Despite the way her heart pounded with excitement, Elise frowned. She liked teasing, but she didn’t want to start off on the wrong foot. If he thought he could get away with playing tricks on her, she would never get what she came for.
“I don’t scare easily, so you can stop trying,” she calmly informed him. Swiping a lock of damp hair out of her eyes, she added, “You can’t threaten me, either.”
“Can’t I?”
The voice was deep and smooth, with an unusual lilt that implied neither amusement nor annoyance, nor much of anything at all. It was soft, almost. As if he was used to speaking in the cotton wool quiet of the fog’s embrace, or whispering against the shell of an unsuspecting woman’s ear. Elise gasped as a prickle of more than just awareness danced across her skin.
Turning sharply on her heel, she intended to lay eyes on the source of the voice that could only be inches from her, but she didn’t get that far.
The heel of her cute but mostly practical black boot slid against the mist-soaked boards of the dock. In the confusion of the fog, she’d misjudged how close she’d come to the edge. Like everything else on Alcatraz, there was no railing to keep her from falling.
Elise swore as she tipped sideways, fear clamping hard around her throat. Everyone knew not to enter the water after sundown. Everyone.
What goes in doesn’t come out.
She couldn’t see the water, nor the edge of the dock, but she fell all the same. There wasn’t even time to panic, nor to consider what it would be like to be torn to shreds and turned into picked over bone as her other foot also lost its grip on the edge of the boards.
A hand clamped around her forearm. For a breathless second, Elise hung there, the toes of her boots pressed against the thinnest edge of the dock as a faceless being held her weight, suspending her between life and certain death in the inky water.
Elise blinked hard as a man materialized before her — not quite all the way, but enough. Enough.
The cool, dry palm and fingers wrapped securely around the bar of her forearm led her eye upward, over ropes of lean muscle and smooth, alabaster skin. A shoulder led to a neck, half concealed by a waterfall of white — silver? gray? — hair, and even further, up and up, to a face of smooth lines and eyes of deep, unbroken black. No whites. No irises. Just black.
His expression was placid when he murmured, “I suppose I don’t need to threaten you, witch, when you’re doing it perfectly well on your own.”