In Total Surrender Read Online Free PDF Page B

to save you. Not from me. Not here. Here, where you’ve so willingly offered yourself. Where I could so easily use you, then toss you away.”
    She twitched. Good.
    “My brother’s language is . . . was . . . foul at times, but yours, sir, contains a new level of filth for me.”
    The clock in the corner issued its first chime. He stiffened. Had she been in his office that long? What was he doing? Goddamn woman and his goddamn issues.
    “ I am foul. Now get out .”
    She gaped at his tone, and the first inklings of true uncertainty gleamed in her eyes. For some reason it angered him as much as it darkly pleased him to finally see it there. “I . . .”
    A rustle of sound at the door extinguished all emotion, smothering it by a solid wall, pulling his senses around it and into sharp, pointed focus. Too late for her to leave.
    “Do you know why I have been keeping to shadow, Miss Pace?” he asked, almost conversationally, as he extended his right hand toward the candle’s flame and slid the blade down his left wrist and into the belly of his palm, fingers curling around the tip.
    The uncertainty in her eyes grew at the abrupt change in tone. He would have reveled in it a moment ago. “I had a thought that perhaps you were either overly dramatic or physically scarred somewhere I can’t immediately see, Mr. Merrick. Either is a possibil—”
    The gaslights near the door shattered. He flicked his fingers forward, the blade slicing through the air, and the man who broke the lights hit the floor amidst the glass. Andreas was around the desk and pushing Phoebe Pace from her chair before she fully knew what was happening. Before the reflection of light extinguished completely from widened eyes as he snuffed the candles on his desk.
    The back section of the room was cast into darkness as he pulled back quickly into the shadows, away from her. Pushing her to the floor had cost him the view of the door and the easy answer as to how many people were now in the room. The air near his uncovered throat rippled, the bullet passing within an inch, as he stepped through the smoke produced by the retort of the first shot, then the second. A darker pillar of shadow broke the wall of midnight. A quick flick of his wrist, and it folded into the dark of the floor.
    The board three over from his right foot creaked. He threw out the heel of his hand and snapped the neck of the second man and gutted the third who had crept behind—the man shouldn’t have taken such a job with a wheeze in his chest. Andreas flattened himself against the wall, flipped his last knife, and listened.
    Too easily dispatched. The thrill of the hunt pressed, as expected, but something tightened underneath his deadened feelings.
    The whimper was loud. The scrape of the edge of her slippers as she was pulled upright.
    “Show yourself, Merrick, or I’ll gut her.”
    He knew that voice. A head shorter than himself, he’d be three inches taller than Phoebe Pace.
    “I care nothing”—he threw the knife as hard as he was capable—“for her.”
    A body hit his desk. He waited until he heard the quick intake of soft air. He moved to the desk, relit the first candle, then pushed the body to the floor. Normally, he would retrieve his blade, but he watched her instead. That insect had looked that way, eyes so wide, as he’d raised a hand to squash it.
    He motioned to the door. “Get out.” The familiar smell of gunpowder finally penetrated his senses fully. He lit the other two candles. The wax hissed faintly.
    “You saved my life.”
    He reached for the bellpull and gave it a yank.
    “What are you doing?”
    “I don’t clean.” He didn’t know why he answered. But the statement was true. He didn’t, not anymore.
    He didn’t need to look at her to know what she was doing. Everyone who wasn’t used to it stared at the bodies. Sometimes they had to be pulled away, eyes unmoving.
    “They are dead. You killed them.”
    “Get out.”
    “You saved my