excerpt kitchen scene
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Excerpt Kitchen SceneTRANSCRIPT
A crash beyond the kitchen's door jolted Shaw from her thoughts. The wooden
spoon rattled from her fingers to the stovetop. She whirled toward the dining room.
“Esme?” She raised a hand to cover her heart.
She was scaring herself senseless for nothing. She was going stir crazy, that was
all. She’d simply been alone for too long. The unexplained rattles and noises and
sometimes even voices she kept thinking she heard were symptoms of cabin fever.
Right?
The house answered her with silence, except for the soft hum of the refrigerator.
She took an uncertain step forward, determined to conquer her fear. There was no one
there, she told herself firmly. No one was ever there. There was no threat, except from
her own panic. All she had to do was turn on the dining room lights, and there’d be no
one lurking around the next corner, waiting to attack her.
She reached for the door.
“Sorry, Shaw,” the faceless, scratchy-voiced man whispered from her nightmare.
She clenched her hands into fists, her nails digging into her palms.
“Don't be such a baby,” she said out loud. “Stop this.”
Fear and the amnesia it fed had stolen everything from her. She had no
recollection of the four high-tech research centers she was said to oversee. Or how she’d
come to be the sole living heir to an estate that included not only this mountain house
near the North Carolina border, once used by her family as a summer retreat, but also a
loft in Atlanta and homes on several other continents. And to add insult to injury, no one
had yet been allowed to tell her more. Doctors orders.
She wanted her life back, damn it. She smoothed her hand against the dining room
door, and braced herself to push it open. She could do this. She had to.
Sudden darkness swallowed the kitchen.
Her thoughts were immediately swamped with the panicked claustrophobia of
being trapped in a closet, waiting to be discovered.
“No.” She blinked, willing the lights to come back on. Her imagination was
merely playing tricks on her, anticipating the worst.
But regardless of how many times she tried to force the room into focus, there
was nothing to see. Someone had killed the power for real. Her nightmare was coming
true. It was waiting for her in the very next room.
She backed away.
Fell over one of the kitchen chairs.
Landed hard on her backside.
“There's no one there,” she insisted. “The electricity's gone out. That's all.”
Something else crashed in the dining room, followed by the distinct sound of a
man's footsteps, inching closer. She covered her mouth with her hand. She scrambled
backwards on the floor, her nightgown and robe twisting around her legs. Disjointed
dream memories swirled through her mind. She lurched to her feet. She felt her way
along the wall, blindly heading for the storage room and its back door to the outside
world.
She was a fool, a weak, clueless fool. But she couldn't stop herself from
panicking.
“Kill the bitch...” the night whispered.
She clawed at the back door's stubborn deadbolt. A glimmer of sanity kept her
from running into the freezing, moonlit darkness. If she really was in danger, heaven only
knew what waited for her outside the mansion’s protection. And there was suddenly
nothing but silence behind her, no movement whatsoever.
She tried to believe this was just like all the other times when she’d freaked
herself out and then realized how ridiculous she’d been. She was running from ghosts.
She tensed to turn back, to confront her paranoia. And heard footsteps again. Closer than
before. Behind her. Coming for her. And there she stood like a paralyzed idiot, trapped
between the shadows beyond her family's home and the nightmare crowding closer
within.
A hand clenched in her hair. A gun pressed into her skin. When it fired, the sound
of the blast shattered her reality all over again.
HER FORBIDDEN BETRAYAL
BY
ANNA DESTEFANO
COMING IN JUNE 2012