Chapter 13
NADIA
PRESENT DAY
Nadia’s eyes flew open. She jerked to sit up only to find she couldn’t move. A shock of fear jolted her system. A hand was clamped over her mouth, keeping her prone in the bed.
“We aren’t alone,” Thomas whispered against her ear, leaning over her in the dark bedroom. His warm breath sent a zing of alarm down her neck, and not because he loomed so close with not an inch of space between them.
Her gaze darted to the door, cracked open from when Thomas had entered. Emotionally wrung out after Kane’s visit, as well as from watching the news all day, she’d barely eaten anything for dinner before showering and collapsing from exhaustion. It had to be well after midnight.
“Don’t make a sound. They don’t know where we are yet, but they’re looking.”
She nodded, making eye contact with him, and Thomas removed his hand.
He helped her up and pointed at her shoes.
She put on her sneakers, tying the laces quickly with trembling fingers.
Her thoughts surprisingly weren’t scattered.
Rather, they were surgical in their precision.
Get dressed. Get out. Stay alive. She moved fast, picking up her limited belongings.
Thomas tugged the clothes in her hand and shook his head. She dropped the garments, getting his meaning. They were leaving everything behind.
He put her phone in her hand, which she slipped into her pocket.
He took her hand and pulled her with him to the door.
He angled his ear at the opening, listening.
The floor creaked from somewhere within the house.
A door softly closed. Thomas nudged her into his side and whispered against her ear. “When I say go, we go.”
“Where?” she mouthed silently in the darkness. His eyes must have been more adjusted than hers because he saw what she’d asked.
“Out the slider in the master bedroom.”
So across the hall, into the room, out the back, and over the fence, she finished in her head. Their escape route he’d planned when they first arrived. They just needed to slip from the house without whoever was here realizing they were getting away.
Thomas patted his jean pockets with his free hand. His grip on her hand tightened. She tugged his arm and he looked at her. She raised her brows significantly. What’s the problem?
“Car keys.” He shook his head.
She bit into the corner of her lip. He didn’t have them? He’d been keeping them on him just for this situation. When had he taken them out of his pocket?
Then she remembered.
Dinnertime. He’d slipped his phone into the same front pocket he kept the keys to help her cook.
His phone had rung, and in his rush to answer—he’d been hoping for a call from James—he’d pulled out the phone and the keys.
The keys dropped on the floor. She’d put them on the counter when he’d walked away to take the call. But he’d never put them back.
“Kitchen,” she whispered.
Fuck. His mouth shaped the word. He glared at the floor, thinking.
“All right. We leave the car.”
She squeezed his hand. And go where? How?
But he was already cautiously easing the door open.
He moved into the hallway only to stop short.
Nadia bumped into his back but he stood his ground.
His hand slipped from hers. Through the darkness, Nadia made out the shape of a gun pressed to Thomas’s temple the same instant she heard the rack of a slide.
“El Carnicero envía sus saludos.” The Butcher sends his regards.
Like a cascading waterfall of liquid nitrogen, the warning doused Nadia in fear, instantly freezing her to the core.
With a violent tremor rattling through her, she was backing up into the room before she realized she was moving.
Just as suddenly, Thomas whipped his hand up and back, knocking the intruder’s arm holding the gun away from his head.
Using his shoulder as leverage, Thomas slammed the intruder’s arm into the door frame, once, twice, then a third time. The gun dropped with a metallic clunk.
The intruder grunted, unfazed. He lunged at Thomas, the two becoming a blur of movement in the dark as fists met body parts. Nadia stood stuck to where she was, petrified with fear, unable to distinguish Thomas from their attacker. Two figures in the dark, clad in black.
Arms swung. A leg kicked out. Then someone went down with a hard thud and pained groan.
“Get the keys,” Thomas grunted. Fists raised, he stood in a defensive stance over the man on the ground. Her relief that he wasn’t the one on the floor was short-lived. The intruder hooked his foot behind Thomas’s ankle and Thomas went down hard. The other guy shot up to his feet.
“Tom!” she shouted.
“Keys,” he ordered, clutching the arm he’d landed on. She hesitated when he struggled to stand. “I’ll be okay. Go. Get out of here.”
The other man laughed, standing over Thomas.
She couldn’t leave him, not like this. But then there was a flash of silver.
Thomas slashed a blade upward along his attacker’s inner thigh.
