Devil's Bargain Read Online Free PDF Page A

head and took a deep breath.
    Several things happened in the next moment: the sorcerer in front of her raised his right hand and aimed his open palm at Lilli’s chest; Lilli bent her knees, gathered her strength, and threw herself into a flying somersault in thedirection of the desk; and the open manuscript of the
Praedicti Arcanum
seemed to rustle its pages with a restless air of discontent.
    â€œWhat the hell?” she heard the man—now behind her—roar as she landed hard where a wheeled desk chair had been sitting, sending the seat spinning and the entire chair rolling crazily into the far wall.
    Not bothering to look around, Lilli made a grab for the book and gave a breathless cry of frustration when a body slammed into her back and pinned her to the surface of the short filing cabinet beside the desk. She tried to scramble forward, her fingers stretching toward the book, but a large, masculine hand attached to an arm with much greater reach shot past hers and shoved the manuscript off the other side of the desk. She cursed as she heard it thud to the ground.
    Ironically, so did the man on top of her.
    â€œI. Need. That. Book!” she grunted and shot her elbow back into her attacker’s ribcage.
    She heard the dull thunk of the impact and his hoarse shout of pain, but the bastard didn’t move. That pissed her off. Gritting her teeth, Lilli pushed her hands into the top of the cabinet and tried to gauge her amount of wiggle room. With his hips pinning hers and his abdomen pressing down on her lower back, she didn’t have much.
    Still, a girl always had options. Letting him take her weight, Lilli lifted her feet off the floor, spread her legs, and hooked her feet around the backs of her opponent’s knees. At the same time, she arched backward, raised her hands off the cabinet, reached back, and boxed his ears firmly.
    The man behind her roared in pain, surprise jerking him backward. Unfortunately, with Lilli’s feet hooked around his knees, he couldn’t step back. He lost his balance and toppled onto his ass, curses ripe enough to peel paint coloring the air around him. Lilli tried to untangle her legs from his before he hit the ground, but gravity moved faster than shedid. She landed on top of him and rolled off immediately.
    Tucking her knees under her body, she attempted to hurry to her feet, her hands reaching automatically for her second misericorde when the magician’s fingers shot out and shackled her left wrist, pinning it to the floor. His other hand pressed against the center of her chest while the tip of her sharp, narrow blade pressed hard against his, directly above his heart.
    Stalemate.
    â€œYou might be able to stick that knife in my heart before I can stop you,” he panted, his breathing as hard and rough as hers, “but I’m not sure you want to bet on it.”
    Lilli hesitated. Was speed really the question here? She had no desire to kill this man for the sake of a damned book, even less when she thought about who had sent her after the book in the first place. She had taken this job as a way to free herself from Samael once and for all; if she killed for him, he’d own a piece of her for eternity.
    Still, that didn’t mean she couldn’t bluff.
    â€œI like to gamble,” she said, deliberately stripping her voice of all emotion, making it hard and cold and deadly. “People tell me I have the devil’s own luck.”
    â€œGo for it then. If you think you can beat me to the punch, why don’t you demonstrate?”
    Lilli frowned. “You want me to kill you?”
    â€œI already said I’m not sure you can.”
    His voice sounded taunting, but his eyes were deep and serious. There was something in them that tugged at her. Lilli had been a hunter for years; she’d been in situations once or twice where she’d had to kill something, so she’d seen what eyes looked like when the light went out of