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  This morning, Paige thought. A full day had not passed since Isaac grabbed her.

  “And now, here we are.” He made a brushing motion with his hand, as though batting away gnats. “You put me in a cell, Paige. I’ve put you in one. I’m going to keep you alive for a long time. There’s your silver lining behind this dark cloud.”

  She lifted her head, stared at him with wide, frightened eyes, giving him what he wanted. “Don’t…hurt me,” she whimpered, and could almost feel him feeding off the fear he perceived in her.

  “I won’t hurt you. You’ll do that to yourself.” He raised a hand, jabbed a finger in her direction. “Question—what is more just than punishing someone for their sins? Answer—making them punish themselves.”

  “No. I won’t.”

  “Oh, but you will. Willingly.”

  “No.”

  “It’s simple enough, Paige. You do what I say, or my next visit will be to your family.” His eyes narrowed. “How do you think your robust grandfather will adapt to being a quadriplegic? And won’t your mother still be a picture of loveliness after she gets a face full of acid?”

  You bastard. Paige turned her head to prevent him from seeing the fury she could no longer keep from her expression. Give me time. I’ll find an opening. Then we’ll see who suffers.

  “Your choice, Paige.”

  “What…do you…want me to do?”

  “Suffer.” His mouth curved as he rose.

  She put her hands to her face, whimpering softly while she watched him walk to the table. From a drawer he retrieved a fillet knife.

  Placed its blade on the heated coil.

  Setting her jaw, Paige pulled in several deep breaths. Her life was not going to end like this, not here, not in this basement with this sick psycho piece of crap.

  Her one hope was to get him close. Disable him. The way to do that was to convince him she was losing what little self-control she had.

  “Pick up the scalpel, Paige.”

  For the first time she felt a lurch of terror, of despair. Like all predators, Isaac was drawn by the sight and scent of blood. In order to get him close, she was going to have to bleed.

  She drew her legs beneath her, shifted sideways. Her left hand trembled as she reached for the scalpel. Her fingers closed around its ice-cold shaft.

  “Paige, we both know you’re right-handed.”

  “Was,” she spat, infusing a bitterness into her voice she hoped would have him underestimating her abilities even more. She held out her scarred hand. “You crippled me.”

  “Yes,” he murmured and took a step closer. “Your hand is just the beginning. Now, I want you to use the scalpel on one of the areas with the highest concentration of nerve endings. The fingertips, the upper lip, tip of the tongue, the genitalia. Again, Paige, it’s your choice.”

  Struggling for detachment, she shifted sideways so her body blocked his view. Fisting her scarred hand, she supported it against her thigh.

  She took a deep breath. Bit her lip. Then jabbed the scalpel’s tip into the large vein on the back of her hand.

  The damaged nerves minimized the pain, yet it was breathtaking. Her stomach tilted; black, boiling nausea surged up her throat. The scalpel rolled from her hand onto the red rug.

  “Let me see!”

  Isaac’s command snapped back her concentration. She worked around the pain. Blocked it.

  Bent over at the waist, she held her hands clenched against her stomach. “My wrist,” she choked out.

  He moved into her line of sight, careful to stay out of the chain’s radius. Moaning, she used her thumb to compress the punctured vein, then released the pressure every few seconds to make it appear like arterial blood spurting out of her wrist.

  “Show me!”

  “No,” she moaned. “Not going…to let you…keep me alive.”

  Her legs still folded under her, she rocked back and forth, gulping air. Blood flowed over her hand, dripped off her fingertips onto the heart-shaped rug.

  “You’ll live as long as I want,” he spat and turned. “I won’t allow you to ruin this for me.”

  Out of the corner of her eye she watched him stalk to the table, jerk the knife off the hot plate’s coil. When he turned, she had a second to imagine its blade glowed red.

  Knife at the ready, he strode toward her, halted. He was furious, his blue eyes glittering, his lips curled back. “The scalpel. Roll it away. Toward the far side of the room.”

  She did so, keeping her right hand pressed against her stomach. From this point on, her every move must come as a complete surprise to him. She had one chance. Just one.

