Excerpt of Exit Strategy by Lena Diaz

Sabrina crept into her moonlit living room and grabbed
the arm of the couch for support. Her right hand,
slippery with blood, slid across the cloth and she fell
to her knees on the hardwood floor. A gasp of pain
escaped between her clenched teeth before she could stop
it.

She froze, searching the dark recesses of the room,
squinting to try to bring everything into focus. If the
intruder was within ten feet of her, no problem, she
could make out every little detail. But any farther than
that and he might as well be a fuzzy blob on the
wallpaper.

Had he heard her? She listened intently for the echo of
footsteps in the hall outside, or the squeak of a shoe,
the rasp of cloth against cloth. But all she heard was
silence. In a fair world, that might mean the stranger
had given up and left the house. But in her world,
especially the nightmarish last six months, it probably
meant he was lying in wait around the next corner, ready
to attack.

The throbbing burn in her right bicep had her angling her
arm toward the moonlight filtering through the plantation
shutters to see if the damage was as bad as it felt.
Nope. It was worse. Blood ran down her arm from a jagged,
two-inch gash and dripped to the floor.

She clasped her left hand over the cut, applying pressure
and clenching her mouth shut to keep from hissing at the
white-hot flash of pain. She had to stop the bleeding.
But there wasn’t any point in looking for something here
in the living room to bind the wound. Only the couch and
a wing chair remained of the antiques that she’d brought
with her halfway across the country from Boulder,
Colorado to Asheville, North Carolina. She’d sold the
other furniture, and even some of her sketches, to pay
the exorbitant fees of the private investigators
searching for her grandfather and the even more
exorbitant fees of the lawyers.

She supposed the Carolina Panthers nightshirt that she
was wearing might be useful as a tourniquet. But she
didn’t relish the possibility of facing an intruder in
nothing but her panties. The nightshirt was definitely
staying on.