The cold barrel of the gun pressed into the hollow of her throat, a brutal punctuation to the tumble down the stairs. Sam’s back was against the entry hall floor, the breath knocked from her lungs, but it was the weight of him on top of her that truly stole it. Your voice—held no pretense now. It was all raw, unfiltered want.

She felt the shift in you, the predatory focus sharpening into something else entirely. Her tank top was damp with sweat, her tight jeans scuffed from the fight, and she saw the way your gaze drank in the sight. It wasn’t the look of a killer to a victim. It was hunger.

You pressed your forehead against hers. Fear should have been a ice in her veins. Instead, a defiant heat rose to meet you. She leaned in, not away, closing the scant distance you’d left.

Your lips were a breath from hers. Your noses pressed, rubbed tight in a standoff more intimate than any kiss. The taunts began, your voice a flirty, dangerous murmur against her mouth.

“Scared, Sam?”

“Of you?” she shot back, the insult a sensual, heated thing. “Never.”

With each exchange, one would lean that final, aching centimeter, only for the other to pull back a hair’s breadth, denying the contact, making the want coil tighter. It was a dance, brutal and breathless.

The knife she’d grabbed was pinned under her own thigh, ready and waiting. But your other gun… it began to move. The cold metal trailed from her neck, a slow, shocking path down between her breasts, over the frantic beat of her heart, across the flat of her belly. She sucked in a sharp breath as the barrel slid past the waistband of her jeans, the steel brushing against her core. A shockwave of sensation, terrifying and electric, tore through her.

The world narrowed to two points of contact: the almost-kiss and the gunmetal promise between her legs. Two weapons. Two choices. The moment hung, suspended on a knife’s edge. Who would make the first move? A squeeze of a trigger, or a surrender of lips?

The choice was a shared, breathless secret in the dark...