Keisha Schuyler padded across the dark burgundy carpet and flipped down the lock for the sliding glass door that led to the patio at the side of their home. Her hand stretched up beneath the dark brown curtain on the door’s left-hand side to flip off the patio light, but she froze in place. She hesitated for a second, and then she screamed.
There was a man approaching her back door. He was dressed all in black, and the look on his face told her all she needed to know. His eyes were wide and angry, and his face was haggard.
She stumbled back from the door and tripped over the cedar coffee table. The sound of her husband’s footfalls pounded down the stairs. “Greg!” she yelled. But the words had barely left her throat when the man in black grabbed a chair from their patio set and threw it through the glass. Shards exploded into the living room, and the chair twisted in the air and slammed into the cedar table near where she had fallen.
The man kicked out the remaining glass and stepped inside. Keisha back-pedaled on her hands and rear. Her bad knee shot pains down her leg, but the adrenaline overpowered the discomfort.
Greg ran through the archway into the living room. He held up a baseball bat, ready to swing on the intruder.
The man’s face showed no change, just the same wide-eyed stare. His eyes seemed distant. Then he raised his arm, and Keisha noticed the large revolver for the first time.
She opened her mouth to yell for Greg to run, but before she could utter the words the big pistol spat fire. Greg’s left leg flew out from beneath him, and he slammed down face-first onto the burgundy carpet.
The noise of the gunshot left her ears ringing even from several feet away. Everything felt so surreal, like something happening to someone else in a movie.
Greg’s screams echoed off the walls, and he tried to crawl away. But the man in black stepped casually over to him and fired again. Greg’s body jerked violently from the bullet’s massive impact, but then he lay perfectly still.
Keisha bolted for the stairs and her stepdaughter’s second-floor bedroom, but another blast into the wall in front of her made her stumble back from the steps.
“Don’t move. Get down on your knees.” The man’s slow Southern drawl surprised her. It was the type of voice she might have expected from a plantation owner living two hundred years ago. Not a country accent, but more that of a Southern aristocrat or professor.
“Please! Take whatever you—”
“Be quiet. I want you alive, but that doesn’t mean that I can’t put a hole in you. Maybe somewhere especially painful and debilitating. Like the kneecap. With a cannon like this, it’s liable to blow your leg clean off.”
The tears ran down Keisha’s cheeks, and she stifled a whimper as she fell to her knees. The man in black stepped forward and placed the barrel of the big gun against her forehead. It was still hot from his past three shots and burned her skin. But she dared not flinch. Her whole body trembled, and she closed her eyes, certain that her life was now over. Her only hope was that her stepdaughter had heard the noises and would find a hiding place rather than coming to help.
She heard a muffled thump in front of her and opened her eyes. A pair of handcuffs and a syringe rested on the carpet. “Inject that into your arm and then put on the handcuffs. Arms behind your back.”
“Please, I—”
The man cocked back the revolver’s hammer. It was a sharp sound that grated across her eardrum. “You have three seconds to decide whether you want that needle in your arm or a bullet in your brain.”
As she picked up and plunged the needle, she thought of her stepdaughter. She had complied more for the girl’s sake than her own. If Greg’s killer had Keisha, he wouldn’t need to search the rest of the house, and Rhaelyn might have a chance.
She locked the handcuffs around her wrists. The man in black pulled her up from the ground and shoved her past the dead body of the only man she had ever loved and toward the door.