find any trace of you or our guys in the house.”

Relief hit me so hard that I had to set my cup on my knee to keep from spilling it.

Aly reached out and gripped my shoulder, and I knew she must have been just as emotional as I was from how hard she squeezed me. “What about the van?”

Junior grinned. “The power company confirmed it was just a routine maintenance call, and the records they sent to the cops back that up.”

“What about all the footprints everyone must have left behind?” Aly pressed.

“What footprints?” Junior said. “The guys swept the snow as they were leaving.”

I forced my fingers to relax around my mug. “So that just left ours?”

Nico nodded. “Remember how we had you wear shoes a size too small?”

“Yes,” I said. “I assumed it was so there wouldn’t be a match to my real size.” I’d pulled a similar deception the first night I broke into Aly’s.

Nico nodded. “The size you wore was also Brad’s.”

You could have knocked me over with a feather.

My mind worked on overdrive as I thought back to all the other instructions I’d received that night, how they’d wanted me to hack into Brad’s machine but make it look like it was him who’d logged on, and the order to unencrypt anything that the cops might struggle with, like his secret hard drive.

Aly released my shoulder and sat forward. “Are you saying the cops think it was Brad inside the study that night?”

Nico nodded. “And an accomplice. That’s why the police bulletin says to be on the lookout for two men. Lucky for us, you have big feet for a woman.”

Aly grimaced. “Thanks for the underhanded compliment?”

Nico waved her off. “I didn’t mean it like that.”

I frowned. “What about Brad’s phone? Did the cops find it?”

“Ah, that,” Nico said, pausing to drain the rest of his espresso. “Yes, they found it. Brad did some rudimentary searching for Aly on it shortly after being released from the hospital, but she wasn’t the only one he looked for. Most of his digging revolved around another nurse named Erica Willet.”

Aly let out a shaky breath.

I gripped her knee. “Was that your co-worker who fit his profile?”

Her expression was troubled as she turned to me. “Yeah.”

I rubbed a thumb over her stocking-covered skin, wanting to soothe her. If not for our audience, I would have dragged her right into my lap. The need to have her in my arms when she was upset was only getting stronger by the day – more proof of how hard I had fallen.

She turned back to Nico. “Are the cops going to question me?”

He shook his head. “Unlikely. With no other trace of you found, there’s no reason. If anything, they might want to speak to you about your run-in with him to get a feel for what kind of headspace he was in that night, but I don’t think it’ll be for weeks yet, if it even happens. They’re too busy chasing down other leads and looking into missing women reports. Something like twenty hookers have disappeared in the city over the past four years.”

“Sex workers,” Aly corrected.

I sat back in my seat, stunned. “And the cops weren’t worried about it before now?”

Nico raised a brow at me. “You should know better than anyone how little cops care about hookers.” He held up a hand. “Sorry. Sex workers.”

I went completely still. Shit. He knew about my dad.

Aly reached down and threaded her fingers through mine. “I’m going to say this once. That is the last reference like that you make.”

Nico’s gaze sharpened on her. “So you know?”

Junior looked between them. “Know what?”

Nico hadn’t told him? Thank fuck for that.

“Nothing,” Aly said, glaring at her uncle. “Right?”

He held her gaze for a long moment. It felt like another battle of wills was happening between them, this one silent.

“I’m the only family you have left besides your kids,” she reminded him.

He frowned but finally nodded. “Fine.”

Aly blew out a breath. “What else is going on that we should know about?”

It turned out, a lot. A twenty-person task team had been formed to take over the investigation, including local police as well as FBI agents. Their first priority was finding Brad, but the second was finding his victims. Cops were canvasing the city streets, finally looking into all the missing persons cases they should have given a shit about to start with. Brad’s childhood record had been unsealed, and a criminal psychologist was using it to help build a more complete profile of his crimes and potential escalations.

His past victims were being reinterviewed. Judges and lawyers were getting subpoenaed in relation to his previous settlement cases. One of the FBI analysts was pouring over his phone records as they hunted for burial locations and tried to match his GPS data to areas where women went missing.

It was a huge case, and because of that, it made Aly’s name just one word in a vast ocean of information, easily overlooked.

The longer Nico talked, the more I started to believe we just might get away with what we’d done. Brad had left his phone behind when he went to Aly’s. He’d disabled the GPS in his vehicle. Her house and my car had been scrubbed clean. Even if a neighbor had caught him on a door camera approaching Aly’s house, there was absolutely no physical evidence that he’d ever come near us.

