Chapter 21 Hunted #2
It was three-against-one, and she didn’t know how much ammunition was left in her stolen gun. Her odds were not stellar. But she’d do what she had to. It wasn’t just her out there. And the men trying to put her down were not the type of men who deserved anyone’s mercy.
“They had her in a cold, sightless cage, with only the privacy of the darkness of the cave.” Jenna’s words rolled through Lynnette’s mind; tears blended with anger that had nowhere useful to go coloring her voice.
It hadn’t been long at all since they’d had that conversation, and guilt swarmed Lynnette at the notion that she hadn’t paid as much attention as she should have.
At the time, her own mind had been a little preoccupied with the immediately recent loss of her job and the whole attempted-murder thing.
Lowered again to her haunches, in a forest on the edge of protected land and yet too far from anything to hope for intervention, with a stolen rifle in her hand and sweat dripping off her chin that had little to do with the mild temperature, Lynnette recognized there might have been a sliver of karma in her situation.
She hadn’t been able to work up the empathy she ordinarily would have before.
Now men belonging to that very same organization were attempting to kill her, presumably for no other reason than keeping her best friend company that particular morning.
On the other hand, the memory was a good reminder.
“You can’t stay hidden forever, bitch,” one of the men said in thickly accented English. He punctuated his words with the cocking of his own weapon, the internationally recognizable sound a bit more chilling than it ever had been in her youth.
Lynnette tipped her head back against the tree trunk.
They might be alive, but they have no respect for life.
Working as part of a cartel that so heavily dabbled in human trafficking was proof of that.
Cooperating with the abduction and inhumane holding of a nineteen-year-old girl was proof of that.
Killing, or standing idly by during the killing of, an elderly woman who was armed with nothing more threatening than a digital photo and a backbone was proof of that.
“There’s nothin’ wrong with bein’ scared, Lynnie.
” Her father’s amber eyes glowed like embers under the angled afternoon sunlight as he smiled down at her, gun resting at his shoulder.
“Bein’ scared is how you know you’re alive.
Just remember not to let the fear control you.
Not ever.” He pressed one finger into her chest, over her heart, as his expression became stern.
“And don’t ever let the thing that’s scaring you see that fear, either.
Show your back if you gotta, but never let it look like fear. Understand?”
If—when—she made it through this mess, she really needed to call her father. It’d been too long since they’d had a chance to just talk. And he would want to know she had a boyfriend.
Calmness settling over her, Lynnette listened for the nearest slide of movement beyond her tree with quiet breaths.
The moment she heard it, she twisted and fired, barely bothering to aim.
They were closing in on her, attempting to surround her, which meant her aim would have to be shit for her to miss.
The downside of that was it generally meant the same in reverse.
It felt a little like fire had ripped into, and through, the side of her thigh.
She had to grit her teeth to keep from yelling out and instead pivoted in a manner to swiftly remove her weight from the screaming limb—if only for a moment—as she swung the barrel of her gun around.
That time she saw her shot blow out the shoulder of the man approaching her, one of the ones she suspected had killed Diane.
Her wound was potentially more damaging to him than his to her, but it was highly likely he’d been shot before.
Or was on something that might make him care a whole lot less about the pain.
The only thing she was on was adrenaline, she had definitely not been shot before, and her leg hurt like a son of a bitch.
More shuffling and groaning behind the enclosing men drew her attention from the sharp, radiating pain in her leg and Lynnette looked up.
One of the men had gone to assist the guy she’d successfully shot—who was glaring at her—another held her at gun-point, and the guy she’d previously maced had managed to drag himself to their location.
Despite his induced blindness and all the terrible symptoms he was surely feeling.
Seriously, does Quetzal pay obscenely well?
Or does he own their souls? It would not have been unreasonable for half of these assholes to have dropped from the chase, yet instead, all four more or less held in front of her.
Two of them bloodied by bullets technically from their own gun, and one veritably poisoned.
If she didn’t loathe them so strongly, she might have applauded them.
The first guy she’d shot, who’d suffered a graze to the torso, snapped something to one of the others without removing his glare from her.
The guy still aiming a gun on her chuckled, tilted his head toward his colleague, and said, “He says you owe us a reward for making us chase you down.” His eyes raked over her and a leer lifted his lips. “’Course, you might have to work extra hard for Juan here to enjoy his.”
Lynnette made sure he could see the entire cringe on her face. “Sorry. I’m a modern-day woman. I choose my own playmates. But by all means, if you guys are feeling frisky, there’re enough of you for everyone to get some.”
One of the guys in her periphery made an agitated sound. So, they understood English, at least.
The one in front of her snarled and ducked his head back behind the scope of his weapon, as if he needed it to make his shot with three feet between them.
His mouth opened, but whatever he’d intended to say died on his tongue as a large, gloved hand dropped onto the barrel of his rifle from the wrong side of their standoff.
A hand that sparked.
“You want a reward, motherfucker?” Lance asked, his voice little more than a warning growl as his fist clenched around the gun barrel.
“You point a gun at my woman, you make her fucking bleed, and you think you get to ask for a goddamn fucking reward?” Electricity crackled in a wide, ominous arc around his knuckles.
Lynnette could only stare, wide-eyed and almost sympathetically breathless, her heart launching again into a sprint inside her chest. But she at least had a perfect view for when the man who’d just moments ago been sneering at her flicked his wide-eyed gaze between the electrified grip and its owner, and promptly went white as a cartoon ghost. Seemed he hadn’t signed up for that.
One of the men Lynnette had already shot had the nerve to call out, though she didn’t know what he said.