The man squealed and dropped to a knee. Thomas slashed again and again, rising to his feet as he did so. Where did he learn to fight like that?
“Nadia!”
It was an order. She roused from her stupor.
“I’m going.”
Her toe kicked the gun in her haste to leave, sending the weapon spinning down the hallway. She picked it up as she raced into the kitchen to snag the keys. But they weren’t there. The counter space by the sink where she’d left them was clear.
“What the—?” She swore she’d left them right there.
“Looking for these… Nadia?” The thickly accented question came from behind her. Keys rattled.
Nadia jolted, then froze. Her stomach plunged in her abdomen.
Time slowed down—that fraction of a second between hearing his voice and the brutal realization that their situation was much worse than they’d thought—before she turned to face a second intruder.
He smiled behind a ski mask as black as his cold eyes and lifted a gun, aiming the muzzle between her eyes.
He wouldn’t miss, not at point blank range.
Another flash of silver in the corner of her eye. The intruder jerked with a guttural grunt of pain, his shoulder snapping backward, the momentum forcing him to stumble back a step. His gun arm wavered, blood seeping around the knife embedded in the shoulder of his firing arm.
“?Pinche gringo!”
He switched hands and aimed again, but not at her.
Nadia didn’t sense her arm lifting. She didn’t feel the icy metal in her hand. She didn’t register pulling the trigger. Not until the intruder’s head swung sharply back and his body crumpled to the floor. A ribbon of blood oozed from his forehead. She’d shot him in the face.
My god, who was she?
The gun hung limply in her grasp as she cried out, stumbling backwards until her back hit the counter edge. She’d killed a man. Ended his life. Nausea swelled and black spots swam in her vision.
Suddenly, Thomas was in front of her, hand gripping her shoulder, lifting her chin, his piercing gaze demanding she focus on him. “It’s okay. It’s going to be okay.” He took the gun from her and slipped it into the waist of his pants at the small of his back.
“I shot him.”
“Yeah, you did. And he would have shot me if you hadn’t. He’d have killed you next.”
Her bottom lip trembled. Her gaze darted around the kitchen, seeking out the body behind him.
“He wouldn’t have hesitated.” He rubbed her upper arms. “Nadia!”
Clarity snapped back like a rubber band. “We need to leave.”
“You don’t have to tell me twice,” he said as he grasped her arm. He snatched up the black duffel in the TV room, slinging the strap over his head and shoulder, and rushed them out the back door.
Outside, he snagged a patio chair as they sprinted past, heading toward the corner of the yard where the fence was lowest. Nadia stepped onto the chair Thomas rammed against the fence and climbed over into the rear neighbor’s yard.
Thomas followed her over. They ran through the yard and out the neighbor’s side gate to the street.
Thomas aimed the key fob at the car across the street.
They were in the car, breathing heavily, and speeding out of the neighborhood before she could fully process that they’d managed to escape. Again.
She looked down at her hands. Her palms stung. There were several scrapes, blood welling along the fresh wounds she must have gotten from when she’d landed in the bushes.
She looked over at Thomas, her gaze grazing over him for injuries, but she hardly recognized the man sitting beside her.
He gripped the steering wheel with a ferocious intensity, every line of his body taut with unspent tension.
A vein pulsed frantically in his temple.
He’d had a knife on him, and he’d wielded it like he’d been trained. Who was this guy?
“Wh-where did you learn to use a knife like that?”
He drove at least a half mile before he answered her. “After what happened to James, I swore I’d never be caught defenseless.”
She thought about what she’d witnessed, how fast he’d fought.
The cold precision in his movements and the calculated targets.
He knew right where to strike to weaken his opponent.
The go bag he’d kept stashed in his garage.
His isolated residence. All signs he’d been living on high alert all these years waiting for the Hidalgos to come looking for him.
She couldn’t wrap her head around living that way, always looking over her shoulder.
Second-guessing every shadow. The mental toll it must have taken on him.
She stared out the windshield. “How? How did they find us?” They were supposed to be safe at the house. Thomas had begged her to stay with him.
“Don’t know. Nobody knew where we were.”
Slick tendrils of dread curled around her hammering heart and an icy heaviness settled in the pit of her stomach.
“One person did,” she said quietly.
Thomas jerked his head to look at her. “No. I refuse to believe that.”
“Who else would have known?”
The vein in Thomas’s temple pulsed faster. She knew his answer. Nobody knew where they’d been staying. Nobody—but Kane.