Bounty Hunter [REWRITTEN VERSION]

Chapter 54 prt. 2: Truth & Lies

MAIZE

A slam of the heavy metal door caused her to jerk straight in her chair. The last thing she remembered was seeing Alec fall, before she too had been knocked unconscious. Her head throbbed. Her forearms were tied down, her ankles too. Tight bindings strained against aching skin as she moved against the hold of the ropes wrapped around the arms and legs of the wooden chair she sat in—to no avail.

She heard the footsteps coming up behind her but she couldn't see.

And then the voice spoke and her vessel within her body went cold as the tantalizing echo of his voice carried throughout the room.

"It's pointless," he said as she felt his presence creep up behind her back.

She wanted immediately nothing more than to lash out and force it away. But she couldn't. Even if not for the primary reason of her bindings strapping her to her seat, she couldn't move. The fear she felt was near paralyzing—and she hated it, but she couldn't fight against it.

Because now; she was looking into the face of a ghost.

Slow but deliberate steps carried him from behind her around in an arc until he was facing her directly. Upon seeing his face, those eyes, that scar.

Her left shoulder began to ache.

For a few moments, it was silent. He said nothing else and merely continued to watch her with an emotionless mask and one piercingly pale eye that haunted her.

Maize felt a tremble in her hands that she immediately fought to clench a fist against. "How..." her voice came out more quivering than she had thought, and she hit the inside of her mouth as a means to steady herself as she gathered her being and glared a furrowed amber blade right through his face. "You died!"

Her outburst didn't seem to faze him in the least. He stood there, hands lax at his sides, unthreatening—for the time being.

"Well you would know wouldn't you?" His voice carried over to her calmly, but Maize could feel its deception as the next words came out with a sharper, clearer edge, "Since you were the one who killed me."

She involuntarily stiffened as a reaction to his words, and he laughed, low and tantalizing.

He gave off the air of a man who was enjoying himself in the present, ravishing as if he had finally gotten what he wanted, what he sought. And he had, hadn't he? Maize realized with a sinking feeling. This was him, he was here. The moment she had seen him she didn't know how to think, because he was alive.

He shouldn't be alive! He couldn't have survived...

But the proof was, quite literally, staring her right in the face.

He was here.

And she knew it was no coincidence. Had he been the one who they thought had been manipulating strings in the shadows? There was no question, he had to be. Maize clenched her hands around the armrests of the chair to keep her composure in control while her mind coiled.

She remembered that flash she saw at the casino, something she, at the time, had believed to have been nothing but an apparition of her own imagination. But she was wrong. He had been there, she was sure of it now, in the flesh, watching her. His presence had been silently stalking them from the dark this whole time. Maybe even since the very beginning. But then that would mean...