Chapter 18 #2
Bullets are flying everywhere, including from my own Glock.
I hit the leg of one of the men approaching Niamh, and the shoulder of another.
Then sparks fly up as return fire comes uncomfortably close to hitting me, striking sparks off the shipping container I’m lying on.
The man who fired them shouts to the other men, pointing to where I am.
Get out of here, Zin.
I shimmy down the side and drop to the ground, then run at a half crouch, trying to stay in the shadows.
I know I’m out of my depth.
Wielding a whip on a hotel bed is one thing.
Open combat is quite another.
I’m no stranger to bullets, but I’m not dumb enough to think I’m equipped for whatever clusterfuck this is rapidly turning into.
Nor can I leave Niamh to die here. I edge toward her hiding place, hearing a warning shout as the men advancing from the rear are engaged by fire from my team.
“Get them the fuck out of here,” one of the traffickers yells to the van drivers. “Go! We’ll take care of the rest of them.” The traffickers retreat toward their vans, piling in and slamming the doors, still firing as they start their engines.
I duck beneath another bullet as I drop to a crouch beside Niamh.
One of her team is lying on the ground beside her, unconscious, blood seeping from his side.
Niamh has been shot in one shoulder but is still shooting, even with her other arm hanging uselessly at her side and a dark patch spreading ominously through her black top.
“You need medical help,” I say as she takes another shot.
I clench my fists in frustration as the vans start turning in the yard. “And those bastards are getting away.”
“There’s a car outside the gates.” Niamh is sweating despite the cold as she reloads. “They’ll take care of tracking the vans. My team’s cover here is blown. Better the traffickers think we’re pinned down, or we’ll only risk those girls being killed.”
“You still need to get out of here.” I look around at the men in Port Authority uniforms spilling onto the ground around us. “I don’t know what the fuck this is, but we’re in some serious shit here, Niamh.”
My girls are fanned out, doing the best they can, but there are so many Port uniforms firing at us there’s not a lot we can do.
Niamh takes a shot at one of the vans, bursting its tire, then at another one. The first van squeals out of the yard, the other two following despite the blown tire. More uniforms pour into the yard.
Niamh and I look at each other grimly, and then we start shooting.
It’s a lost cause, and we both know it. But there’s no way out—not back, where my girls are clearly going hard at it, and definitely not forward, where there seem to be men everywhere.
Then suddenly there’s an explosion, right in the middle of the oncoming uniforms.
The men shooting at us start falling, one by one.
I cower down beside Niamh. “Do you have more people here?”
“I thought they were yours.” She’s stopped trying to shoot, slumped against the container, her face pale. “There’s only five of us. I sent two back to the car as soon as the shooting started. The others are all wounded.”
I look around, trying to make out who is shooting.
I’m not the only one. The yard is rapidly turning into a melee of smoke, explosions, and confused shouts as the men try to work out where the attack is coming from. I turn around, but Sally and Ana’s team are still behind me, trying to take down the force coming from the rear.
There’s another explosion, then rapid fire that takes out two more of our attackers on the ground.
One of the remaining men takes a wild shot at the roof of the containers, but he clearly fails, because a moment later there’s another explosion, this time from behind me, right at the center of the force my girls are shooting at.
It knocks out several men, followed by precision shots which take out several more and leave the rest running for cover.
Sirens sound in the distance.
Fuck.
Niamh’s eyes are closed, her breath coming heavily.
“We seriously need to get out of here,” I mutter, looking around.
“Oh, you think, huh?” A hard arm wraps around my waist, hauling me to my feet. I realize, with a sickening jolt of relief, who it is and go limp instead of trying to fight. “When we get out of this,” Luke snarls, “I swear I’m going to kill you myself.”
Before I have time to answer, he thrusts me behind him, shoots a man who’s coming toward us, then bends down to Niamh, ripping open a bandage with his teeth.
Pulling her shirt up, he presses it against the blood oozing from her stomach.
“Press this hard,” he orders her. “There’s an ambulance coming. Can you hang on until it gets here?”
She nods.
“Good.” Luke pushes me down beside her and gives me a death stare. “Don’t even think about moving from this spot.”
Leaping to the top of a container, he picks off several stragglers, then makes it to where Sally, Ana, and the other girls are closing in on the remaining men.
“Leave them,” he orders. “Sally, go and open that second container. We’re going to have to get the girls to the van on foot. Can you do that?”
She nods. “What about—” She looks at the remaining men.
“I’ll take care of them,” he says dismissively. “The way is clear to the container. Open it. I’ll cover you while you get them out of here. Go.”
Sally hesitates.
“Fucking go,” Luke snaps, and Sally obeys, running for the container, followed by the team of girls. The remaining men yell when they break clear, and start to follow them.
I lurch up, unsure what to do. Luke glares at me, his eyes so fierce that I crouch back down again.
Then he spins out from behind the container, so fast I barely make sense of his movements.
He takes the first man with a knife across the throat, then uses the man’s gun to shoot the next one.
The next three go down in a mass of movement I can’t quite make out.
By the time Luke is running silently back to me, they’re nothing but bodies on the ground.
He bends down, checking Niamh again, then crosses the yard to the container.
“Ana and Maria, go. Get the vans started.” He takes up position behind the open door of the container, from which the bewildered girls are emerging, sobbing with fear.
“That way,” he orders Sally in a low voice, nodding at a dark part of the yard that leads back to the fence.
