Read Online Stealing Faces by Michael Prescott - Free Book Online Page A

her mouth. For an awful moment she was sure she would suffocate or choke to death.
    No, wrong, she could breathe, and to prove it she inhaled slowly through her nostrils, feeding her lungs.
    When she was calm again, or almost calm, as calm as she could be under the circumstances, facing death at the hands of the man who was her worst enemy—when she was able to think, she tried to reconstruct what had happened.
    She’d talked to Anson, then gone to sleep. Bad dreams ...
    Then Cray must have broken in, sedated her somehow.
    She remembered an instant of alertness, of disorienting terror, and after that, a long stomach-wrenching fall.
    And now ...
    She was his prisoner.
    Again.
    In the suitcase Cray found the clipping from the   Dallas   newspaper. She saw him study it in the lamplight. His lips formed a circle. “So.” The clipping, neatly folded, went into his pants pocket. He resumed searching.
    Her gaze traveled around the room and settled on the bed. The bedspread was a rumpled mess, the pillows strewn. Amid the disorder she saw a canvas satchel, something of his, which he’d tossed there.
    Just behind it, on the nightstand where she’d left it, lay her purse.
    In one lunge she could reach the purse, grab the gun inside. But first she had to free her hands. She tugged at the knotted sleeves. Cray had tied them tight.
    She couldn’t break free, and so the gun would do her no good, and she had no hope and no chance at all.
    “I intend to dispose of your luggage, of course.” Cray said it casually, merely for the sake of conversation. “I’ll put your suitcases in your car and drive into a bad neighborhood, then leave the doors unlocked and the key in the ignition. The car and its contents will disappear quickly enough.”
    He was foraging in the bottom of the suitcase. She watched his hands, gloved in black, slip like twin snakes among her undergarments and toiletries.
    “But just in case your personal effects are somehow recovered by the police, I need to ascertain that they include nothing that links you to me.”
    Finished with the first suitcase, he closed the canvas lid, then walked to the closet and removed the second one.
    “You know the sort of item I mean. A diary or journal, a torn-out page of a phone book with my name circled. Perhaps I’m being paranoid. But even paranoids have enemies. Isn’t that right, Kaylie?”
    The second suitcase was large and heavy—she’d never unpacked—but with one arm Cray hefted it easily onto the counter. His strength dismayed her. She had forgotten how powerful he was.
    Still, she saw a weakness. Cray looked very much like a man in cool control, but it was an act. His hands were not as steady as they should have been, and there was a twitch at the corner of his mouth.
    He was fighting for composure. Fighting against an emotion so strong it threatened to overmaster him.
    Hatred. Hatred of her.
    She’d hurt him deeply, and now it was his turn to inflict pain.
    Cray unzipped the suitcase and rummaged in it. At the bottom he found a thick manila envelope.
    “Well, well. What have we here?”
    My   life,   she wanted to say.   That’s what you have.
    He opened the envelope and tamped a clutter of papers and laminated cards onto the countertop.
    “Let’s see. A   New Mexico   driver’s license issued to one Ellen Pendleton. Miss Pendleton looks rather like you, Kaylie, except for the brown hair and the rather mousy librarian’s glasses.” He flipped the card aside. “An obvious fake. I hope you didn’t pay too much for it.”
    She hadn’t. It was the first false I.D. she’d obtained after going on the run. A man with a camera had stood her up against a life-size   posterboard   display of a driver’s license form, the details filled out by hand in large block letters that looked almost like type. He’d taken her picture, then simply laminated the photo.
    The results had been terrible, but for fifty dollars she couldn’t complain. Later she’d done