Total pages in book: 82
Estimated words: 78334 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 392(@200wpm)___ 313(@250wpm)___ 261(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 78334 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 392(@200wpm)___ 313(@250wpm)___ 261(@300wpm)
Reid appears at my left shoulder, breathing controlled, rifle up, and then Sully ghosts around the south corner of the building. He holds up two fingers, then points toward the rear.
He’ll take the back door on my breach through the front. I nod and he disappears.
I look at Reid and he lifts his chin. I’m ready.
I think about Tessa in that room… waiting, probably in pain and terrified out of her mind.
Hold on, I think. Just a few more seconds.
I count down in my mind and when I reach the three-second mark, Sully’s voice comes across as soft as a summer breeze in the comms. “I’m in place.”
“On my mark,” I whisper low. “Three… two… one…”
I kick the front door hard with the heel of my boot, channeling all of my fury. It bursts inward, splinters exploding in all directions, and I’m through it before it’s fully open. Reid’s a half step behind me.
Two guards—left and right—both reacting, both reaching, but both so stunned they’re a half second too slow. Reid takes the left man with a controlled strike that drops him against the wall, following through to the floor with a knee to the spine. I take the right man with the stock of my rifle across the jaw—one clean movement that causes bones to pulverize—and he goes down. If he ever gets back up, he’ll be drinking through a straw for the next eight weeks.
I surge toward the closed door, behind which I know Tessa is sitting. I abandon my rifle for my Glock and kick the door open with even more force than my initial breach. I take it in all at once… a hook in the ceiling beam and Tessa hanging from it, hooded, stripped to her underwear. The sight of her hits me like a round to the chest but I don’t stop moving.
Pelham.
He’s across the room, two feet from Tessa with a stun device in his hand. He’s the only one in the room still standing and he knows it. His eyes move from me to Reid to the two men on the floor through the doorway, and I can see him mentally calculating his odds.
Pelham reaches for the sidearm at his hip and I don’t hesitate.
I put a round right through his thigh and Pelham goes down hard, his gun skittering across the floor. He hits the ground with a grunt, his hand going to his leg, and he looks up at me from the floor with surprise in his expression.
It shouldn’t surprise him.
He hurt Tessa and he’s lucky that’s all he gets from me. His hand starts to creep down his leg… I’m guessing to a gun he has strapped to his ankle.
“You should go for it,” I say, lips curving into a daring smile and my gun leveled straight at his forehead. “I dare you to.”
He doesn’t.
CHAPTER 24
Tessa
The curtain is pale blue and someone on the other side of it is crying softly. Somewhere, a monitor beeps in a steady rhythm that has nothing to do with how I feel, which is not steady at all.
I’ve been staring at the curtain for a while now. It’s easier than looking at my wrists.
The ER doctor was matter-of-fact about my injuries—efficient, not unkind, moving through the inventory of my damage like someone who has seen worse today and will see worse again before his shift ends. My wrists are abraded to rawness from the rope, my shoulders both strained. Lifting them above chest height makes my vision go white at the edges, but the doctor assured me they would heal just fine. The contact wounds from the Taser are the part that made him pause, the skin around each an angry mottled red.
The nurse dressing them now works with a gentleness I’m grateful for. The sites are tender but are nothing compared to what it felt like when the electricity was flowing into me.
I don’t look at them, instead looking over to Cole.
He’s in the chair pulled up to the left side of the hospital bed, forearms on his knees. He hasn’t left and the furious expression on his face hasn’t diminished, not since I first saw it when the hood came off. Those hazel eyes… something in them that I don’t have a word for. It’s between relief and fury and words I’ve been turning over ever since.
The evening comes back in fragments, out of order, the way I’ve been told shock works. The sound of the door getting kicked in. I had no idea what it was, only an explosion of wood. Quick shouts, another explosion when the second door was kicked in and then the gunshot—sounding like a cannon blast in that small room, the percussion of it punching through my chest like I’d been struck. Voices. Movement. Hands on the hood, pulling it up and off.