I click off the safety and yell, “I mean it!”
He stops and looks me dead in the eyes like a killer would when he’s found his target, and something about that makes my entire body start to tremble.
His lips part, his tongue slowly licking his canines as a lopsided smile appears on his face. “Don’t … move.”
His voice is gravelly. Darker than I remember, even from that night he came for her. And the mere sound reminds me of just how far he went to get what he wanted.
I can’t trust him.
My foot instinctively rises.
CLICK!
My eyes widen. The sound came from below my own feet.
Too late to run.
The second my mouth opens to gasp, I’m covered in ropes. It all happens in the blink of an eye. I lose control over the gun, and it drops from my hands right onto the forest ground as a net wraps around my body and forces me into the fetal position. My body is all coiled up, trapped inside the rope, and the gun is out of reach.
Fuck!
“Get it off me!” I scream, fighting the ropes that push me further and further into myself, desperately trying to get away before …
He’s here.
Right in front of me.
Staring straight into my soul.
Fuck.
His feet are spread wide, his posture intimidating and aggressive.
Tilting his head, he wears a smirk on his filthy face as though he enjoys seeing me stuck. “I told you not to move,” he growls.
“You put out a trap for me?” I yell, incensed he’d go this far.
He swings the axe, and I shut my eyes, praying for a quick end, but it doesn’t come. Instead, he slams it down and lodges it straight into the ground.
“Not for you … but it’s a nice catch, I have to admit.”
Nice?
How could this ever be considered nice?
And who the hell puts down actual traps?
Fuck this. It doesn’t even matter. I jiggle my way around the rope to try to reach my phone.
Suddenly, he reaches down and snatches it straight out of my pocket. “I’ll take that.”
“Give that back and let me out right now,” I growl. “Or I swear to God I’ll—”
He goes down onto one knee in front of me and interrupts me, “You’ll what? Point your silly gun at me?”
My eyes immediately home in on the metal lying mere inches away from me, but the second I try to reach for it, he’s already snatched it off the ground. Not that I’d ever be able to grab it, rolled up like a goddamn sausage ready for the oven.
He holds it up, dangling it between two fingers like it’s disgusting. “This … this is what you came to kill me with?” He snorts and chucks it away onto the ground. “Pathetic.”