Chapter 15 #2
That I’m not that girl anymore.
The knife in the guard’s hand shifts.
And I’m frozen in the past.
A fatal mistake.
The guard lunges at me.
By the time my body responds, he’s already on me.
His hand slams into my wrist.
The knife flies from my grip.
Panic spikes through me.
The guard twists behind me.
An arm snakes around my throat.
My back collides with his chest.
The constriction hits immediately and my airway thins.
I dig my fingers into his forearm, fighting for leverage.
Nothing.
His hold only compresses further.
Stars burst across my vision.
My pulse thunders in my ears.
The warehouse spins.
I try to drive an elbow backward.
I miss and I try again and miss.
The guard sneers something at me I can’t make out.
All I can hear is the blood rushing in my head.
The terrifying realization that I let myself drift.
That I looked away and gave him an opening.
The pressure around my throat increases.
My lungs burn.
“REAP!”
Tyler.
His voice pierces through the fog surrounding me.
An instant later the weight behind me vanishes.
The guard is ripped away so violently that I stumble forward.
Air tears into my lungs.
I cough hard as I clutch my throat. It feels raw.
Every breath scrapes as my knees threaten to buckle.
I turn just in time to see Tyler slam into the guard.
Pure fury radiates from him.
The kind reserved for moments when someone puts their hands on me.
The man doesn't have time to do more than register what's happening.
One minute he’s standing, the next he’s crashing into the concrete floor.
Tyler follows him down.
The guard scrambles for the knife that was in his hand.
Tyler easily kicks it away and it skitters into another puddle.
The guard dares to look Tyler straight on.
Tyler snatches him by the front of his shirt and hauls him partially off the ground.
The sky unleashes a torrent of rain, but Tyler’s voice cuts through the chaos, dark and lethal enough to eclipse the storm itself.
His teeth grind together, spit flying as he glares at the guard. “No one touches my wife,” he growls.
The guard’s face drains of all color as the reality of the situation hits him.
Tyler doesn’t give him a chance to respond.
He aims his Glock at the guard's stomach, right at the abdominal aorta and fires.
The guard clutches his stomach, gasping through the pain. He has maybe minutes left.
Tyler knew that and judging by the look on his face, that was his intention. He doesn’t move as he glares at the guard dying with his hands clenched into fists.
Then his gaze finds me and everything changes.
Lurking underneath the fury raging in his eyes is something infinitely more terrifying.
The understanding of how close he came to losing me and the promise that he’ll never let it happen again.
Within seconds, he’s standing in front of me and his hands find my face.
My shoulders, my throat, checking for injuries and making sure I’m still standing.
“I’m okay,” I rasp.
My voice sounds foreign to my own ears.
A muscle jumps in his cheek and a myriad of emotions cross through his eyes.
A bruise is already forming beneath his fingertips.
All I can focus on is Tyler.
The look in his eyes.
I reach up and cover one of his hands with mine.
“I’m here.”
His shoulders unwind by a degree.
Then reality collides back around me.
Neither of us wants to, but we break our connection.
Tyler still stands beside me, eyes laced with concern on my face.
“We need to keep moving.”
The rain streams down both of us as I concentrate to get my breathing under control. I fetch my knives and head back to Tyler.
The light leaks from the warehouse in the dark like a living hell daring us to come closer.
Tyler takes my wrist briefly before we set off.
“You with me?”
I fix my gaze on the warehouse and wonder how much blood waits for us behind those walls. My hand flexes around the handle.
“Always.”
Tyler searches my face for a heartbeat longer before freeing my wrist. Then we move out.
The side entrance door of the steel gate around the warehouse sits thirty yards ahead near the loading dock, partially hidden beneath a rusted roof. A lone dim security light sputters above it through the storm.
Warning bells start ringing in my head. No one leaves an entrance this exposed, especially someone running an operation like this. Which means there’s another guard somewhere.
Tyler crouches beside the corner of the gate and checks his watch, rain dripping from his hair onto the ground.
“Two moving toward the west side.” The words leave him with unshakeable authority. “Probably making rounds.”
I scour the yard, once, twice, three times.
Shipping pallets, forklifts, stacks of plastic-wrapped crates turning ghostly beneath the rain.
Motion registers in my peripheral vision, and my gaze snaps toward it.
A flashlight beam skims across the gap between the containers before just as quickly retreating back into the darkness.
“There,” I whisper.
Two men, both armed. Walking lazily side by side holding umbrellas while one of them laughs at something on his phone.
My control on my emotions weakens, stretched thin by the faint screams coming from the phone’s speaker.
Tyler hears it too, his entire demeanor shifting from alert to deadly.
“Take the one on the left.” A lethal calm threads through his whisper.
My chin lowers and we split apart abruptly.
I drop into a crouch and advance through the shadows between stacked pallets while rainwater splashes against my boots. My breathing stabilizes automatically.
The world narrows.
The closer they get, the quieter everything inside me becomes.
One of the guards takes another drag from his vape while the flashlight bounces aimlessly, the light reflecting off the wet ground.
“Seriously, man,” he snickers. “That blonde is making these idiots spend thousands tonight.”
Rage bursts hot beneath my ribs.
The moment they pass my position, I strike and explode from behind the pallets and hit the first guard with enough force to drive him sideways into the containers.
The umbrella flies from his hand.
Before he can make a sound, my knife punches into his stomach.
His mouth gapes, stunned.