The Last Word by Taylor Adams EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
- Author: Taylor Adams
- Language: English
- Genre: Conspiracy Thrillers
- Format: PDF / EPUB
- Size: 2 MB
- Price: Free
Sometime after three A.M., Emma awakens to see a man standing in the
darkened corner of her bedroom. He’s mostly obscured by the door’s
angular black shadow.
She blinks, expecting the figure to vanish like a fading dream.
He’s still there.
She focuses her eyes and the room sharpens. A ray of moonlight catches
a rumple of coat fabric on the apparition’s shoulder. A fold of flabby neck
flesh. And the rim of a hat. Like something a gangster might wear in an oldtimey film.
Staring at her.
Watching her sleep.
She doesn’t dare move. Not even a toe. If he sees that she’s awake, the
fragile moment will shatter. He’ll spring forward and slice her throat or
gouge out her eyes or worse. She blinks again, trying to find more detail in
the darkness, trying not to open her eyes too noticeably wide.
The figure doesn’t move, either.
She realizes she’s holding her breath. Her lungs burn. She draws in a
mouthful of air as quietly as she can, a gentle hiss between her teeth. She
wonders if he can hear it.
How long has he been standing there, watching me?
The room teeters on a knife-edge.
Emma lives alone. This bedroom is on the second floor. Her phone is
charging downstairs. There are no guns in the house. And no neighbors
close enough to hear her scream. She considers hurling off the blankets
now, jumping to her feet and bolting past the stranger and down the stairs.
But it’s still too dark to be certain. He might still be just a hanging coat, she
tells herself. An illusion.
To her left, there’s a bedside lamp with a pull chain. She slides her hand
toward it, inching her fingers under the bedsheets like a serpent underwater.
Silence.
The figure hasn’t moved. And he hasn’t seen her hand move—not yet, at
least. Emma shuts her eyes and focuses on the ambient sounds. The low
roar of the waves. The rattle of raindrops on roof shingle. She tries to locate
the stranger’s breathing or the flex of his coat, but he’s eerily quiet. She
braces for the creak of a floorboard announcing his first step toward her
bed. It never comes.
One, she counts. Her hand slides free of the blanket now, her fingers
spider-crawling up the cold porcelain. Feeling for the chain.
Two.
She finds it. A dry click between her fingers. Did he hear that? If so, he
still hasn’t attacked. No motion.
Three?
She’s afraid to break the stillness. But she swallows her fear. She’s fully
awake now, her muscles tense under the sheets, and she must be ready. No
excuses.
Three.
She tugs the chain. A nuclear flash. She winces in a blaze of light and
throws the blankets left while heaving her body right, landing hard on bare
feet. She spins—elbows up for defense—and kicks into a sprint for the
bedroom door. As she hurtles toward it, she glimpses the spot where the
hat-wearing stranger had been standing, now a bare wall.
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