Chapter 11 Prowl #3
I spun left. The second Wolf had stopped his run and was bringing his rifle up, aiming at where I'd been a half-second ago.
Too slow. I raised the Sig Ghost had tossed me, the borrowed pistol heavy and unfamiliar in my left hand, and fired twice.
Both rounds hit him, each impact shaking his body in awkward movements.
He dropped flat on his back, rifle landing on the dirt beside him.
The third Wolf was already past me. He'd heard the shots, too close for the background firefight to muffle out, and spun, pistol coming up toward me. I raised the Beretta in my right hand. We locked—his muzzle on me, mine on him, the standoff lasting half a second that felt like half a minute.
Declan's rifle cracked from the hillside.
The Wolf’s neck bent his head violently to the side, the trajectory of the bullet forcing the motion, as a splatter of blood exploded out the side of his temple. He crashed onto the dirt in the same trajectory. Three down.
The housing door was still closed. The people still inside.
I started to turn towards the enclosure—
The world turned sideways before I understood what had hit me.
The bearded man hit me from the side at a dead sprint.
Low. Full tackle. A collision that felt like being hit by an animal that should have been behind a fence.
My ribs compressed. My breath left in a single forced exhale that tore something in my throat on the way out.
The Beretta and the Sig flew from my hands—I felt them go, the weight vanishing from both grips simultaneously.
We landed hard onto the ground together, his weight crushing me down, the packed dirt slamming against my back hard enough to white out my vision.
The taste of blood flooded my mouth where I'd bitten the inside of my cheek.
Somewhere far away, Diego's voice came through the comms shouting my name, and I couldn't answer.
His hands found my throat before I could recover.
The grip was crushing—two massive hands, fingers overlapping, thumbs pressing down on my windpipe. The world went dim at the edges. I could feel my pulse hammering against his hands, could taste copper at the back of my throat, could see my own vision collapsing from the outside in.
"There you are." His voice was low, almost intimate, the words delivered with the casual patience of a man who'd done this before. "Thought you were clever, didn't you? Sneaking around my men?"
I snapped my right hand off of grip on my neck and drove my right thumb into his eye.
Not finesse. Survival. I pressed until I felt the wet resistance of the eyeball beneath my thumb and pressed harder.
He roared—a guttural animal sound that was more rage than pain—but he didn't let go.
His left eye did not leave my gaze. Mass and conviction and the conditioning of someone who'd taken worse and kept fighting.
His hands stayed on my throat, crushing harder—the thumbs digging into my windpipe, the fingers closing until the pulse in my temples was the only sound I could hear.
Suddenly, his left hand shot up and grabbed my right wrist. Yanked my thumb away with a force that wrenched my shoulder. Wild or not, the man’s eye could not take the pain further. He slammed my right arm onto the ground, then his left knee came up and pinned my freed arm down across my chest.
My arm was locked. His other hand was free. The hand on my throat kept squeezing.
He drew his pistol from his left holster.
One smooth motion. The muzzle came up toward my face.
I yanked my right arm with everything I had left, swiping it across the uneven dirt under his knee, and grabbed his wrist as the gun came level, forcing it to the left, and lower, away from my face, in the half-second before he fired.
The muzzle flash went off six inches from my shoulder.
The crack was deafening—a thunder that vibrated in my eardrums—and I felt the bullet graze my left shoulder in a line of white-hot fire, tearing through jacket and shirt and flesh in a single hot slash.
The bearded man smiled. Teeth in the shape of something that shouldn't have been smiling.
"Should've let me kill you clean." Low and slow, wet with venom. "Now I'm going to make it painful."
My strength was bleeding out. The graze burned along my left shoulder.
My right arm was slowly losing the contest against his arm that carried his weapon, inch by inch moving the muzzle back toward me.
And the hand on my throat never stopped crushing, the pressure rising until the edges of my vision were going black.
Declan couldn't take the shot. The bearded man was directly on top of me.
"Almost there," he murmured. His face was so close to mine. The swollen red eye leaking tears, the good one fixed on me with something that looked like enjoyment. "Don't fight it. Makes it worse."