Junior swore no one would ever find Brad’s body. Brad’s car had been stripped to the frame, and its pieces were scattered throughout other vehicles across the city. Hell, the cops thought Brad was still alive. When Nico said he intended to keep it that way, with several planned sightings in Canada over the coming months, my shoulders started to relax for the first time since the night Brad broke into Aly’s. Thank fuck, because I’d been working on developing a serious crick in my neck, and my stop-you-in-your-tracks good looks would have been totally ruined by frown lines.

Did I feel like we were completely in the clear? No. But I did feel like I could stop looking over my shoulder every five seconds, and for that, I would be forever grateful to Nico.

We spoke for nearly an hour, Aly peppering her uncle and cousin with question after question until Nico pinched the bridge of his nose and begged off, claiming she was giving him a migraine. He promised to call if anything else came up, and only then did Aly rise from her seat and say that she was ready to go. Nico invited us to stay for dessert, but she declined.

On the way out, she stopped in to use the powder room, and I gathered our coats and waited for her by the front door with her uncle.

It was only the second time I’d been alone with him, and, hoping to smooth over some of the earlier awkwardness, I extended my hand. “Thank you again for everything.”

He ignored my offer to shake, going so far as to slip his hands into his pockets while he eyed me. “I did it for my niece. Not you.”

“I understand, but I’m still grateful.”

His expression flattened. “I don’t trust you.”

“Okay,” I said, because what else was I going to?

He stepped close, and though he was about half my weight, it looked like he planned to keep on coming, expecting me to back up. His eyes had gone cold, and there was a cruel glint in them that made me feel like I was getting my first real glimpse of Nico, the mobster. “If you ever do anything to hurt my niece –”

I laughed.

In my defense, I’d held it in as long as I could. God, he was so predictable. I’d been ready to kiss his ass as long as he remained civil, but I’d had a feeling it wouldn’t last, which was why I’d taken a page out of Aly’s book and was ready with Plan B.

“Look,” I said. “I’m sure this routine works on most people, but you know who my father is. Nothing you can say will ever compare to what I lived through with him.” I lifted my phone out of my pocket and waved it at him. “Also, I recorded that entire conversation in your study and already sent a backup to a private server I own, so now we’re even. You have shit on me, and I have shit on you. Don’t ever threaten me, and certainly don’t try to call in your favor for covering up for me, or I’ll dismantle your entire organization from the inside.”

I lifted my phone and tapped the screen to drive my point home. All the lights in the house flickered. Nearby, the alarm by the front door started beeping. Nico rushed over to it and punched in the code before it could go off.

“Hun?” Moira called from deeper inside the house. “What was that?”

I answered for him. “Must have been a power surge!”

Then I turned my attention back to Nico and did something I hadn’t done in years. I went to that cold, dark place in my head where I used to hide when Dad was at his worst. There was no pain inside it, no emotion. I didn’t give a fuck about anyone or anything there, not even myself, and I knew it showed on my face because this was the same place I’d gone to all those years ago when I scared off Tyler’s shitty ex.

“I don’t care about you, one way or the other,” I told Nico. “And your family seems nice, but I don’t care about them either. You could all disappear tomorrow, and I wouldn’t lose any sleep over it. And no, I’m not threatening you, just stating facts. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

“That you’re a psycho, just like your father,” Nico spat.

“Nah, I’m not that far gone. I’m able to care about some people. And I care about Aly. I’ll do whatever I have to in order to protect her, go as far as I must. With my skills, I’d make a much better ally than I would an enemy. So, I’m going to offer to shake one more time, and we can try this conversation again.” I extended a hand between us. “Thank you so much for everything.”

Nico’s face looked like a thundercloud, red creeping into his cheeks that spoke of a deep well of rage. I’d have to be very careful around him and his sons from this point on, but if my father had taught me anything, it was that bullies like Nico only responded to threats and violence, and I would never let someone like him push me around again.

I waited several seconds, still in that emotionally detached state, holding Nico’s gaze as I let him decide if he wanted to be my enemy or my friend. Part of me hoped he made the wrong choice. I hadn’t gotten the chance to really flex my hacking skills for years, and the thought of slowly leaking mob crimes to the FBI one at a time made me smile.

I think it was the smile that decided Nico. He shuddered and, with a grimace, finally slipped his hand into mine. “You’re welcome.”

“I truly appreciate all your hard work keeping your niece safe,” I told him, which was true.

He frowned. “You’re pretty fucked up, kid. Aren’t you?”

An indrawn breath announced Aly’s arrival. “What did you just say to my boyfriend?”

In a blink, I came back to myself, my smile becoming more genuine than creepy as I released Nico and turned to face his niece.

