Читать книгу Under His Protection - Amy Fetzer J. - Страница 10

Indigo, South Carolina

His death smelled like lavender.

Moisture from his bath still hung in the air like a veil, preventing him from sensing more than the cramping in his stomach, the flashes of hot and cold thrashing over his skin. The gradually slowing beat of his heart.

His thoughts collided, spilling into one another till he couldn’t recall truth from memory, fiction from fact. The buzzing of the phone, half-off its cradle, droned like a fly. Was it day or night? He could see no more than slivers of light draped in shadows.

As he lay on the bed, a towel barely covering him, his body felt heavy, immobile, pressed into the antique quilt. He hated being helpless. He hated disorder and the vulgarity of illness. Fury worked beneath his clammy skin and he tried to use it to counter the seeping of strength from his body in thick, oppressing waves. How long had he felt this numb? Earlier he’d thought it was the flu. But he knew better. It was happening too fast. The fire beneath his skin, the furious headache that only grew stronger. His eyes shifted sluggishly, the simple effort like sand grinding behind his lids, and the room tilted, the furniture stretching like something out of a cartoon.

His heartbeat slowed, beating a painful dirge toward his death.

He tried to reach again for the phone to call for help, but his fingers only flexed with a faint spring, then went still. Regret lanced through him, and her face filled his mind. Always her. She was his wife. She always would be.

He hated being pitiful, pathetically weak. And he was. Completely. His heartbeat dropped another notch, and he couldn’t fill his lungs. Saliva dribbled from his mouth and down the side of his face. He heard a noise and blinked to focus. He hadn’t the strength to turn his head, and the indignity of it, the slovenliness, humiliated him.

He’d have preferred a bullet between the eyes, messy as that would be. They would find him like this, he thought. Wet, naked and in God knew what state. A shadow moved, a shape forming in the faint light.

Help! Thank God, help!

His whimper shamed him, but he was desperate. Then the figure leaned over the bed. His eyes widened, but only a fraction. Rage and confusion ground down to the marrow of his bones, and he choked on words he couldn’t form, couldn’t push past his lips.

Why?

His killer smiled and watched him die.