Chapter 16 #3
He spun beneath me, blood splattered down the front of his shirt, very clearly from his nose, and not a gunshot wound.
Hammering my fists down onto his breastplate to pummel him into submission, he snatched both of my wrists. “Your life was never yours to begin with! I gave you more than anyone else got. You owe me!”
“I don’t owe you anything.” Wind rustled the stalks, and though faint, I made out sounds from the road. Tires on gravel. A low hum. A cut engine. I had thirty seconds, maybe more, maybe less. I needed to keep him talking. “Let go of me!”
Mads rolled over me and splayed my hands above my head. “Submit!”
“No!” I writhed beneath him, then spat in his face.
“Delilah, so help me god, I’ll knock you out.”
“You killed Lawrence! You made him kill himself!”
“I was playing the long game, and Lawrence was my way in! I did all the work! I bided my time, befriended him!” I headbutted Mads in his rounded belly, but it wasn’t enough to hurt.
He leveled me with a look. “When I got him in with the Seal, I had my team slip him so many drugs he didn’t know who he was anymore.
And you know what, yeah, it fucking hurt, because I genuinely ended up liking the guy! ”
It was the worst possible thing he could have done.
Lawrence had seen what the cult had done to our parents.
How they forget themselves. And us. They became malleable pieces of plastic, shaped to someone else’s will.
Lawrence had made me promise that if something like that ever happened to him that I’d put him out of his misery, and now, I was learning that he’d been subjected to his worst fear. And I had done nothing about it.
It was more than I could handle.
“You didn’t have to do it. You could have just taken me!” I heard footsteps. I needed to get the rest of the confession out of him while I still could.
“Your brother would have sawed his own leg off to find you. He needed to be out of the picture.” Mads’ eyes were bloodshot. “He needed to sacrifice himself in order for this to work!”
“You killed him and framed me! I was in prison!”
“I was going to get you out when the time was right! I had a plan! What I didn’t expect was mummy and daddy FBI to come bust you out.”
“And you killed your team at the cabins for what—sport?” I knew it was wrong, it was a leading question and a change of subject, but I had my motives.
“They went rogue! They disobeyed my orders, and went behind my back to—” Mads drew his palm down his face. I’d riled him up so much he almost forgot about our surroundings. “Delilah, I have fifteen years invested, and eight million reasons to bring you in. I have to be the one to do it.”
“That seems like an exaggeration.”
“Dollars, Delilah. Eight million—” I lurched, kneeing Mads between the legs. “Fucking bitch!” He shifted his weight, one hand grabbing at his package, the other wrapping around my legs and lifting.
It was an awkward position. Not one I’d expected, nor would have opted into by choice. All of my weight was on the back of my shoulders. My legs elevated, bound by Mads bicep as I bucked, a familiar rectangular device slid out of the waist of my pants, clattering against the compacted dirt.
Mads’ focus snagged on the device in the dirt. “What the hell is that?”
It was my phone. My real one. The one I didn’t throw out the window, and was still very much relaying my location back to Jack and Todd. “You threw it out the car! I saw you! How the fuck do you have a phone!”
He dropped my legs. A mistake on his part. I launched my foot at his face.
My heel made contact with a satisfying squelch, striking him in the eye. A smile tugged at my lips. He wasn’t going to look pretty any time soon, and evidence of him losing this fight would be all over his mugshot.
“Grrahhh!” The sound Mads released was half-way between a growl and yell, as his hands clamped down on my leg and yanked.
My fingers clawed at the ground for resistance, holding out for the opportunity to fight smarter, not harder.
So, when Mads shifted his weight with the intent to gain leverage for a second pull, I pushed myself towards him instead.
My back dragged across the ground and Mads’ upper body fell back, pulling me along with him. I ignored the fire scraping against my skin, and the fury simmering beneath, as I twisted out of Mads’ grip, a motion which somehow had me reverse straddling his rib cage.
I didn’t have to win. Or escape. I only had to buy time.
But that didn’t mean I couldn’t make him pay.
I was midway through dropping all my weight on Mads’ stomach when I heard a familiar voice call through the foliage, “Hands up!”
It was rough, and stern, and just about the sexiest thing I’d ever heard.
“Ooof!” Mads sputtered beneath me, trying to catch his breath. My body jostled up and down as he coughed.
A sly smile broke out across my face, as I looked up at Jack and Todd. They were a full head and shoulders above the crop looking as rugged as ever, their weapons trained on Mads. I dropped my weight onto Mads’ belly once more for good measure. “Oh look, mummy and daddy FBI are here.”