Chapter 9
NINE
You gotta be fucking kidding me.
Ryan bit back a growl of rage and pain as he rolled off Candace and grabbed her arm to drag her behind cover, his right hand slick already with blood as he clutched the rifle.
She scrambled up onto her hands and knees, crawling beside him while blood ran down the length of his right arm. He’d served a total of six combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, managed to avoid any bullet holes throughout all of them, but he wound up getting shot at a fucking resort in Montana?
Fuck this.
People were still screaming and running all over the place. Someone was still out there shooting at them.
Ignoring the pain, focused on getting them to safety, he shoved to his hands and knees, dragged Candace up, and took off in a running crouch, her hand clutched tightly in his left one. Bullets slammed into the rock wall a few feet beside him, sending up a spray of razor-sharp shards.
“Go, go,” he urged her, flinging her in front of him toward safety.
Two strides from the corner of the building ahead of them, another shot splintered the air. Candace flinched and clapped a hand to her side an instant before she disappeared from view.
His heart shot into his throat. He dove around the corner just as more bullets punched into the fieldstone wall behind him where he had been only a split second before.
The instant he hit the ground, a hand grabbed him and hauled him the rest of the way behind cover. He rolled over to find Cam bending over him.
“You hit?” the PJ said over the chaotic noise and confusion around them.
Ryan didn’t answer, his only concern finding his wife. Turning onto his left side, he pushed up and scanned frantically for her.
She was crouched down against the stone foundation of the building, her face pale, a stream of blood trickling through her fingers as she pressed a hand to her upper left side and his anger evaporated as raw fear punched through him. “Candace.”
Her dark gaze met his, wide and startled. “I’m okay,” she blurted.
No, she wasn’t. He was already rolling to his feet, rushing for her. “She’s hit.”
“So are you,” Cam said, clamping a hand on his good shoulder and shoving him back down. “Stay the hell put so I can take a look.”
He wrenched away and opened his mouth to tell his buddy to fuck off, but Erin was already crawling her way to Candace. “I’ve got her.” She took Candace by the shoulders, saying something he couldn’t hear. Fuck, how bad was she hit?
Ryan shoved Cam away and rolled to his feet. His wife was fucking bleeding, he didn’t care about himself.
Cam let him go but followed close behind. Whoever was out there shooting was quiet now, but that didn’t mean the threat was over. Ryan crouched next to Candace, set a hand on her shoulder and cupped the side of her face with the other, the burn of his wound barely registering beneath his alarm.
Her dark brown eyes were dazed, glazed with pain. “Baby...”
“No, I’m fine,” she insisted, the words choppy, her breath coming in gasps. “I’m breathing okay and I can move my arm. I don’t think it hit anything serious. What about you?” She ran her free hand down his right arm.
“I’m good.” The bullet wound stung like someone had poured fucking battery acid into it, but he could still move his arm so he figured it wasn’t broken, even if parts of it had gone numb and some of his muscles were weak.
He rubbed her back with his left hand, feeling helpless. God, if he’d even for one moment thought there might be a threat waiting for them outside, he never would have exited the building that way.
Erin already had Candace’s sweater up and was examining the wound just under the edge of her shoulder blade.
She’d worked as a nurse at Craig Joint Theater Hospital at Bagram for multiple tours, and had seen every kind of trauma case imaginable.
“It’s still in there, buried under the edge of her scapula.
Must have been a ricochet.” She looked up into Candace’s face. “Do your ribs hurt when you breathe?”
She shook her head. “Not really.”
Erin nodded. “Anywhere else hurt? Your shoulder blade?”
“I said I’m fine.” She thrust out her right hand toward him. “Now give me a damn weapon so I can shoot back at these assholes.”
Ryan slipped a hand around her nape and leaned in to plant a hard kiss on her mouth. “You got it.”
Erin glanced at him. “She’ll be okay. I’ll try to get the bullet out and get the bleeding stopped as best I can until we can get clear.”
Ryan nodded, shrugged off his pack, and dug out his pistol. After slamming in a fresh magazine, he handed it to Candace. If the shooters maintained their distance, it wouldn’t do her much good, but at least she’d feel better being armed.
Now that he wasn’t frozen with terror that his wife was going to die, he scanned the others, all hidden behind this low retaining wall running the length of this side of the building.
