The Thought Readers (Mind Dimensions #1)(56)

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As if in a trance, I feel almost pushed outside his head. I’m not sure what just happened.

I realize that in reality, there is only one thing I can do. I can open that door, and I can shoot Tolik. And hope I make it—hope I shoot him in time.

My brain screams at the impossibility of making the shot in time, so I try to hope that whatever I did inside Vasiliy’s head will help.

I open the door. I push my frozen self out of the way and take his exact position. I close the door behind me.

Now, I try it in the Quiet. A test.

I open the door. My hand is steady. I shoot. His temple is red. It all takes no more than two seconds.

I’m ready. I take a breath and phase out.

I open the door for real this time. My hand is even steadier here than it was in the Quiet.

I hear the Russian’s shot as I squeeze the trigger.





Chapter 22


My own gun fires—but I don’t hear it. I phase into the Quiet once more.

Tolik’s head is frozen mid-explosion. Bits of his skull and brain are caught mid-flight toward the wall behind him. I killed him, but I don’t even register that fact. Instead I focus on something else entirely—and what I see makes me feel like I’m about to burst with joy.

Vasiliy, the guy whose head I was in just a moment ago, is on top of Mira.

He took the bullet that was meant for her.

I roll him off her and see no signs of the bullet having traveled all the way through. It hit him in the right shoulder blade.

Mira is unharmed, other than some minor bruises due to falling with the chair. She hasn’t been killed.

I know there is a possibility, however remote, that the bullet is still about to go through Vasiliy. I might’ve phased in at just the right fraction of a second to make the bullet freeze on its way out.

I run to my body and slam into myself, roughly grabbing whatever exposed skin comes my way.

I am in the real world again, hearing the sharp crack of the shot I just fired.

I rush into the room.

I ignore the sound of Tolik’s body falling to the floor where I shot him. My entire focus is on Vasiliy, now crumpled on top of Mira.

He moans in pain.

She’s quiet.

My heart sinks.

Tolik’s shot must’ve reached her through Vasiliy’s body.

Filled with panic, I roll him off her as fast as I can. His moans become screams at my rough treatment, but I barely notice his pain as I see Mira lying there, alive and unharmed.

Just as she was in the Quiet.

She’s strangely silent, however, and I decide that she must be in shock. Feeling a tiny fraction calmer, I start cutting away the duct tape from her legs.

“You’re a hero, Darren,” Caleb says from the door. For the first time, I hear no sarcasm in his voice. “You should know I don’t throw around compliments lightly.”

“Help me untie her,” I say, not knowing how to respond to that.

“Can’t,” he says curtly. “I need to bind Julia’s shoulder.”

I remember Julia’s wound and I nod, continuing to work on the tape by myself. Mira still doesn’t say a word. Her silence begins to worry me.

Finally, I succeed in cutting through the tape, and Mira slowly gets to her feet, still without speaking. Then, not looking at me, she walks to the gun that fell from Tolik’s hand and picks it up.

She’s going to finish Vasiliy off, I realize.

But instead of pointing the gun at the injured mobster, she points it at me.

I barely have a chance to register the tears gleaming in her eyes and the shaking of her hand before I instinctively phase into the Quiet.

Battling my shock and disbelief, I approach her and brush my fingers against her frozen cheek, determined to understand her strange behavior.

Instantly a moving Mira joins me in the Quiet. She wipes the tears from her eyes, looking around the room, and as her gaze lands on me, the expression on her face turns to fury. Stepping toward me, she slaps my face, the way wives do to cheating husbands in movies. Then she punches me in the stomach.

I’m stunned. What the hell is she doing?

“You f*cking Pusher!” she says through clenched teeth. “Don’t you ever come near me again!”

Before I can react, she turns around and touches her frozen self.

Numb, I look at my own self standing in front of her gun. His face looks more confused than it did on the day I first discovered being able to ‘stop time.’

I now know what upset her so much.

I now understand what I did to Vasiliy.

Mira must’ve phased in after the shots went down. She must’ve Read Vasiliy. She must’ve seen the telltale signs of what happened in his mind.

Signs similar to what I saw earlier in Piotr’s mind.

Signs of what I refused to really think about, until now.

I made Vasiliy protect her with his body.

I made him fall.

I overrode his free will.

I pushed him.

I’m what she hates most in the world.

A Pusher.

I touch my confused self on the forehead.

I am back in the real world, with Mira’s gun in my face. It’s shaking more than it did before.

Is this really how it’s going to end? Is she going to kill me? I’m so numb that I just stand there, waiting for it.