  He rushed in, grabbed her arm. “Show me your wrist!”

  She bolted upward. In one move she locked her fingers on his knife hand while slamming her right elbow into the underside of his jaw. His head snapped back. She thrust a leg behind his, threw her weight into the move and shoved.

  Lurching backward like a drunken dancer, he went down.

  She wrenched his wrist, heard ligaments pop. He howled; the knife slid from his useless fingers, clattered against the cement floor.

  Isaac jerked the chain, yanked her foot out from under her.

  She landed on her back.

  And he was on her.

  His thighs straddling her hips, he clamped his good hand on her throat. Lowering his head, his teeth snapped as his mouth sought her flesh.

  Kicking, thrashing, she jabbed her fingers at his eyes, kept jabbing to keep those teeth away. Her other hand flailed against the floor, scrabbling for the knife.

  His fingers tightened on her neck. White spots burst before her eyes.

  I’m dead, Paige thought frantically even as her fingers wrapped around the knife’s hilt.

  Her arm swept up in a merciless arc. Isaac shrieked as steel penetrated his throat.

  He fell forward, his full weight crashing down on her.

  Chapter 24

  Sobbing, near shock, Paige shoved Isaac’s dead weight off of her. She forced herself to touch his wrist, check for a pulse. There wasn’t one.

  She was trembling, nauseated and deathly afraid a search of his pockets wouldn’t produce the key to the metal ankle cuff.

  But she did find it, tucked into the corner of his soft leather billfold.

  Legs unsteady, she climbed the wooden staircase, stepped into a kitchen, its counters and floor yellowed from age. She stayed there only long enough to wrap a rag around her bleeding, throbbing hand.

  She walked through a hallway to a small empty living room with stained, ragged carpet. The only sounds the creaking floors, the rasp of her breathing.

  Her coat was among the clothing hanging in the bedroom closet. Her shoes sat on the floor next to Isaac’s. He’d turned off her cell phone, placed it on the nightstand beside the twin bed. Her silver necklace was there, too. Her watch.

  Settling on the sagging mattress, she switched on her phone. Saw she had fifty messages.

  Someone was looking for her.

  It seemed a lifetime had passed since she stood in the office off Homicide’s squad room and watched McCall input his phone numbers into her cell.

  She held back a sob when he picked up on the first ring.

  McCall arrived a half hour later, having used the signal from her phone to track her location. She stepped into the living room just as he shoved through the front door, uniformed county deputies and a handful of out-of-jurisdiction OCPD cops spilling in behind him.

  She had stayed on the phone with him while he tracked her, shifting into cop-speak to report what had happened in the basement. That didn’t stop a smoldering violence from settling in his eyes when he spotted her.

  “Christ!”

  The blood, she thought. She’d forgotten to tell him she was covered in blood. Hers. Isaac’s.

  “I’m fine,” she said, watching him holster his automatic while striding across the room. “Isaac’s dead and I’m fine.”

  His trembling hands framed her face. “Fine,
hell,” he said, then swept her up and carried her outside.

  She sat on the edge of a gurney inside an idling ambulance while an EMT treated her hand.

  McCall sat directly across from her, his grim eyes locked on her face while he spoke. “I didn’t know anything was wrong until around noon. That’s when my manager pal at the Ambassador Arms called. Burke said you never showed up to check out. I phoned your ex-partner. He hadn’t heard from you. Neither had Holden Lassiter. I got the description of your rental car, went to the hotel, found the car. Burke and I viewed security tapes from the parking garage. I saw you get nabbed.” He shoved a hand through his dark hair. “If you hadn’t told me how good Isaac was at disguise, I’d have listed the suspect in my APB as a gray-haired woman.”

  Paige nodded. “I didn’t know if anyone even knew he had me.”

  “We knew.” McCall reached across the short distance that separated them, snagged her good hand. “Your ex-partner told me Isaac used a farmhouse in Dallas. I put your description out to every county in the state, had deputies checking isolated properties, houses, storage sheds, barns. Everywhere.”

