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A/N - Hello and welcome. I hope some people out there enjoy this. It's been posted on a couple of messageboards I've been involved with in the past. It's still being worked on, and I will try and update fairly regularly. The chapter length might be a bit variable, as I just let the breaks in the story fall where they will. If anyone has anything to say about it, I'd be thrilled to hear it.
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"Shit." she swore under her breath.

This was her worst nightmare come to life. She squinted behind her, her sight hampered by the fine mist of rain and glaring reflections of streetlights, but he was there, a shadowy smudge in the orange haze, relentlessly following her through the backstreets as she tried to find a bar or a cafe or a hostel to duck into.

Over the past week she'd got used to men approaching her, she guessed that if you were pacing the streets this late at night they were bound to make assumptions, but most of them had either been shy, blushing as she informed them she wasn't in the trade and pointed them towards the more notorious districts of town, or the furtive more experienced types who just gave her a gruff nod before closing their car window and driving slowly on.

But not this guy. This guy was the bad news she had been waiting for. It was her own dumb fault for straying too far away from the busier areas of town where there was always some bar spilling its patrons out on to the street, or one of the cleaning crews busy removing the traces of revellers' takeaways from the streets before the hoardes of business people appeared the next morning.

He'd asked for her rates.

"Sorry mate," she'd said, "Not my game, you want to try a couple of streets down, towards the river."

And with that she'd turned, scanning the streets for the large Victorian buildings that she knew would offer a roomy doorstep for the night. But she'd felt him. He was following.

Another glance behind her didn't allay her fears, he was still there, still keeping his distance, but stalking her, keeping her in sight, and she knew that she was running out of time to figure out what to do.

The uneasy prickling at the back of her neck was errupting into a full-blown panic, her ears were full of the sound of her pulse and her breath, both speeding up as her body was flooded with adrenaline. All the while she thought of the stories she had read in discarded newspapers, the man behind her could be responsible for putting any number of those anonymous women into their pages. Women like her.

"Sick bastard." anger flared up inside her, rage at him trying to intimidate her, play cat-and-mouse with her. The crazy idea of going back and planting her knee into his bollocks filled her mind, striking that blow for all the lost souls he'd destroyed for his own amusement, until she heard his footsteps.

He was getting closer and her fear overrode her irrational anger and she began to run.

She never knew she could move as fast as she was, but he was still right behind her, silent except for his footsteps and his panting breath. She felt like a child in a fairytale, lost in a forest and pursued by a wolf.

Suddenly the world was turning, the orange glare of the streetlights whizzing past in slow motion before she fell to the ground with a sickening bump.

"This is it then." she thought, knowing that any second her follower would be there. But as she rolled over to face her attacker, she was blinded by bright white lights and heard the squeal of brakes before the pain in her head overtook her and she passed out cold.