Wade was on his phone, probably talking to the cops, rifle in his free hand. Ryan grabbed ammo from his pack and loaded his rifle. His right upper arm and the back of his hand were numb, the bullet wound burning like fire.
Rolling to his belly, he crawled his way over to where Jackson lay near the end of the protective wall with his own weapon trained toward the shooters. Maya was right next to him with her service pistol, searching for a target.
As he neared them, the back of Ryan’s neck prickled. All eight of them were now pinned down behind this low rock wall with an unknown number of shooters out there, making them one giant, fat target.
They couldn’t stay here. He and everyone else with a rifle had to lay down covering fire while the others spread out and found a better defensive position.
Ryan bit back a grunt of pain as he nestled the stock of his weapon against his right shoulder, pressing his right cheek to it to stare through the scope. The night vision device would enable him to see a potential target in the darkness, but it wasn’t as good as having NVGs.
“See any muzzle flashes?” he asked the others, aware of the blood that continued to run down his arm, puddling on the flagstone beneath his bent elbow.
“A couple at one o’clock a few seconds ago,” Maya answered. Then to Jackson, “I hit one, but I don’t think he’s down. Got anything?”
“Not yet,” he answered, his Texas drawl making his voice seem even calmer.
Wade made his way over to crouch on one knee beside them. “How we looking?”
“No targets yet,” Ryan answered. Who the hell had fired at them?
“Cops are on the way and I just got off a call with Taylor. He’s alerting the local Feds and is on his way here with his brother. Said he’s bringing backup.”
Until then, they were on their own. “We gotta get the hell out from behind this wall,” Ryan muttered. Who knew how many shooters there were, and what kind of weapons they had? It made his skin crawl to stay here another second.
“Yeah,” Wade muttered, putting his eye to his scope.
Quickly they came up with a plan. Candace still held the pistol tight in her right hand, her expression intent as Erin did what she could to stop the bleeding.
Ryan wanted to haul her into his arms and not let go but he couldn’t until this threat was neutralized. He loved his wife so damn much, respected how strong and brave she was. He couldn’t stand to lose her. She was everything to him.
“You and Erin get to cover while we divert them,” he said to her. “Maya and Dev, you’ll cover them while we head out.”
Both women nodded once, gazes trained on the darkness beyond. “Got it,” Maya answered.
“Ready?” he asked the guys. They all nodded.
On his three count, Ryan and Wade burst out from behind the wall, firing spaced shots across the patio toward where the shooting had come from. Cam, Jackson, and Maya laid down covering fire for them as he and Wade sprinted to the relative protection of the water feature on the opposite side.
Flashes of light burst in the darkness and rounds slammed into the rocks in front of them. Bleeding and royally pissed off by this point, Ryan ducked around the corner of the fountain and caught sight of one of the shooters in his scope. He aimed and fired two shots, hitting him center mass.
The guy cried out and fell.
“One shooter down,” he said to Wade, wishing he had comms with the others so they knew what was going on.
“I saw two more moving northeast.”
Swiveling around, Ryan waved to signal the others and Jackson signaled back. They were ready.
He faced forward again, searching through his scope for another target. He and Wade began firing again, laying down covering fire so the rest of their group could move.
“We’re clear,” Cam called out a minute later.
Ryan’s heart rate eased and when he looked back there was no one left behind the wall. Candace was now out of sight behind solid cover with Erin to treat her wound, and Dev and Maya were both armed as well. She was in good hands, and as safe as he could make her for the moment.
Now he and the guys had to hunt down the rest of these bastards before anyone else got hurt.
He signaled to Cam and Jackson, hiding behind the end of a short brick wall that separated the patio from the garden, then resumed firing to keep the shooters at bay and give the PJs time to join him and Wade.
Thirty seconds later, Cam and Jackson reached them, rifles to their shoulders and ready to rock.
“Two more shooters moving to the northeast,” he told them. “We’ll go in pairs. Wade and I’ll take the right, you two take the left.”
“Roger that,” Jackson murmured, eye to his scope.
He and Wade peeled off and started across the north lawn while Cam and Jackson covered them. They stopped behind a decorative rock formation in the middle of the grass and covered the other guys, then kept leapfrogging their way toward where the shooters had been.
The one Ryan had hit was gone, but there was a blood trail for them to follow, though it was hard to see with just his scope to aid them in the darkness.