My lungs screamed. My fingers were losing their grip on his wrist, the tendons in my forearm shaking, the muzzle drifting back toward my face one millimeter at a time.
The sky above his head was going gray, then white, the edges of the world dissolving.
I thought about Diego. About my flannel shirt on his chair.
About how this was a stupid, ugly place to die—facedown in the dirt of someone else's cattle ranch, choked out by a man whose name I didn't even know.
Not here. Not now. Not after everything.
But the hand on my throat didn't care what I wanted. My vision was tunneling. The white was winning—
A blast slammed into the dirt three feet from us.
The impact sprayed earth and gravel across both of us. The behemoth of a man jumped off me on instinct, his body clearing mine in a single fluid motion, the combat reflex overriding the kill he'd been about to make.
The world swam. I was on my back, yet everything tilted and blurred and came apart at the edges the way the world does when oxygen has been gone too long and comes back too fast. The sky above me pulsed—gray, white, gray again.
My throat was on fire. Each breath came in a raw, scraping wheeze that tore at the damaged tissue.
My hands weren't working right. My fingers opened and closed on nothing, both guns gone somewhere in the dirt, my arms too heavy to search for them.
I looked to my left. The direction where the shot had come from.
My marred vision managed to lock on Tank, ten feet away, shotgun already racking another round.
I looked to the right, my sense of urgency and danger returning.
The bearded man hadn’t faltered. He rested his right knee on the ground, and returned fire.
The pistol cracked twice, three times, the rounds snapping past Tank's position.
More shots came from the left. Two Wolves near the barn had spotted Tank and opened up, the muzzle flashes strobing from behind a cattle feeder.
Tank's second shotgun blast went wide as he threw himself sideways, rolling behind one of the SUVs, the buckshot sparking off concrete instead of flesh.
He came up firing from the new position, but the angle was wrong now—the Wolves had him pinned behind the vehicle, trading shots across twenty feet of open ground.
Somewhere far away, through the ringing and the gunfire and the wheeze of my own ruined breathing, I heard it.
"Logan!"
Diego's voice. Not through the comms. Through the air. Raw, cracked open, carrying across the compound with a desperation that cut through everything else. The voice of a man watching something happen that he couldn't stop.
"LOGAN!"
I rolled onto my unharmed right shoulder. Planted my palm firmly on the ground, left arm lifted against my body, the full damage of the bullet graze unknown to me. The oxygen that rushed back to my brain summoned back enough strength to try and stand up.
The hands that grabbed me were faster.
It wasn't Tank's hands. They came from the wrong direction, and in a violent grip that didn't say ally.
Multiple hands—under my arms, on my vest, fingers hooking into the collar of my jacket.
I was being dragged. The dirt scraped against my heels, cutting furrows in the packed earth.
The sky bounced and lurched above me. I tried to fight.
My arms swung, connected with something that felt like leg bone, and a grunt came.
But the hands didn't let go. There were too many of them.
"Take him!" The bearded man's voice, a roar that cut through the firefight. "Take him now! Move!"
More hands. Someone wrenched my right arm behind my back. The tranquilizer pistol was ripped from my left hip—the only weapon I had left.
My legs dragged through the dirt and my throat screamed for more air. They hauled me upright. My legs buckled. Two men held me between them, my arms locked behind my back, my left shoulder flashing hot white pain as it was forced back.
The compound spun around me—headlights, muzzle flashes, the shapes of buildings lurching sideways.
Through the chaos I saw Tank pinned behind the SUV, shotgun barking.
Saw Wolves falling back in coordinated retreat.
Saw, across the compound, a lean figure sprinting toward me with a knife in one hand and a Desert Eagle in the other, too far away, the distance between us widening with every second as the men pushed and led me away.
Diego. Running. His mouth open, shouting my name, the sound lost in the gunfire.
They dragged me through the firefight. Used me as a shield—my body between them and the Phoenix positions, my frame blocking any clean shot.
I felt rounds snap past, close, but nothing hit.
The Phoenixes couldn't fire without hitting me.
The Wolves knew it. They moved fast, hunched behind my body, boots pounding the dirt.