34. The Bullet Between Us
The Bullet Between Us
Jacob
Blood drips off my boots onto what's left of the thing on the floor.
Carter's already got Hayes free. They come up with rifles that were propped against the wall and I take the handgun from beside Kurt's body. My knuckles are screaming and I don't feel any of it.
Summer. Alive. She has to be. I'm not letting my head go anywhere else.
The alarms are deafening now. Red light strobes down the corridors, turning the whole place into a fever dream. Somewhere below us men are shouting over the top of each other.
Then gunfire. Fast. Panicked. Badly aimed.
None of it is ours. There isn't a badge left standing in this house except the two men beside me.
Which means Jackson's men are shooting at something.
I tell myself it's each other. Shadows. Their own reflections in all that expensive fucking glass. Frightened men in a dark house firing at anything that moves.
But she's loose in here somewhere.
And every one of those rounds is going somewhere.
"East corridor," Carter says.
We move.
The first guard comes round the corner almost into my chest. His eyes go wide. Too slow. I take him by the vest and put him skull-first into the wall hard enough that the sound cracks down the hallway, and he's out before he lands. Carter puts a round through his forehead anyway.
Another one steps out behind him with a shotgun already up and, before we can react, empties it into Hayes.
Fuck—
Carter fires past me and drops him. There's no time. There's no fucking time.
Hayes isn't getting up.
"Move," I say, and I hate the sound of my own voice saying it. I don’t leave my men. I never fucking leave them. But when I see blood up the walls, glass under our boots, smoke starting to curl from somewhere deeper in the house where the wiring's gone, I know time isn’t on my side.
A man comes out of a side room swinging a knife. I catch his wrist, drive my elbow into his throat until he gags, take the knife out of the air when it drops, and put it into the side of his neck. Hot blood sprays across my face, then he goes down choking and I step over him without looking.
Because I'm past mercy. Past restraint. Past everything except getting to her.
We take the stairs two at a time.
"You think she made it out?" Carter asks, reloading as we move.
I don't answer straight away, because if I let my head go there—if I let myself picture getting to her too late—there won't be anything left of me to finish this with.
"She's alive."
Not hope. Fact.
We come through into the lower corridor—
Movement at the far end.
My gun's up before I've registered anything.
Then everything in me stops.
There's a woman standing in the smoke down there. Her hair is dark. For one gutting half-second my brain says not her while every other part of me is already screaming that it is.
Then she turns her head.
And she sees me.
Summer.
And the world just—goes. The alarms. The strobing. The blood drying to my forearms. Carter somewhere at my shoulder. All of it drops away like someone cut the sound, and there's nothing left in the whole world but forty feet of corridor and her standing at the end of it.
Because I have carried the same picture behind my eyes every second since that gravel drive. Both her palms flat on the glass. Her mouth going round my name. The fog closing over the whole thing while I ran with my lungs tearing and my legs failing, thirty seconds behind her.
I've hauled those thirty seconds around like a stone sewn into my chest. I've felt them every time I closed my eyes. Thirty seconds is the distance between a man who saved her and whatever the hell I've been since.
And now she's forty feet away, and there is not one thing left standing between us.
She's a wreck. I take it in the way you take a bullet—all at once, no defense. She's shaking. Filthy. Barefoot. Her throat is a ruin of bruising and there's dried blood at the corner of her mouth, and she's holding herself like her own ribs are a stranger's.
He did that. Every mark on her is his.
I'm going to take this house apart.
Her face crumples. I watch it happen in pieces. The fight drains out of her shoulders first. Then her mouth trembles. Her eyes fill so quickly it's as if someone opened a valve behind them, and suddenly she's trying to breathe through something her body can't swallow.
“Jacob…”
My name in that wrecked voice. Screamed at a window that wouldn't open, at a man who wasn't there in time.
This time I am fucking here.
Then she runs.
She runs at me—after everything, after being carried out of my own home—our home—and hauled onto a helicopter and dragged up this mountain, she is coming toward me under her own power, and nobody in this world is taking her anywhere.
I'm already moving.
Forty feet. Thirty. Ten.
She hits me hard enough to take us both down. My arms lock around her. Her feet leave the floor.
She’s warm. Solid. Her heart slamming against my chest hard enough that I feel it through both of us.