“He was teasing,” I said. “I made a dumb joke. Right?” I asked him.

His gaze slid from me to Aly. “Right.”

I clapped him on the shoulder. “Thank Moira again for dinner. It was delicious.”

Aly frowned as she reached us, sensing something was off. “Are you ready?” she asked me.

“I am,” I said before turning back to her uncle. “Can’t wait to do this again next month.”

Nico looked a little green at the idea, but he managed to say goodbye to Aly and see us out the door without giving anything away.

“What the hell did you say to him?” she asked as we made our way toward my car.

“I told him he had a nice arse.”

Aly choked on nothing.

“What?” I said. “He does.”

I unlocked the doors, and we climbed inside. She turned to me as I started the car, her eyes narrowed to slits. “You threatened him, didn’t you?”

“Yes, but in my defense, he started it.”

“What about trying to stay on his good side?” she asked.

“Turns out, he doesn’t have one.”

She punched my arm. “Are you out of your mind? Do you know what he could do to you?”

I turned to face her. “The better question is, do you know what I could do to him?”

That brought her up short. I could see the wheels spinning in her head as she reviewed everything she’d learned about my computer skills. “But the risk…”

I reached out and smoothed her hair back from her face, looking for an excuse to touch her. “I understand the risk, but I don’t think it’ll ever come to that. Nico is a smart guy. He knows a truce between us is preferable to setting his whole world on fire just to prove he has the bigger metaphorical dick.”

She grimaced. “Gross. No relative dick talk.”

“You understand what I’m saying, though. The threat was just a threat. He needed to realize that he can’t bully me like everyone else. And he also needed to know that he can’t push me out of your life just because I’m not Italian enough for his liking.”

Her gaze shifted from my eyes to my mouth and back again. “Did you have to wait until I was out of the room to do it? I would have liked to see you go all alpha on him.”

I cocked a brow at her. “Alpha, huh? Is that something out of your porno books?”

She rolled her eyes. “They’re called spicy romances, and they’ve taught me as much about myself as your masktok account has.”

“Yeah?” I asked. “Like what?”

“Like when we’re at that Airbnb we booked in the mountains, I want you to chase me down and fuck me in the woods like an animal.”

It was my turn to choke on nothing. Yup. Yes. I could definitely do that for her.

“Speaking of my masktok account,” I said. “You want to hold the camera for me again tonight? People seem to like the new content since you’ve started helping.”

She groaned and turned to buckle herself in. “As long as you don’t publicly thank me again. I’ve gotten, like, a thousand new followers since Wednesday.”

“You know people pay for that kind of social media growth, Aly,” I said, unable to keep the teasing note out of my voice.

She turned back to me, deadpan. “Yeah, but do they also pay their new followers to threaten them? Because that’s all I seem to get.”

“They just want to make sure you’re treating me right. They’re still not sure about you after that one time you made me sad.”

She rolled her eyes. “If they only knew the truth about what happened.”

I grinned. “They’d probably think it was hot.”

She sighed. “You’re right. Who am I kidding? I’m living their fantasies. I will always be the enemy.”

I gripped the back of her neck and pulled her toward me. The car had barely heated up, and our breath frosted between us.

“Hey,” I said.

She looked into my eyes from an inch away. “Yeah?”

“I love you,” I told her, unable to keep it in any longer.

“I know,” she said.

“You do?”

She nodded, her hair tickling my forehead. “Yeah, you’ve been saying it in your sleep for the past week.”

“Oh.”

“Hey,” she said.

“Yeah?”

“I love you, too. And no matter what happens, we’ll get through it together. I don’t have anything tying me here. If we have to, we can copy Pretend Brad and flee the country.”

“Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that,” I said. “But if it does, I’m down, too. I can do my work from anywhere or become a hacker for hire. We have options.”

She grinned. “Okay, but can we agree on someplace warm? I’m over this cold.”

“Wherever you want, baby,” I said, leaning in to kiss her.

OceanofPDF.com

Epilogue

Aly

Icrashed through the undergrowth with all the grace of a water buffalo. Twigs snapped beneath my heels. Birds shrieked overhead, announcing my presence. I ignored it all and kept on sprinting.

Right now wasn’t about stealth; it was about speed. I was being hunted, and if I had any hope of escaping my fate, I needed to put as much distance between myself and the man who chased me as possible.

The midsummer sun sat high in the cornflower blue sky, baking the forest with its heat. Sweat beaded along my forehead as I leaped over a fallen log and kept on running. The trees were laden with leaves, their lower branches reaching out to grab at my hair and clothes as if trying to slow me down, and the air was so humid that I could feel it pressing in on me like a weighted blanket.