“I’ve got people at the van to cover you if you hit any trouble. Hurry.”
As the girls start stumbling across the ground, two more men come at Luke, firing, and the girls scream.
Luke runs at them, then spins and somehow hits both of them hard enough to send them flying as if they were rag dolls.
He takes both of their guns. “Hurry!” he calls in a low voice to Sally as the sirens get closer.
The last girl is barely out of the container when he runs back over to me.
By that time, it’s too late for us to follow them. The flashing lights are already visible, the sirens so close they’re screaming.
“Go,” Niamh says feebly from the ground. “They can’t find you here, Zin, or we’re all finished.”
Luke pulls me upright. “Do exactly as I say.” Taking my hand, he leads me into the dark labyrinth of containers.
We run silently through the rows, heading away from the fence where the vans are.
I don’t question him.
Whoever this Luke is, I clearly have no idea what he’s capable of.
Nor am I too sure he wouldn’t just knock me out cold and throw me over his shoulder if I started to question him.
We run until we’re at the final row at the edge of the storage yard. These are old, rusted containers, piled three high, and have clearly been here for some time. Luke stops and looks around, then crouches down in front of me. “On my shoulders.”
I stare at his back, frowning.
He glares at me over his shoulder. “Fucking do it, Zin.”
He puts his hands over his head, and I take them to brace myself as I climb onto his shoulders.
“There’s a pull-down ladder on the outside of the second container,” he says.
“Use it to climb up to the third one. The door will be open.” The grim expression on his face doesn’t invite discussion any more than his rough tone, so I just do as he says.
I hear him climb the ladder behind me then pull it up.
A moment later, he hauls himself into the container, closing the door behind him.
“Strip,” he growls.
“What?” My heart is thudding. I can hear the shouts and sirens of the police and ambulance nearby.
The container is completely dark except for three small round holes about an inch wide that have clearly been drilled into it recently, but given that it’s dark outside, they don’t provide much light.
I can take a good guess at who made the holes.
Going by the duffel bag on the floor, which Luke is rummaging around in, and the plastic water bottles nearby, he was in here for a while tonight before I arrived.
“You heard me.” Luke pulls off his camo gear and opens a bottle of water, which he uses to wash the blood off his face and body.
“Strip. Then wash the blood off your face. There’s a change of clothes in the bag.
” He throws the bottle of water to me. Given the barely controlled fury in his face, I judge it wiser not to argue.
I pull off my clothes, then splash water over my head and shoulders. I’m shaking so much I drop the water bottle. It hits the floor with a dull thunk that echoes with horrible clarity.
“Over there!” someone yells, and the sound of running footsteps start coming toward us.
Luke’s hand on my shoulder makes me freeze. I look up. In the dim light, he puts a finger over his lips. The footsteps are coming closer.
Clad in nothing but tight black boxers, Luke presses his face to the small holes in the wall, then slowly rolls away from it. Pulling me close to him, he puts his mouth against my ear.
“Port Authority,” he breathes. “Don’t move unless I tell you to, and for Chrissakes, don’t speak.” He turns around to face the entrance and slips me behind him, against the wall, then picks up his knife from the floor.
I stand completely still as the voices come closer. Luke is in front of me, his huge body completely dwarfing mine, knife balanced lightly in his hand. I can sense, rather than see, the tension in his body, the hard edge of danger he’s poised upon.
“It was that crazy Melikov bitch again.” One of the voices drifts up to us. “She took all the girls in that second container. Although that might not be a bad thing, now that the cops are here.”
“What about that agent?” another man says. “We need to send someone to the hospital to take care of her, before she talks.”
Niamh? I tense. Fuck.
“No. We just plead stupid, tell the cops we didn’t know she was a uniform. They think we’re all idiots anyway.” The man’s voice turns darker. “Anyway, it isn’t her we came for. It’s Melikov who’s the problem. Our orders are to get her, alive if we can. Dead, if not.”
The two men have paused right beneath us, by the sound of it. My heart has slowed to nothing more than a dull thud, and I barely dare to breathe.
“Surely she’s not still here.” The other man sounds skeptical. “Didn’t she get away with the rest of them?”
“I don’t know. Maybe.” He sounds uncertain.
“Let’s check the fence again.” Slowly, horribly slowly, their footsteps start to recede.
I stay frozen against the wall, my heart suddenly racing, heat and then ice rushing through my veins. For a long time, until the voices are completely gone, neither of us moves.
Then, in a swift movement, Luke is right in front of me, heat radiating from him in a dangerous wave.
His huge hands grip the steel ridges on either side of my head like he wants to bend them, the knife still between his fingers.
His eyes glitter in the dim light filtering through the holes.
I can feel his barely restrained savagery, smell the blood and cordite on his body.
My mouth is dry, fear still pounding through me. “I’m sorry,” I whisper.
Luke’s mouth twists contemptuously. “No, you’re not.” He doesn’t move.
My breath stops, my entire being consumed by his nearness, the raw power of his body so close to my own.
I’m cripplingly aware that I’m naked except for a few scraps of underwear. And that Luke’s tight-fitting boxers are completely incapable of disguising the hard need trapped behind them.
Lust, pure and fierce, hits with an urgency that turns my limbs to molten heat.
Luke’s eyes bore into mine.
My lips part, my body arching toward his like a magnet to a lodestone.
Then his mouth is on mine, and the world disappears.