Page 32 of Hunted

I wanted so badly to do it. I didn’t want to endure any longer, I wanted more.

“Pull the trigger, Adelaide!”

And just as my finger pulled back, right on that precipice between death and life, I realised I couldn’t do it. That I wasn’t capable of surrender.

I wanted more.

Fleur would kill me herself if she knew I’d entertained this lunacy for even a second. Her life had been stolen from her; her throat slit in the night all because she’d resembled me…

I knew what I had to do, and this wasn’t it.

The fucker who did that to her deserved this bullet more than I did. He deserved a hell of a lot worse. And I wasn’t about to sit around waiting for someone else to give him a slap on the wrist and go back to pretending there wasn’t a cold-blooded serial killer in our midst.

Well, one who’d been there prior to Graduation.

My arm fell back down to my side as my eyes snapped open, gaze locking onto both instructors. Their expressions were like two sides of a coin: Evander with terror and relief etched plainly across his face, Beckett with something disturbingly like pride.

He held his hand out, and I relinquished the Beretta, equal parts reluctant and relieved to do so.

“And now you know,” Beckett murmured, his eyes flicking to the doors and back again. “This place will need to survive you, not the other way around.”

I wiped the remaining tears away. “Hell of a way to make a point.”

“I’ll say,” Evander grumbled, crossing his arms.

“But a point you needed to realise sooner rather than later.” Beckett raised one black brow pointedly, switching the safety back on and holstering his sexy gun.

One day I’ll own one of those, I promised myself.

I frowned as a thought occurred to me. “It wasn’t even loaded, was it?”

Evander’s head snapped up to Beckett, equally curious.

In answer, Beckett unholstered his weapon again, clicked the safety off, raised his arm, and squeezed the trigger.

BANG.

A nine-millimetre hole appeared in the solid wooden door—a foot to the right of Deklan Pearce’s head.

“Asshole!” he swore from the corner in which he’d apparently been watching my whole existential crisis in silence.

“Oh, great, another witness to my breakdown.”

“Adelaide, it’s not—” His sentence dropped off at the look on my face.

I met his stare head-on, an indecipherable expression flitting across his features, then whirled on the largest, stupidest of the three. “Are you fucking serious?!” I screamed, getting up in his face. “You could have killed me!”

Beckett took the opportunity to step closer. Our chests pressed up against each other. Our lungs raced in tandem. He looked down his nose at me, smirked, then dipped his head—so close he could kiss me.

Fuck. He isn’t going to kiss me, is he?

“No. You could have killed you. I just handed you the weapon.”

My fist flew before I was fully aware of it, landing squarely on the side of his jaw. “Why, you—” I started, ready to unleash a torrent of vitriol his way—and deservedly so—when an arm hooked around my midsection, dragging me from the room.

Beckett just watched and grinned as one of his friends carted me outside, dumping me on my ass in the snow.

“What the fuck?!”