The Taking

Tyler stopped talking, and his eyes flicked down to my lips, lingering and clouding over. He inhaled, as if it was taking every last ounce of will to keep from kissing me, and I didn’t want him to hold back. I wanted him to give in. I wanted to feel like a normal girl. Like me. So I stepped up, balancing on my tiptoes, and wrapped my fingers around the back of his neck.

He surrendered easily, lowering his head in an instant. A sound somewhere between a growl and a moan escaped his throat the moment his mouth covered mine.

And then we were lost, the two of us. And I no longer cared about whether I was a normal sixteen-year-old girl . . . or something different. Because I was Tyler’s.

He’d said as much with that amazingly perfect, ravenous kiss.

It was that very same kiss, though, that masked the footsteps. And it was the kiss, too, that kept me off guard, making me unaware that we were no longer alone.

It wasn’t until I heard the click—until we both heard the click—that we jumped apart. My lips were still swollen and pulsing, but my heart raced like mad.

I fixated on the gun, so when the guy spoke, it took me a second to realize it wasn’t Agent Truman talking. “Don’t move.” The voice—and the gun too—crushed any hope I’d had that everything was going to be okay, that I would just go back to being plain old Kyra Agnew, regular girl. The guy behind the gun was a younger, fresher-faced version of the stiff NSA agent who’d been shadowing me wherever I went.

Like the others back at my house, this agent had one of those walkie-talkie things, and he lifted it to his mouth and pressed a button. “I found her,” he spoke into the crackling radio. “We’re at . . .” He shot a quick glance at Jackson, who was cowering in the doorway behind him. “Where are we?”

“Second-Chance Comics and Books. On Pine,” Jackson answered, keeping his gaze on the gun in the agent’s other hand, the one he was holding on Tyler and me.

The agent repeated what Jackson said into the radio and then told Jackson, “Good. Now go out front and wait for someone to arrive so they know where to find us.”

Jackson flashed Tyler an I’m-sorry expression even though he didn’t say a word. He avoided my gaze altogether and did as he was instructed, leaving us alone with the young NSA agent.

“What do you want?” Tyler asked the agent, taking the lead and moving to stand in front of me, putting me out of the path of the gun.

I didn’t have a plan—everything was happening too fast to think. But I didn’t stay where Tyler put me. Instead, I reached down and snatched the box knife off the floor, clutching it in my palm.

The agent saw what I’d done, probably because I hadn’t been exactly subtle about it, but he stayed where he was, his gun still cocked and trained on the two of us. I didn’t blame him, really. I guess he’d heard the expression “You don’t bring a knife to a gunfight.”

“Son,” the agent said to Tyler like he was decades older than we were, even though he looked like he’d barely graduated from whatever training academy the NSA sent their agents to. “You need to step away from the girl. You have no idea what you’re dealing with here. She’s putting you in danger.”

That was when I realized it, the way the agent held the gun. He’d never really been pointing it at me at all.

He’d kept it aimed at Tyler the entire time. And the way he looked at me, all meaningful, the way he challenged me with his steady gaze, made it more than clear that he was in on my little secret, and he suspected the same thing I did: that it wouldn’t do any good to shoot me.

Not that I was immune to pain or anything—I’d definitely felt the blade when Simon had cut me. But I’d healed all the same. And, most likely, if what I’d learned then was true, I’d probably heal from a gunshot too.

Tyler . . . not so much.

“Turn yourself in,” he told me, “and no one has to get hurt.”

“Don’t do it, Kyr,” Tyler ordered, his eyes never straying from the agent’s. He reached into his pocket and tossed me his keys. “Run.” He said it so calmly it was hard to believe he’d even noticed the gun at all. “Get out of here. Now!”

I looked from Tyler to the agent with the gun and down to the gun itself. There was no way I was leaving him.

It was over. The NSA had found my Achilles’ heel.

Still clutching the box cutter, I held up both hands, showing the agent that I surrendered.

Grinning with a kind of condescending arrogance, the agent took a step toward me. “I knew you’d make the right choi—” He stopped then, right where he was, midsentence and midstride. His eyes flicked down to my right arm, falling to my wrist.

I looked too.

A trickle of blood made its way down my arm from my closed fist where I clutched the razor-sharp blade curled against my palm. I recoiled, opening my fingers, but it was too late. The blade had already done its job, cutting a wide trench across my hand.

The pain was there again, a sting that started in the cut and burned all the way up my arm to my shoulder.

“Kyra!” Tyler started to lunge for me but stopped himself. His eyes were trained uncertainly on my injury, and I suddenly hoped he wasn’t one of those people who fainted at the sight of blood.

“It’s okay,” I told him, nearly forgetting we weren’t alone. “Wait . . . watch.” Already I could feel the telltale prickling sensation that told me the wound was beginning to heal. The tingling that meant my body was working. “It’s okay. It’ll heal.”