Page 19 of Emerald

I open my eyes and look up into their face.

I see two wide, startled eyes looking back at me. In shock, the assassin hesitates.

That’s all I need.

I launch myself off the bed, grabbing their wrist in my left hand, and driving my right shoulder into their body.

The would-be hitman is ridiculously light. He goes flying backward, crashing down onto the floor with my full weight on top of him. He’s still trying to twist the syringe, to jam it into the back of my hand, so I wrench it out of his fingers and fling it across the room.

I’m tempted to stab it into his chest instead—give him a literal taste of his own medicine. But I don’t want to fuck around with that needle of death. For all I know, the slightest prick could kill me, and it’s too easy to get scratched in a fight.

I intend to throttle this little shit instead. However, he’s not easy to hold onto. He’s wriggling and thrashing beneath me. Now that he’s lost his weapon, he’s obviously abandoned any hope of winning the fight. He just wants to get away.

He’s so slim and light that I’m sure he’s lightning fast. I have no intention of letting go of him. But he’s fighting like a wildcat, kicking and punching and squirming, trying to snatch up anything he can get his hands on.

He grasps the bedside lamp by its cord, yanks it close enough to grab hold of the base, and tries to bring it crashing down on my skull.

I knock it away with my arm, then swing a haymaker at his head that he only just manages to dodge, my fist brushing past his nose.

He responds with a kick to my groin. It just misses the mark, his heel striking my inner thigh instead. It still hurts like a bitch and makes me double over. I’m going to have a bruise the size of a softball.

Enough fucking around.

I seize the assassin by the throat. I’m going to squeeze the life out of him.

But I want to watch the light fade from his eyes as I do it. So I grab the stocking covering his face and I tear it off his head.

And I’m face to face with the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen.

I stare at her in utter shock.

She stares back at me, my body pinning her down, our faces inches apart.

She’s flushed with color, panting hard from our fight. I can feel her body quivering beneath mine, her heart pounding away against my chest, as rapid as a rabbit’s. She’s trapped. Like a wild animal, she’s desperate to flee.

I can’t understand how I didn’t realize her gender when we were rolling around on the floor. I suppose it’s because I never could have imagined a woman breaking into my room to kill me.

I’m mesmerized, staring at this face that’s flushed with exertion and sheer terror.

Her dark, almond-shaped eyes are wide and bright, thickly lashed and framed by straight black brows. She has a heart-shaped face with a slightly square chin, offset by a remarkably wide, full-lipped mouth. Pulling off the stocking has loosed a halo of black curls all around her cheeks and shoulders.

I can’t tell who she is or where she’s from. With those dark eyes and hair, and that lightly tanned skin, she could be French, Iranian, Greek, Albanian . . . I only know she’s not Russian. Because I’ve never seen anybody who looked like this before.

It takes me a moment to remember that she was trying to murder me.

And I’m supposed to be paying her back in kind.

Yet somehow, I find my fingers loosening around her throat.

I don’t let go of her—I’m not that stupid.

But I find myself in a conundrum.

I’ve never actually killed a woman before.

I’m not against it, in principal. After all, this is the very definition of self-defense. Whatever she had in that syringe, I know for damn sure it wasn’t a vitamin B-12 shot.

She would have jammed it into my neck without hesitation.

---