I put on another burst of speed, defiance burning through my veins. Josh was not going to catch me. Why the hell had I made that bet with him? I must have been out of my mind at the time or suffering from sex-induced diminished capacity.

Was that even a thing?

Six months ago, I wouldn’t have believed it possible, but since then, I could think of several times that I’d been dicked so good I’d briefly forgotten how to do basic things like walk unaided or solve simple math equations.

The wager was straightforward: if Josh caught me within the next twenty minutes, I lost.

I really didn’t want to lose. Losing meant making my first-ever appearance in one of his thirst traps, and he would have full creative license over exactly how I took part. Knowing him, he’d use it as another chance to needle me, and I would either be embarrassed by it or become the internet’s most hated woman for the second time in less than a year.

That would happen over my dead body.

Maybe literally, if I didn’t start paying better attention to where I was going.

I skidded to a stop just before a drop-off. A glimpse over the edge revealed a long, steep descent into a boulder-filled ravine. My heart nearly fell out of my ass as I realized how close I’d come to having a Very Bad Day.

I glanced behind me. Shit. I must have gotten off the main path somehow and ended up on a game trail. Doubling back would cost me precious minutes I couldn’t spare, so I forged onward, following what looked like another game trail that ran parallel to the ravine and further up the hill. I had to slow down because of how close it skirted to the ledge. One wrong step could send me tumbling over, but I took heart in the knowledge that if I had to be careful, so would Josh.

As much as I didn’t want to lose, part of me couldn’t wait for him to catch up so the chase could start for real. He’d given me a five-minute head start. To be sporting, he’d claimed. He’d grown up in the boonies, after all, and some of his fondest memories were bonding with his stepfather during their camping trips. Rob was a country boy through and through, and Josh had learned a ton from him about tracking animals and how to survive if he ever got lost in the wilderness.

I didn’t know anything about bushcraft, but I did have two advantages on my side: speed and endurance. I’d been a sprinter on my track team in high school, making it to the state championships my senior year. Unbeknownst to Josh, I’d spent the past three months skipping the gym two days a week to go to a local track instead. I alternated between sprint and distance training, pushing myself to the max because I had no desire to make this easy on him.

Yes, I longed to be hunted down and fucked in the forest, but I wanted the full experience more than anything. I wanted the chase. I wanted to make Josh earn the right to claim me. From the hungry gleam that entered his eyes whenever we discussed our plans leading up to today, he wanted that just as much as I did, and I couldn’t wait for him to let his darker side out to play.

We didn’t have many rules, but the ones we’d agreed on were iron-clad, and if either of us broke them, we forfeited. First and foremost, there was no cheating. We had GPS trackers on us in case we got lost, and promised not to check them unless an hour passed without Josh finding me. Dirty play was forbidden as well. We couldn’t throw sand in each other’s eyes or try to set booby traps – not that I would even know how to go about doing that.

The last rule was that only penetration counted as a catch. If Josh caught up to me, I could still win if I managed to keep his dick out of me until time ran out.

On paper, it toed the line of dubious consent, but I was more than into it, so maybe it was more like con-dub-con? Plus, Josh was adamant that all I had to do was tell him to stop, and he would. Just like always.

Part of me hoped it came to a knock-down, drag-out fight for dominance. I loved the idea of him physically overpowering me, and we’d had so much fun with orgasm denial and edging that trying to keep him off me would only make me wetter for him.

Not that I wasn’t already soaked.

I’d been primed and ready to go since the second I stepped into the trees, turning to blow a goodbye kiss at Josh and telling him not to go easy on me just because I made him feel weird in the tummy.

He’d barked a laugh and told me to run, and the sight of his eyes darkening with desire sent me sprinting into the woods.

Initially, I’d wanted to do this at night to really play into the scary vibes, but we’d decided it was too dangerous. The risk of tripping over something and either spraining an ankle or knocking ourselves out just wasn’t worth it.

A sound pulled me from my lustful thoughts, and I spent a heart-stopping moment thinking Josh had found me, but it was only a squirrel fleeing up the side of a nearby tree. I refocused my full attention on the narrow path, breathing a sigh of relief as it started to veer away from the ravine and widened enough that I was able to put on more speed.

The trail continued to pitch upward, heading higher into the foothills of the mountains. I crested a small rise and pounded down the other side of it, spooking a deer and her fawn when I reached the bottom.

A brook ran through the center of the gulley, and I decided to hurdle it instead of taking the time to find an easier crossing. My toe caught on an exposed root when I landed on the other side, and I nearly went sprawling face-first into the dirt.

