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Lexi hit the ground hard. Only a gurgling sound escaped from her lips. Cold metal touched the back of her neck before the old man stepped away from her, his slippers chuffing against the paving slabs. For a millisecond, she imagined he’d released her from the suffocating death grip. But he hadn’t. Her next failed breath proved it. With familiar expertise, he’d twisted the two ends of the wire at her nape in less than a second.
Panic seized Lexi’s brain as her lungs palsied. Sam had tied it tight enough to restrict her airway and as her throat swelled, her unwitting body committed murder for him. Lexi’s nails scored deep lines in her cheeks and neck as she fought the wire. No amount of self-defence training had prepared her for this form of attack. Not hands or an arm around her throat, but a ligature. And her killer studied her from a metre away as though revising a science experiment.
Lexi rolled to her knees, but the action only caused the tendons to stand out on her neck. The wire gripped tighter, biting and adding a sting to the pain in her lungs. Her eyes streamed and her nose ran, mingling with the first ooze from her broken skin. Black spots dotted her clouding vision, and an ethereal calm gripped her. She’d at least dressed nice for once, not expecting to die that morning. But they’d find her in decent trousers, a matching jacket, and a pretty blouse. Such strange consolation to soothe her as death readied his sickle.
Garima’s image drifted across her inner vision. He smiled at her and offered a gentle benediction in his sure baritone. When he drifted away, Tarant replaced him. Foolish Tarant Leon, who’d thrown away her affection with less care than a sweet wrapper. He shook his head at her in disappointment as even the grey of the paving slabs beneath her blurred.
“Why do you bitches never fight?” Sam’s voice reached Lexi over the buzz in her brain. Excitement laced his tone. She struggled to process his words, but the last one looped and pummelled her as though more significant. Fight. Why didn’t she fight?
From the vestiges of her panic came logic. Sam had fastened the wire and stepped away to watch. As he’d done with the real estate agent and the unknown woman. As he’d done with poor Liza Barnard and perhaps even Father Donald. Lexi pushed her right hand behind her neck and forced her lungs to halt their frantic clamour for oxygen. The cut wires bit into her fingers and drew blood. The stickiness made the ends of the wire impossible to grip. She twisted once and served only to tighten the ligature. The other way, then. Clockwise.
With a snarl of fury, Sam lurched towards her. He lifted his foot and kicked Lexi in the ribs. Something clicked within her torso. The blow depleted the last of her air. It whooshed from between her lips and the wire prevented its replacement. Lexi collapsed sideways, trapping her right arm beneath her. She still sought the wire but drew away only hanks of her hair. It tangled around her wet fingers like threads of a spider’s web. A strange warmth infused her body, chased by a numbness which began with her toes. Darkness shrouded her as though the sun set with extraordinary speed, taking her vision with it. The ligature pressed into her Adam’s apple and the last dregs of oxygen sputtered through her bloodstream.
Lexi no longer sensed the hard slabs against her shoulder, or the pain in her constricted throat and broken ribs. Sight evaded her, but her brain continued relaying sounds and translating them right until the end.
She heard Sam’s jagged scream from her cocoon of peace. It held a wild, primal fear. The echoing thud of knuckles on soft flesh finished with the crack of a skull against concrete. Then silence. The scuff of heavy boots on gritty pavers. Lexi could no longer think in coherent sequences as gentle hands slipped beneath her head. Something soft took her weight and moved beneath her. The numbness remained in her extremities, and she moaned to beg for the wire’s removal. Her left hand groped at her neck but didn’t understand what it found. As her vision returned in snatches of bright white and vivid colour, Lexi saw her own fingers stained with scarlet threads. The wire’s release caused unexpected misery, and she cried out in pain as it lifted away from the scored channel in her throat. She inhaled and her left lung complained and locked. Firm hands rolled her onto her uninjured side and bent her left arm to support her head. The hot concrete burned against her skin and her jacket sleeve offered relief. Her heavy limbs moved as though she’d become a rag doll at the mercy of a child, right arm tight by her side and her left leg bent at the knee. Lexi felt the rush of warm breath against her left ear and then pressure to her temple. The gentlest of kisses. Then nothing.
