Page 131 of Forever Dark
Nolan moved.
One second, he was slumped by the keyboard looking half-broken.The next he launched at Connor so suddenly that Connor barely had time to shift.A shoulder drove into his middle and slammed him backward into the wall beside the door.Pain flashed white along his spine.The back of his head clipped plaster hard enough to scatter his thoughts.
Connor got one hand to Nolan’s collar and the other toward his gun.
Too late.
Nolan slammed his forearm across Connor’s throat and drove him down.They hit the carpet in a tangle of limbs and grunting breath.Connor’s shoulder struck first.Fire shot through it.Nolan came down on top of him all sharp elbows and desperate force, not strong in the usual way but frantic enough to make up for it.Connor grabbed his gun, and Nolan smacked it from his grip, the gun sliding along the floor.
Connor shoved at him and nearly rolled him off.
Nearly.
Nolan’s fist connected once with the side of Connor’s face.Not clean, but enough.The room jerked sideways for a beat.Connor tasted blood.Nolan stood snarling now, no softness left in him at all.The mask had slipped.
The radio crackled again.
“Connor?Are you there?”
Selena’s voice, sharper this time.
Connor reached for it.
Nolan saw the movement and lashed out with one kicking foot.The radio tore free from Connor’s shoulder mic and skidded across the room, bouncing off the dresser leg before sliding under the far bed.
“Connor!”
The voice came thin and tinny from the floor.
Nolan scrambled up first.
Connor pushed onto one elbow, vision blurring at the edges, and saw the other man’s face fully for the first time without the meekness, without the musician’s nerves, without any of the shrinking little habits he used to disappear behind.
What looked back at him was pure panic and something uglier and more deadly beneath it.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
By the time Selena turned onto the county road, her hands were already too tight on the wheel.
Donna Murphy’s voice had not left her.Nolan Pruitt.Not Elias.Not the man on the stage with the perfect cadence and the polished smile.The quiet one behind the keyboard.The one nobody would have noticed.
She’d been trying to get a hold of Connor.But no luck.She grabbed her phone again at the next stop sign and called Connor once more.
It rang.
And rang.
No answer.
“Come on,” she muttered.
Voicemail.
Selena ended the call before the beep, hit redial, and kept driving.The road blurred past in strips of pale concrete, low fence wire, and leafless trees leaning over drainage ditches.Her pulse had not slowed since she walked out of the rehab center.If Connor picked up now, she could tell him everything in under thirty seconds.Nolan.Donna.Pregnancy.Miscarriage.The first death.Then killing women he thought were like Donna.The whole ugly logic of it.
The line rang out again.
Still nothing.
