into submission and then do unspeakable things to her before finally strangling her.
She fought then. For her life. With all the violence and desperation her five-foot-two frame could muster. Which wasn’t enough, of course. But she gave it her best shot. Her attacker merely tightened his arms around her in a vise that crushed her ribs and made breathing nigh unto impossible, and then he waited out the expenditure of her remaining oxygen. This obviously wasn’t the first time the man had done this.
An image of another girl’s face, bloody, scared and pleading for her life, flashed into Lissa’s head. She froze, arrested momentarily by the image, memorizing the face carefully.
Lifting her slight frame mostly off her feet, the man dragged her backward toward an alley even darker than the street they currently wrestled on. If only he would take his hand away from her mouth and nose and let her draw a proper breath. Then she could scream. Or fight some more. Or do something to save herself.
She felt herself dropping into a state of shock. This must be what it was like to be a gazelle in the moments after a lioness caught its neck in her mighty jaws and crunched into it. Paralysis first and then blessedly numbing shock. The gazelle wouldn’t even be aware of its bleeding muscles being ripped away by razor-sharp teeth, its living organs being torn from its warm belly. There would be just the shock. The blessed, detached, distant awareness of encroaching death. Warmth. Quiet. Calm. She was going to die, if not right now, then soon, at this man’s hands.
Vague regret at having never been in love—the real thing, with all-consuming need, soaring heights of ecstasy, a melding of minds and souls, and, of course, really great sex—passed over her. She was too young to die. And she sincerely wished it didn’t have to be like this.
But maybe it was fated. She’d been conceived in violence, after all. Maybe that meant she had to leave this life the same way. Was this some cosmic evening out of the scales? Had she never been meant to be born? Was that why the universe saw fit to take her out like this? Or was it some wrong she’d committed in her own life coming back to haunt—
Something big and fast flew at her from the side. More shadow than man. But big. Fully as big as her attacker. A second attacker? Oh, Lord. Were they going to gang-rape her?
Her first attacker grunted as the newcomer barreled into him and Lissa, knocking all of them into a pile on the ground. She rolled clear of the melee of flailing limbs as the two men struggled to untangle themselves.
She scrambled to her hands and knees, sucking air into her oxygen-starved lungs gratefully. Must get up. Run away while they still tried to gain their feet. She must fly like the wind—
But no wind could outrun the wave of psychic power that rolled over her as she panted on the sidewalk. It was as if a great floodgate had swung open and a massive flood of energy clobbered her. The scale of it was staggering. It made the rest of her life look as though she’d been sipping at a trickle of psychic power from a leaky faucet. But this. This was unbelievable. Time had no boundaries; her vision had no limits. Knowledge of all things was right there, hers for the taking.
Something hot and wet and smelling of iron splattered her face, jolting her out of the vision and banging the floodgates of time and power shut. In front of her nose, a fist connected with her attacker’s jaw again. Hard. With a smack of flesh on flesh that spoke of violent intent. Wait. What? The new man had just slugged his partner in crime? Maybe not his partner in crime?
Very belatedly she realized the two men were fighting. The second man was rescuing her! Well, then. That changes things. She pushed to her feet, balled up her fists, waited for an opening...and dived into the fray.
* * *
Max mentally groaned as the woman he’d just rescued leaped into the fracas in a misguided attempt to help him. He could kill this punk here and now if he wanted to, but he was trying hard to keep the guy alive so the police could have a chat with him. The attack on the woman had been too practiced, too perfect, for some amateur lowlife looking to score drug money. This guy was a professional stalker of women.
The woman, however, had different ideas. She seemed hell-bent on killing the bastard and was punching and kicking with all her strength. Although, on second thought, she was probably too tiny to do the guy any serious damage. And it was undoubtedly therapeutic for her to kick the hell out of the punk for scaring her like that.
The stalker finally rolled into a fetal ball with his arms over his head to protect himself from the woman’s fury, which was prodigious now that she wasn’t on the verge of dying.
Max rolled away and pressed to his feet, panting. He jerked his leather bomber jacket back into place and dusted off his jeans, which were torn at one knee. Dammit, he liked these jeans.
“Okay, lady,” he said drily. “That’s enough, or else the cops will charge you with assault when they get here instead of that jackass.”
The woman looked up at him, confused. As if she was just now registering what her feet and fists were doing. “Oh. Oh! Right.” She stumbled back and commenced shaking so hard he could see it from where he stood.
The attacker made a move to jump to his feet and take off, but Max put a hand on the back of the guy’s neck and shoved him down to the ground with casual strength. “You stay right there, or I’ll break your neck.” The punk lurched one more time, and Max increased the pressure. “For real, man. I’ll kill you. Right here. Right now. No compunction.”
The punk subsided.
For good measure, Max went down to one knee, kneeling on the spot between the guy’s shoulder blades and no doubt pressing the stalker’s cheek painfully into the gravel-strewn sidewalk. He glanced up at the woman. “Ma’am, if you’d be so kind as to call nine-one-one. Tell them to send the nearest cruiser. Then tell them to call Detective Bastien LeBlanc and pass the message that Max could use a hand.”
“Is that your name?” the woman asked in a shaky voice close to tears. “Max?”
“Please make the call, ma’am.”
“What is it?”
“What is what? You mean my name?” he echoed blankly. That was a good question. He’d been living under that other name, not his own, for so long, he almost didn’t remember his real name anymore. Not that he had any great fondness for either his real name or his real life. All of it had turned out to be a lie of epic proportions. And he was so caught in this new lie, so deeply ensnared in its tangles, he couldn’t breathe, let alone move.
“Max,” he mumbled. “Call me Max.”
“Max what?”
Damn, she was persistent. “Smith,” he muttered under his breath.
In what little light there was in this crappy corner of town, he made out a faint frown puckering her brow. The sort of frown that said a person didn’t believe what she was hearing and was trying to understand why the speaker would lie to her. An urge to tell her the truth, to tell her his real name, bubbled up from somewhere deep in his gut.
But thankfully a siren’s wail sounded just then, and the woman looked away, relief painted in every sweet line of her face. She was a little thing. She looked like Mary Poppins in that old-fashioned wool coat and those funny curved-heel granny shoes. Her hair was curly, and about half of it remained in a bun at the back of her neck. The rest fell around her face in a wild, sexy riot of curls that fit her face massively better than the old lady attire
