Stay With Me (She's With Me #2) - Jessica Cunsolo Page 0,18

like nothing I’d ever imagined, and a hot pain radiated through my leg from the spot where Tony had stabbed me with a pocketknife.

He yanked the knife out with a twist and I screamed against his hand.

“That’s to make sure you can’t run from me this time,” he whispered, his breath vile against my ear.

With his gun hand, the one not smothered against my mouth, he reached down to my wound and forcefully pushed his finger into it, making me squirm and cry in pain. I could feel the sting all the way up my spine.

“And that was for fun,” he told me with a gleeful smile.

My eyes widened when he brought his bloody finger up to his face and put it in his mouth, savoring the taste of my pain and misery. He smiled a warped smile, his dark eyes lighting up at my obvious fear and disgust.

“Just remember: do something wrong and people die. Let’s go.” He removed his hand from my mouth and forced me to walk, the gun pressed inconspicuously into my back.

I didn’t get a chance to look back at my best friend, who was bleeding out on the floor, or think of the pain in my leg. I just did what he said, stepping out of the back room and into my uncertain future.

The few people who had been in the store had left, leaving it empty, filled only with the pop music that was always on repeat. It was a good thing no one was in the store—I didn’t want to risk Tony hurting anyone else. The man had savored the taste of my blood for goodness’ sake! Who knew what else he would do?

We exited the store and walked toward the stairs. For some reason, the elevator music that filled the mall seemed blaringly loud—maybe because the mall wasn’t as busy as it usually was. My sluggish brain refused to come up with an escape plan. But I refused to give up that easily, to let him torture me, kill me. I needed to find a way to get away from him without getting anyone else hurt.

Before we got to the stairs, Frank, the regular security guard, saw us. He was the nicest man. He had two kids a bit older than I was, and was friendly to everyone. He had people who loved and cared for him, and even though he was the security guard, I couldn’t have him notice Tony and his gun. Frank would have tried to be a hero. Tony didn’t care who he hurt. I forced myself to look away, praying that Frank wouldn’t notice me or the bloody mess all over my jeans.

“Hey, Hailey!”

Tony’s grip tightened on my arm and his gun pushed harder into my back, both hard enough to bruise.

“Hey, Frank.”

We kept walking. Tony started to steer me in a different direction, away from Frank. We were almost at the stairs when Frank stopped us. “Hailey, there’s blood all over your pants.”

In a split second, Tony removed the gun from my back and shot Frank. Time slowed as my friend clutched his chest and fell down, blood spilling through the slits between his fingers.

Shaking off the shock, I acted quickly. Pulling the letter opener out of my combat boot, I plunged it into Tony’s stomach. The impact forced him to drop the gun, but then he landed a punch to my face that caused me to stumble back. Nothing I’d learned from jujitsu and self-defense classes came to my mind—it was all gone like a child’s balloon being ripped from their hands in a violent windstorm. I scrambled for the gun while Tony pulled the letter opener out of his gut. The cold steel was just in my grasp when Tony landed a kick to my ribs, and I toppled over onto the floor. He kicked me again and put his knee on top of me, letting his full weight pin my small frame.

“I’m going to enjoy making your death a slow one,” he growled, clutching the bloody opener in his hand.

In this position, on my back and his knee on my stomach, a memory from practicing jujitsu surfaced of how to escape this position.

Tony raised his arm to stab me, and using his momentum against him, I brought my knee under his butt and bridged my hips at the same time, driving up toward the sky and causing him to lose his balance. He fell toward me but I put my forearms in