Darken (Siege #1) Read Online Free PDF Page B

get in exchange?”
    “Standard fifteen percent cut. Unless I hear you talking smack about Cora again. Then it’ll be my foot up your ass.”
    She blew him a kiss and sauntered off to the change room. It would have been funny and maybe a bit sexy, except Cora stood directly behind the spot Keeley had just been. There was no way she missed Keeley’s warning.
    He waited for her to lash out, but she didn’t. He untied the waist apron and tossed it in the laundry basket in the corner. Her eyes followed him, and his nerves got the better of him.
    “Problem?” He let his eyes narrow.
    Her lips thinned, though their natural fullness failed to give her the stern face he was sure she was going for.
    “No,” she said after a long pause then followed Keeley’s path.
    As much as he wanted to change, he wasn’t going to risk being in a cramped space with Cora again.
     

 
    Chapter Three
    THE MAN SITS IN his car, flexing his leather-clad fingers around the steering wheel, the only outward sign of his tension. He watches Gavin step out from the bar, the door drifting closed behind him.
    In the rear-view mirror, the ma n’ seyes hazel eyes flash with concentration. Cora tries to see more, but she is trapped within the ma n’ s gaze, seeing what he sees. And he is intent on his purpose.
    Gavin rolls out of the parking lot in his Jeep. The man waits until the Jeep reaches the light a block down the road then follows, keeping a good distance between them all the way to the apartment complex. Then he watches again. This time, his fingers smooth along the barrel of his gun.
    He raises it and finds Gavin in his sights.
    Cora’s eyes fluttered, reluctant to face the midmorning light streaming in through the blinds. She inhaled deeply, her stomach churning as she reached for the bottle of water on her nightstand and took a long sip.
    Sleep had been an absent friend in the months since the accident. It started with nightmares about drowning; then a year ago, the visions started.
    At first, she thought she was suffering some kind of hysteria, a kind of post-traumatic stress. She’d wake in the middle of the night, shaking with adrenaline, then be thrown into a vision of Gavin.
    She brushed them off as semi-conscious dreams for the first few weeks. Sometimes, they bordered on fantasies, other times on nightmares. Then she discovered some of the things she saw actually happened.
    Once she started thinking of them as visions rather than hallucinations, she searched for some sort of order. There wasn’t any. She saw things from the past, others from the future. She accepted them for what they were—a glimpse into his life.
    When the man first entered the visions, he’d seemed innocent enough. A stranger who caught a glimpse of Gavin at the store or outside of the bar. But as the visions came more frequent, his presence became something else; he became the sole set of eyes to view the events. That night’s vision was nothing new.
    Someone out there was trying to kill Gavin.
    Telling him had been her first instinct until she realized how crazy it sounded. Up until a year ago, Cora never believed in psychic visions, but there was no other way to describe them. Yet, even though she believed in them didn’t mean she expected anyone else to.
    Moving back to Thompson Creek was the only way she could stop what would happen.
    She dragged herself from bed and padded across the cold hardwood floor to her dresser. She jotted down a few notes about what she saw in a journal filled with other details. Not that she had much to go on. The location and time of the hit differed each time as if the man hadn’t yet decided. As for identifying him … Well, he was too nondescript. He looked like so many other older, white men. With hazel eyes. That was new. After work, she’d take the time to figure out how this vision fit in with the others.
    Waitressing at Porter’s Pub wasn’t the most intellectually stimulating job, and it didn’t utilize her