I paused for a second to catch my breath and make sure I hadn’t pulled anything. When it seemed like I’d escaped unharmed, I took off again, lifting my watch to check the time. I nearly yelped when I saw that I’d been in the woods for a quarter of an hour. The timer officially started when Josh entered, so technically, we were now halfway through the hunt. He’d been on my trail for the past ten minutes, and even though I hadn’t seen or heard him, I couldn’t shake the thought that he was gaining on me.

The man was huge, and we’d worked out together enough in his apartment’s gym that I knew he was fast for his size. I regularly drooled over the sight of him sprint-pushing a three-hundred-pound sled from one end of the gym to the other, and I could only imagine how much faster he’d be without all that weight holding him back.

I strained my ears and started being more careful about where I placed my feet, avoiding as many sticks as possible. Whenever I thought about forests, I always imagined them full of birdsong, but it was eerily quiet so deep in the trees, and it made the sound of my passage all the more obvious. Last year’s fallen leaves littered the trail, crunching beneath my heels. Branches rustled as I pushed between them.

The upside was that if I was being loud, someone who outweighed me by nearly a hundred pounds was probably louder, but I’d long since learned my lesson about underestimating my boyfriend, so my senses remained on high alert, waiting for some warning that he was nearby.

I heard nothing but the noises I was making and the occasional nattering squirrel or pissed-off blue jay. The quiet made me paranoid. I imagined hands reaching out of shrubs, ghost steps racing after me. A shiver licked down my spine that made me feel like someone had just breathed on the back of my neck. I whipped my head around, but there was no one in sight.

Good thing we hadn’t done this at night because it was unnerving enough in broad daylight. My heart thundered in my chest. Adrenaline pumped through my veins, urging me onward and up over a rockfall where I had to grab onto saplings to pull myself forward.

Why the hell did I have to choose this route? The hunt was becoming less of a run and more of a hike, and while my endurance was great on flat ground, my legs were already starting to burn from exertion. It made me feel even more unbalanced, jumpy and nervous, like a rabbit with a fox on her heels.

Hoping to spare my aching legs, I took a sharp left near the top of another hill and abandoned the trail to run through the woods along the hill’s wide peak. This high up, the old-growth forest was more conifer than broadleaf, and the understory was sparse enough that I could see hundreds of yards ahead. The trunks of pine trees rose around me like matchsticks, clear all the way to the canopy far above. I’d be able to see Josh long before he reached me.

It was perfect.

I slowed to a quick walk, grateful for the soft needles carpeting the forest floor, silencing my steps. The time for speed had passed. Now was the time for stealth. With any luck, I’d be able to hear Josh coming and either hide or take off back down the mountain, letting gravity do most of the work and saving my energy for when I hit flat ground and could sprint again.

I might have been prey, but I was smart prey, and I was going to make my predator work to catch me.

A sharp snap echoed through the trees.

I turned around and nearly screamed.

Josh stood less than a hundred feet behind me with a broken stick in his hands. I wasn’t proud of it, but he caught me so off guard that I froze. Where the fuck had he come from?

He stepped toward me out of a cluster of shadows, looking huge and ominous in his dark clothing. Had he gotten bigger since we’d been together? His biceps strained against the sleeves of his tee. Corded muscle climbed up his arms. Like me, he wore running pants to protect his legs from getting scratched, and they pulled taut over his tree trunk thighs.

Yeah, he’d definitely gotten bigger. I bought that t-shirt for him two months ago, and from the way it strained across his chest, he’d either gained weight or it had shrunk in the wash.

The son of a bitch wasn’t even breathing hard. He’d managed to sneak up on me so soundlessly that he’d intentionally broken a stick to give me a sporting chance. As I watched, he tossed it aside, a victorious grin splitting his handsome face.

It felt like he was mocking me.

Oh, hell fuck no.

Like a shot, I was off, as annoyed as I was afraid. I’d gone through all that trouble to make this good for the both of us, and the bastard had found me the second I stopped running.

His laughter chased me through the forest.

It was too late to hide, too late for strategy. I ran on instinct alone, my arms pumping at my sides as I drained my last reserves. The trees blurred around me. My feet flew over the forest floor. I caught sight of a dense scramble of shrubs and beelined toward it.

“Oh, no, you don’t!” Josh called, his feet pounding against the ground as he gave chase.

Despite how hard I was pushing myself, I heard him gaining on me. It was tempting to glance over my shoulder and check how close he was, but I worried that slowing down even half a second to do it would spell my demise. Every step felt like it could be my last. My shoulders stiffened as I braced against being tackled from behind.