  Paige glanced out the window on the ambulance’s rear door, saw a ramshackle house. “Where is this place?”

  “An abandoned farmhouse about fifty miles from Oklahoma City,” McCall replied.

  The EMT applied a final piece of tape to the gauze pad on the back of Paige’s hand. “That ought to hold you.”

  “Thanks.” She watched the man pull off his latex gloves, drop them into a small haz-mat bin. “Could you give us a minute alone?”

  The EMT raised an eyebrow. “Sure.” He stepped out of the ambulance.

  Before he closed the door behind him, she caught another glimpse of the ramshackle farmhouse. Isaac had intended for her to die there, but it was his life that had ended instead. Paige felt something loosen inside her. It was as if Isaac’s death had brought the pain and devastation of the past three years full circle. Her life had changed drastically during that time, personally and professionally. Yet, it contained empty, hollow space that only another person could fill. Tonight’s brush with death made her realize that even though one of the paths now open to her might contain more risk than others, it might just be the one that would lead to greatest happiness. Fulfillment.

  She looked at McCall, sitting so still and quiet. Waiting. “This morning in the office, you told me when I finished my business with Isaac that you wanted me to come back. Or you’d come to me. You said all I had to do was call and let you know.”

  “One call,” he said, watching her.

  “After I got out of that basement—” Her voice hitched on the fear that still raced through her veins. She didn’t want to think about the horror she’d faced. Wouldn’t think about it. “When I found my phone, it didn’t occur to me to dial 911. You’re who I wanted. Who I reached out to.” She tightened her fingers on his. “I didn’t have to wonder if you would do whatever it took to find me, to get to me. I just knew.”

  He brushed his fingertips down her cheek. “Nothing could have stopped me.”

  “You remind me of my grandpa.”

  His dark brows raised a fraction. “I’m not sure that’s a good thing, considering all the ungrandfatherly thoughts I have about you.”

  “It’s good.” A smile touched her lips. “My grandfather doesn’t believe in sugarcoating things. He would cut off his arm before telling a lie. He says what he thinks, tells you how he feels. You never have to wonder where you stand with him. That’s you, McCall. From the minute I walked into that classroom and tripped over your feet, I knew your opinion of me.”

  “I liked your legs. Your screw-you attitude pissed me off.”

  “And you made no secret of either point.” She studied their linked fingers. “I’ve spent the past three years trying to rebuild myself, my life. I gave everything I had to the job. Even a week ago, I would have said I didn’t have anything of myself to give to a relationship. But then there you were, offering me something I didn’t want, yet couldn’t fully turn my back on. Can’t turn my back on.”

  She gazed into his eyes, still hesitant to lose herself in their depths. Still, she had the distinct feeling he was what she had been waiting for.

  “Nate, I don’t know any more than you do where things between us might go.”

  “Are you willing to find out?”

  She tilted her face and smiled up at him. “Do you remember me telling you about my plan to vacation in Mexico?”

  “At Lassiter’s villa overlooking the Sea of Cortez. You said your idea of a great vacation was a couple of weeks there doing nothing but soaking up the sun, reading and drinking margaritas. Alone.”

  She shifted off the gurney and slid onto his lap. “About the alone part…”

  One of his arms circled her waist, the other cupped her cheek. “What about it?”

  She pressed her mouth to his. “I lied,” she added softly.

  ISBN: 978-1-4268-6200-7

  TRIGGER EFFECT

  Copyright © 2005 by Margaret Price

  All rights reserved. Except for use in any review, the reproduction or utilization of this work in whole or in part in any form by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including xerography, photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, is forbidden without the written permission of the editorial office, Silhouette Books, 233 Broadway, New York, NY 10279 U.S.A.

  All characters in this book have no existence outside the imagination of the author and have no relation whatsoever to anyone bearing the same name or names. They are not even distantly inspired by any individual known or unknown to the author, and all incidents are pure invention.

  This edition published by arrangement with Harlequin Books S.A.

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