Real. She's real.
Something that's been screaming inside me since that gravel drive finally shuts up.
Her arms lock around my neck like she means to weld herself there. Her whole body shakes against mine, and the sound coming out of her isn't crying—it's days of everything she couldn't let out, arriving at once.
I get a hand into all that dark hair, hold the back of her head, don't let go.
"I've got you." My voice is gravel. "I've got you, baby. I've fucking got you."
I press my face into her neck and breathe her in.
And underneath the smoke and the sweat, there it is. Her, buried beneath a scent that isn't hers.
I want to tear this mountain out of the ground by its roots.
Instead I hold her tighter. "I'm here. I'm never letting go of you again."
My hands move without asking me—her face, her arms, her ribs—because holding her isn't enough. I need the proof under my palms.
"You hurt?" It comes out rough as hell. "Did he touch you? Are you bleeding?"
She shakes her head. Fast. Too fast.
And she doesn't say a word.
Something in me goes cold, but I decide to put that away for later.
"I thought he killed you," she chokes out.
That nearly takes my legs out from under me. And that's when my brain finally catches up with the rest of the corridor.
Because she isn't alone.
Constance and Adelaide stand twenty feet away in a trafficker's fortress in the middle of a firefight, gray under the emergency lights, Constance with a fucking gun hanging from one hand.
"What the fuck—" It's out before I can stop it. "I told you two to stay—"
"Yeah," Constance says. "You did."
That's it. That's all she gives me. And I know there isn’t a single part of her that’s sorry for ignoring me.
I don't have a single second to spend on this. But my eyes go to Carter anyway, and Carter—who has never once in ten years failed to meet my eye—is very busy watching the corridor behind us.
He armed them.
He armed them because he knew they’d come up here and he never said a word to me about any of it. Carter steps awkwardly and reaches the other two. They stand like people who've come through a war.
Maybe we all have.
And for one second—one single second—I let myself breathe.
BANG.
Pain detonates through my shoulder, white-hot, and the roar comes out of me before I know it's coming.
Summer screams.
I go down hard, and the floor comes up, and everything on my right side turns to molten metal.
My head snaps up.
Jackson Moore is at the far end of the corridor with his gun up, chest heaving like he's run the whole way here, blood down the front of his shirt and half his ear gone.
And when his eyes find Summer on her knees beside me, something pulls at his face that isn't rage.
It's possession.
"She's mine," he snarls.
He says it like a man watching someone walk off with his property.
Summer's got fistfuls of my shirt. I try to get my weight under me and my shoulder won't take it—blood coming through the fabric fast, running warm down my ribs.
Jackson raises the gun again, and I know he’s aiming straight at my head.
I reach for my weapon. But I’m too slow. The pain whites out my vision for half a second. But somehow I still know he smiles.
Then Summer moves.
She comes off the floor. Lunges for my handgun—the one that left my hand when I fell—brings it up in both fists.
Wrong grip. Hands shaking so hard the barrel won't sit still.
And Jackson freezes.
Actually freezes. Shock crosses his face—real shock—because somewhere in that ruined head of his he still believes she belongs to him too much to do it.
"Anna—" he whispers.
BANG.
The shot goes off like the corridor itself split.
Jackson jerks sideways. The gun leaves his hand. Blood bursts out of his thigh, he hits the wall, then goes down onto one knee with a strangled sound I'll be hearing for the rest of my life.
Summer's still holding the gun. Shaking so hard she looks like she might go down too. Her eyes are huge. Horrified.
Jackson stares up from the floor. Confusion. Pain. Disbelief.
He didn't think she had it in her.
But the truth is, he's had her for days and he still doesn't know one single thing about her.
Carter's past us before Jackson has a chance to move. He boots the gun away down the corridor, takes him by the back of the neck, puts his face into the concrete hard enough that it bounces.
"Move again," Carter growls, wrenching his arms back, "and I'll cave your fucking skull in."
Constance hasn't moved. Adelaide's white as death.
Summer drops the gun like it burned her.
"Oh my God." Then her face crumples. "Oh my God—"
She's down beside me, hands on my face, shaking.
"You're bleeding—Jacob, oh my God—"
"It's okay," I grind out.
It is absolutely not okay.