Page 24 of Once Upon a Fable

I tried again to get my knife.

I couldn’t.

Panic drowned me.

I couldn’t speak. Couldn’t beg.

I looked into the face of my murderer and studied the scars on his cheekbones, the lips glistening with hate, the eyes molten with mayhem, and took my last breath as he bowed over me, the tips of his long hair tickling my cheeks, his nose coming so close to mine.

“Die.” He squeezed a final time.

And I did.

CHAPTER EIGHT

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THE SECOND SHE PASSED out, I shot off her and shook out my hands. I couldn’t stop the fire of touching her, of feeling her pulse flicker, of squeezing the life out of her body.

I paced, looking down at the unconscious stranger. A girl who’d appeared out of nowhere and somehow entered my house.

Where the fuck did she come from?

Unable to remove the burn in my fingers, I ducked and checked her condition.

If she was dead, then good riddance.

If she wasn’t, then I had a choice to make.

Slowing my breathing, I waited for a quick kick of her heart.

There.

Faint but steady.

Fuck.

I had a choice then.

But how was I supposed to decide when she wasn’t welcome here? When her very existence threatened mine?

I returned to pacing, dragging my hands through my hair and shoving aside dampness from the river. I couldn’t take my eyes off her. It’d been so long since I’d seen anyone other than my own river reflection that she looked foreign. Wrong. A combined creation of everyone and everything evil that had been done to me.

I stopped and stood over her.

With blond hair spread and tangled on the carpet, arms bent at her sides, and legs wide from kicking, she looked vulnerable andnonthreatening. She was a girl. She couldn’t hurt me.

Then again, my life experience said she could. All it would take was a moment of distraction on my part, a slight give in my wariness, and she could kill me as surely as I could kill her.

I nudged her cheek with my foot.

Her head lolled to the side, but her eyes didn’t open. She didn’t come back to life. She remained utterly at my mercy to either finish the job or devise another plan that didn’t involve more blood on my hands.

Think.

I grabbed my hair again, tugging it, forcing my brain to unriddle this problem.

First, I needed to make sure she was alone. Where one human was, more were sure to follow. Until I knew why she’d come after me and who would come after her, she was worth more to me alive than dead.