Face of Darkness (Zoe Prime #6) - Blake Pierce Page 0,1

looked forward gleefully to his pasta, cheering his spirits again. He turned down the alley between two stores, a shortcut that he was used to taking every night. Two more turns after this and then home. He wondered if Mrs. Peterson down the way had put out anything new in her window yet. She often changed out her floral displays, since she was a bit of a skilled hand at arrangements, and Frank took a gentle amusement from seeing how it changed every time the fresh flowers seemed ready to wilt.

Without warning, Frank felt something hit the back of his neck; something that made him fall to his knees, dazed, unable to keep up mentally with the physical sensations. He had no concept of the journey between standing with a pain in the back of his neck and being on his knees on the ground, but here he was. He blinked slowly, raising a hand to the place where the blow had been struck, twisting around as he did so.

There was someone behind him. Who was there…? A dark figure in dark clothes, only the pale disc of a face coming at him in the gloom of the dark alley. He blinked again, trying to correct his vision, but it seemed blurry and indistinct. Like he was looking through a fog. “Wh…?” he managed, meaning to ask who it was that was there, but he couldn’t quite get the words to come out.

Frank tried to keep his eyes on the figure as it moved close by him, but he couldn’t strain his neck that far, and when he swung back around to face forward his head rocked with a sickening pain. Still on his knees, he took his hand down from the ache on the back of his head to steady himself and felt something slip around his neck, something rough that immediately rested up against his throat. Frank’s hands shot up toward it, grasping—it was a rope—a rough-fibered rope, he was sure of it.

There was a rope around his neck.

“This is for her,” someone whispered, right by his head. The whisper—it was unfamiliar—a voice he couldn’t place—not masculine, like he had expected, but light—and who was her? What was happening to him?

Frank fought his way up to his feet, still clutching at the rope, intending to pull it up over his head and cast it aside so that he could get away. But the rope tightened around his throat, pulling snug around his windpipe and the back of his neck, and Frank clawed at it more urgently. If he could just get his thumbs hooked under it—

Frank scrambled for purchase against the ground instead, which was inexplicably falling away from him. Panic shot through his veins like ice, taking over from the groggy confusion of his head wound. Someone was not just trying to hurt him—but to hang him. The tension of the rope around his neck only increased, leaving him unable to suck in a breath. His toes fought to strain back toward the ground, but it was too far away—something else was bumping against his hip instead—something dark and hard, a pole of some kind sticking out of the ground. He threw his arms toward it to try and get purchase, but his arms slipped on the wet surface, still slick from an earlier rain shower.

Frank gave up on the pole and the ground and caught at the rope instead, trying desperately to force his hands under it. The world was spinning around him as he fought to gain purchase, to stop the rope from biting into his neck. If he could just get one breath—the surface was burning his fingers, his fingernails bending painfully back as he scrabbled against the thick rope, though Frank barely registered these minor injuries against the overwhelming horror of the desire to breathe.

He kicked out desperately in a last attempt to hold himself up somehow, to grasp hold of the pole, to stop the blackness he saw at the edges of his vision from swallowing him whole. Frank had a flash in front of his eyes of his wife’s face, of her back to the door as she turned on the oven to prepare for him coming home, a last desperate clutch at the rope to pull it back that produced no result.

The blackness overcame him as his body succumbed to its need for oxygen, though Frank’s body kicked a few more times, an involuntary and unconscious reaction. Consciousness gone, he