7
The body of one of Austin’s guards lies lifeless at my feet, a pool of blood pouring out of the bullet hole in the middle of his forehead and the one to his chest and I step over him without a moment’s thought. My focus is on finding Sierra.
I grip my gun tight in my hand as I make my way through kitchen. As Ollie promised, the backdoor was left unlocked, allowing me easy access to the house, I just have to find Sierra before Austin’s other guys find me.
I’m outnumbered, but I’m not out of my depth. I trained for situations like this, I did it for years in the Marines and came out the other side. I will survive this, I have to. For her.
Following Ollie’s directions, I head down the steep narrow steps that lead to the basement.
As I get closer to the bottom, I can hear fighting; male grunts and the unmistakable sound of skin hitting skin.
I stick close to the wall, my gun held high in front of me as I reach the bottom and turn the corner to find Ollie and Austin rolling around on the floor, but something off to the side catches my attention, the sight of it alone has me wanting to fall to my knees.
Sierra.
I don’t know what exactly I expected to find once I got to her, but it is nothing compared to what is right in front of me now.
She’s curled up on her side, her battered and bruised back facing me, her naked body trembling on the dirty mattress she’s lying on, but it’s not the cuts and bruises that concern me the most. It’s the blood.
There’s so much blood pooling between her legs, soaking into the fabric of the mattress.
“Fuck, princess,” I breathe out, closing the distance between us as I shrug off my jacket.
I drape it over her frail body and she twitches slightly. She lets out a cry as her hands move to her lower belly.
I lean in close to her ear as I manoeuvre her into my arms. “I’ve got you, princess.”
Her eyes flutter closed before she passes out. I rise to my feet, looking back at Ollie and Austin as they continue to fight.
I could kill him now. I could take a shot and all of this would be over. It would be so easy.
But with killing Austin, I run the risk of hitting Ollie.
“Get her out of here!” Ollie shouts a second before Austin drives his fist into the side of his face. “Go!” he gurgles, and I do as he says.
I carefully carry Sierra up the stairs, her cheek resting over my heart that thumps wildly in my chest.
I did it.
I fucking found her. The feeling inside me right now is unlike anything I’ve ever felt in my life. A million different emotions are flooding through me, it’s overwhelming. So overwhelming, that I don’t anticipate what happens next.
The click of a gun behind me makes me freeze. “Take one more step and you get to watch her die before I kill you too.”
I turn around to find Austin a few meters away, his gun aimed at the sleeping beauty in my arms. His eye is swelling shut and blood trickles from both his temple and the corner of his mouth.
I tighten my hold on Sierra. “I’m taking her with me.”
“Not if I have anything to do with it,” he disagrees.
“Come on, Sloane. You and I both know it’s over.”
His eyes lift briefly to something over my shoulder before returning to me. “Yeah, I suppose it is,” he says with a smirk, and before I have chance to react, I’m smashed over the head with something blunt and hard from behind.
Sierra and I go down. She cries out as she hits the floor and I do my best to brace myself above her so I don’t crush her with my weight.
My vision turns cloudy for a second, my head thick and heavy like I’ve drank too much alcohol because the world around me spins at a million miles an hour.
“Boss, there’s a vehicle parked up not far from here, two other vehicles just pulled up alongside it, it looks like the FBI.”
“Fuck!” Austin shouts, his voice echoing around my foggy brain. “Take the bitch and put her in the van. I’ll be there in a minute.”
“Sir, what about him?” I can only assume they’re talking about me.
“Leave him. Same goes for Ollie, let the cunt bleed out. With any luck they’ll both be dead before help arrives. Now move!”
“D-Don’t touch her!” I try, but my words come out slurred as my mind swims, and all I can do is watch as Sierra’s limp body is dragged away, the jacket I draped over her slipping off, leaving her completely exposed once again.
“A-Alec… Alec!” she cries wearily, her voice pained, as the guy who hit me hauls her out of the room.
Gripping the edge of the kitchen counter, I pull myself up onto unsteady feet, feeling the rush of something warm and wet trickle down the back of my neck and beneath my shirt, but I don’t have time to dwell on it.
I stumble my way out of the kitchen in the direction they took Sierra, led solely by the trail of her blood on the ground.
I fight through the pain in my head as I burst through a door that leads me outside, just in time to see a black van pulling away, but not before Austin, who sits in the passenger seat grins at me through the window.
Before I know it, I’m running. I’m running as fast as my size twelve boots will allow, my steps eat up the dirt beneath me as the van speeds along the gravel driveway, but I’m not fast enough.
Despite the burn in my legs, my effort is wasted. The van soon pulls a lead ahead of me, but I don’t give up. I never will.
Just as the van begins to disappear into the night, a set of headlights appear out of nowhere. A black SUV careens towards the van, cutting them off. The driver of the van brakes sharply, allowing me precious seconds to get closer.
I close in on the van as its wheels screech with acceleration, maneuvering around the SUV blocking its path. Just as I reach for the handle, my grip closes around nothing as the van peels away.
One of the SUVs slam to a halt beside me, the side door sliding open. “Get in!” Max shouts, reaching out to give me a hand.
I climb in just moments before the driver floors it, slamming me against the back of my seat from the force.
My head spins from the hit I took, but all I can focus on is Sierra. “She’s in there. She’s in the van.”
“You okay, man?” Max asks, noticing the blood that trickles down from my head, soaking my shirt.
“I will be when we get her back,” I say, wincing as I press harder onto my wound.
We gain on Austin’s van in no time, but it veers left and right, the driver weaving erratically, doing his best not to allow us alongside.
Bullets pelt the SUV, showering us in a spray of gunfire that ricochets off the armoured metal. The windshield takes a couple of hits, the glass splintering into a spiders web that spans the entire width, but it doesn’t break, not completely.
They manage to get a little further ahead, but there’s no shaking us. There’s movement in the back of the van, and we watch as a body is dumped unceremoniously out the back, rolling and tumbling along the ground over and over and over like a rag doll.
Sierra.
“Fuck!” Our driver swerves hard to the right and slams on the breaks as we skid to a sharp stop.
I slide open the door and rush over to her, dropping to my knees beside her body. Her black hair is a matted mess that covers her bruised face.
Her skin is marred with a dozen cuts and scrapes as a result of being shoved out of the van.
“Sierra? Princess?” I reach for the pulse point in her neck, relief flooding me when I feel its steady rhythm beneath my fingers.
“Max, I need your jacket!” I shout.
He climbs out of the van and crouches beside me, laying the jacket over her naked body.
“Jesus,” he mutters. “What the fuck did they do to her?”
“I think we both know the answer to that.”
I carefully scoop her into my arms and a frown knits her brow and she groans in pain.
I hurry back towards the SUV and climb back in, slamming the door shut behind me.
“Hospital, now!” I shout as I cradle her in my arms, her head resting against my chest.
My mind swirls with everything that just happened.
“My car is still at the house, and one of Austin’s guys, Ollie, the one who helped me, he’s injured,” I tell Max.
“I’ll send the SUV behind us back to the house to get him and get one of my guys to collect your car.”
“Thank you,” I say. “And, thanks for coming, I know it goes against your protocols but, if you hadn’t, we’d probably both be dead.” If not me, Sierra definitely would be.
“I might be FBI, but above all, I’m your friend. No way in hell was I letting you do this alone, despite how much I could murder you sometimes.”
“I knew you loved me really,” I tease.
He barks a laugh. “Shut the fuck up.”
Sierra stirs in my arms murmuring my name weakly. And if the sound of that doesn’t pierce straight through my heart.
I lean down and press my lips to her forehead. “You’re safe now, princess. I’ve got you.”