Lance turned his head a fraction of an inch in their direction, just enough for Lynnette to catch the severe angle of the glare on his face.
The man in front of him dropped the rifle, letting it dangle from Lance’s grip, and spun on his heel to run in the opposite direction. He shouted something that had a strong ‘fuck this’ vibe.
While multiple voices called after him in tones of agitation, Lance lifted a handgun from his waist and squeezed the trigger. Exactly once. The fleeing asshole dropped to the dirt.
The shot spurred the other three into motion.
The guy she’d maced apparently had had a second, smaller, gun on him because he raised it in Lance’s general direction and made an angry garbled sound as the other two properly found their feet and swung their larger weapons around.
They still had the numbers, though their numbers weren’t exactly thriving, and they seemed intent on taking advantage of that.
Except the foliage around them rustled and three more men in shades of green and black, all armed, swept forward like a small tide. They ignored Lynnette, swarmed her assailants, and in the span of about ten seconds had her already wounded and entirely unprepared attackers on their bellies.
“Keep ‘em alive so I can kill ‘em later,” Lance barked. He dropped the weapon the other guy had abandoned to the ground, tucked his handgun away, and turned to face her as one of the newcomers let out a snicker of amusement.
Lynnette finally lowered her gun, her memory re-engaging and drawing up names and faces to match the blurred images of movement she’d just seen. The men in makeshift fatigues were the friends Lance had introduced her to before he’d left. The ones Jon had called in.
Lance cupped her face, drawing her complete attention like a magnet. “Lynn, look at me.” His eyes roved over her, brow pinching and lips thinning. “Fuck. Fuck, sweetheart, I’m so sor—”
Lynnette tugged him close and silenced his needless apology with a hard kiss.
He kept an arm around her shoulders and lowered the other to her hip, his fingers digging into her side as he kissed her back. They kissed like he’d been gone for weeks. Like they’d been lovers for months, perhaps years, and he’d been gone for an achingly long time.
They kissed until someone let out a teasing whistle.
Lance pulled one hand from her and flipped his friends off as he eased from her lips. His eyes never strayed from hers. “Why’re you running through the forest in a pretty dress, sweetheart?”
Her chest warmed and she smoothed her palms down his front. “Because a lunatic tried killing me outside my best friend’s apartment. The forest was the only place we could get to and get out of sight before we got shot.”
He drew a hard breath. “Which you did.”
She cringed. “As it turns out, yes.” In an attempt to ease the darkening mood building behind his eyes, she added, “Not until after I hit three of them, technically.”
He didn’t fall for it. “I’m gonna need to see.”
Lynnette patted his chest. “Correct me if I’m wrong, but I believe I’m the nurse here? And I know I damn sure don’t have any medical supplies available.”
Lance brushed another kiss to her lips, then eased a half-step back and looped an arm around her shoulders. “Not to worry, Lynn. We should have enough. Let’s get you comfortable and you can walk me through what needs doing.”
She blinked, watching as the blond male named Billy shrugged out of his oversized backpack and dropped to a knee. She was still watching as the man casually asked, “What’re we doing about the other guy?”
“Let him fuckin’ bleed,” Lance replied as he guided Lynnette toward a large rock.
“Other guy?” Lynnette heard herself ask, her gaze flitting over the three laid side-by-side, face-down on the dirt.
She should probably have felt bad for the way the one jerk’s shoulders were heaving, indicating that he was having a harder time breathing in that position.
Instead, she decided he was lucky aerosol was all she’d had to defend herself with at the time.
Lance bent down, cupping his hand over her bleeding thigh as if the motion of her sitting or the nearness of the rock put her at greater risk.
Once she was seated, he eased the skirt of her dress out of the way just enough to reveal the wounded area, moving the fabric carefully so as to preserve her modesty, and she saw the way his jaw clenched again.
Billy answered for him as he passed over a clearly marked med kit. “The guy who had his gun on you, and whom our sharpshooting Master Guns left alive in the shrubs up ahead.”
Lynnette’s eyes widened. “He’s still alive?” She nudged Lance. “I thought you’d killed him.”
Lance roughly removed the gloves from his hands.
“Shot him once through the spine. He’s paralyzed, not dead.
It’ll take him a damn long time to bleed out from that.
More likely bears or wolves will finish him off, assuming this forest has those.
” He tore open a sanitary wipe and scrubbed at his skin, dipping the cloth beneath his short nails in a quick, efficient manner.
Lynnette rolled his words through her mind, replayed the scene, and finally shoved it all aside.
Was it cruel? Yes, arguably. Was it kinder than what that man had openly intended to do to her?
Absolutely. And to her mind, it was no less a fate than men in his chosen profession deserved.
“We do,” she said as the decision settled.
“Have bears and wolves, I mean.” She angled herself carefully to get a better look at the wound still throbbing in her leg.
Blood was smeared and trickling over her skin, and she knew the next several minutes were going to be incredibly uncomfortable.
They would need to clear away as much of the blood as possible, find some way to sanitize the area, then stop the bleeding and close up the gash.
It looked—as best she could tell—rather rough.
About three inches in length, give or take, and wider than she had hoped. It’d probably scar.
Lynnette blew out a hard breath and lifted her gaze to find Lance’s. “Hope you don’t mind me a little less feminine.”
He blinked once. “When this is healed enough not to hurt anymore,” he said, reaching for another wipe, “I’ll show you exactly how much I don’t mind.” He held her stare, the green in his eyes sparking. “The only thing I give two shits about is that you stayed alive. This? This is nothing, babe.”