34. Chapter 33
Chapter 33
“ S ummer.”
Her name was a shout inside Ramiro’s head but only leaked out of his lips. His eyes felt seared shut when he tried to open them.
Naz sat at his bedside, staring at him.
Ramiro stared back, confusion adding to the swirling fog in his head. His body was one big ache, his head the worst part of it, nausea adding to the shifting currents of his bleary thoughts.
“Where’s Summer?” Ramiro slurred, needing her. His heart thudded in fear, but he didn’t remember why, only that he needed to see Summer.
Naz shook his head, pushed to his feet, and headed to the door, a limp in his step from his prior injury.
Ramiro didn’t have time for his fucking head shakes. He liked the kid, but he needed someone to tell him what the hell was going on. He didn’t recognize the room he was in .
He struggled to push himself up, the nausea getting worse as his side throbbed along with his opposite shoulder. His hand lifted to his head, and he found a bandage wrapped around both.
The last thing he remembered was being shot in the hand and Summer screaming. The memory slid sickeningly through his mind.
Ramiro dragged his legs out of the sheets, swinging them over the edge of the bed.
“For fuck’s sake, Ram, lie the hell back down!” Diego shouted, crossing the room, but his hand on Ramiro’s shoulder didn’t keep him from standing up.
“Summer. Ovidio took Summer.” Ramiro had an IV in his arm. He grabbed it, but Diego slapped his hand away before he could pull it out.
“Sit down before you fall down,” Diego snapped.
Standing had made Ramiro dizzy, but the world was firming around him. Ramiro grabbed Diego’s shirt, dragging him closer. “He told me he was going to rape her and carve the baby out of her stomach. Unless you say she’s in the next room, get out of my fucking way.”
Diego paled. “You’ve been unconscious for days, Ram.”
Days. His stomach dropped out as panic filled him.
“The three gunshot wounds were bad enough, but it was like someone took a pipe to your head,” Diego was saying, but Ramiro didn’t care .
He shoved his friend against the wall. “Why didn’t you go after her?”
Diego’s eyes fell. “Ash went.”
Ramiro felt like he could finally breathe. He hated that it wasn’t him, but as long as she was safe. “Where is she?”
“Ash went after the clinic was hit. He said he’d follow them from there like they had followed you. We got you and Seb and the doctor out, brought you all here to where Naz was still hiding with—”
Ramiro grabbed him again. “Where. Is. Summer?”
Diego swallowed. “Ash failed, Ram. Hayes tracked down a feed of where he was dumped.”
“Dead?” Ramiro should care. He would later. Right now, all he could imagine was Summer, gushing blood from her stomach. It had been days. They were both probably dead. Summer and her daughter.
“We’re not sure. Seb said he recognized the woman that dragged him into her car. She’s some crazy Guzman.”
Ramiro shoved Diego away again, staggering as he rounded the bed.
Naz rubbed his hand over his head where he stood in the doorway. The doctor pushed around him, looking less than happy.
“What the hell are you doing out of bed?” the doctor snapped, moving as if he would push him back, but Ramiro’s glare stopped him.
“Move,” Ramiro said. “I have to find Summer. ”
“Just finished tracing Ash’s movements back to the source,” a steady, mechanical voice rasped from somewhere near the couch. “It was a bitch to tap into all those cameras, and it wasn’t like those fuckers drove a straight line.”
Seb stood from the couch with a wince and a hand pressed to his stomach, holding out Ramiro’s phone.
Ramiro’s hand shook as he took it. “Where is she, Hayes?”
“I’m texting you the address. Take the other guys with you. You can drop dead, but Summer shouldn’t.”
If she wasn’t already dead. Ramiro shoved the thought aside. He would find her, and he would kill anyone in his way. Once he had a gun. He stared down at his naked and bandaged body.
Meg came out from a side room, pushing clothes into his hands. “You’re bigger than Naz, but these will have to do.” She crossed to where Naz had backed up against the wall, kissing Naz’s unmoving lips briefly while Ramiro dragged the jeans on. “Come back safe,” she said.
She’d left the room by the time Ramiro dragged on the too tight T-shirt.
Seb pulled keys out of his pocket, heading to the door. “I’ve got a bunch of guns in my trunk.”
“Probably stolen,” Diego muttered, already following. “You all better not get me fucking killed. Some of us have something to live for.” He glanced over his shoulder. “Let’s go get your reason to live.”
Naz followed behind .
“You’re all fucking idiots,” the doctor groaned, slumping onto the couch.
Ramiro shut the door on his muttering.
“I’ll pull the schematics of the house and send them to all of you,” Hayes said, still using that fake as hell mechanical voice. “There aren’t any cameras close enough to tell you what you’re walking into.”
Ramiro grabbed a gun from the trunk, his hand aching like a bitch when he gripped it. He tucked a second in the too tight waistband of his borrowed jeans. “None of them get to live,” he said, but the words came out empty.
He should have been furious or panicked. No one knew if Summer was even still alive.
A fog filled his mind instead, protecting him from thinking too far ahead. He climbed into the back seat of Seb’s clunker and focused on breathing through the pain in his body.
Ramiro had failed her. Somehow, he’d brought the cartel right to their doorstep. He’d figure out how they’d found the house later. Right now, there was only one need: getting to Summer.
He dragged the bandages off his head, letting them fall to the floorboards. His feet were bare. Summer’s feet had been bare when he’d found her on that bridge. He remembered watching her toes curl around the edge, so close to ending things.
She couldn’t be gone. He wouldn’t survive it.
Ramiro stared at the blood seeping into the bandage still wrapped around his hand while Diego parked the car a block from their destination. Seb, pressing a hand to his stomach, pulled up whatever Hayes had sent on his phone.
“There’s no telling where she’s being held, but there are three entrances. The—”
“It’s the blue house?” Ramiro asked, squinting up the street. The neighborhood reminded him of the ones near that long ago bridge. Rich assholes who raised preppy rapist boys and who painted their daughters as sluts instead of victims.
“Yeah, the one with the cherry wood door,” Diego said.
Ramiro pushed out of the car. “I’m going through the front.”
“For fuck’s sake, wait—”
He shut the door on Diego’s protests. The hot asphalt burned his feet. The sun was still up, directly above that goddamn house, one that looked a lot like the one Summer had grown up in.
He heard shouting inside the house, and the sound of glass breaking as one of the cartel shot first.
Ramiro shot inside the broken window, then sank two into the handle of the front door, climbed the porch steps and kicked it open. He shot the man in the hall through the eye and moved through the short entryway to the living room.
The cartel hadn’t expected a frontal assault, and half didn’t yet have their guns out. Ramiro emptied his first gun into the room, accepting the burning in his hand. Blood spattered the coral walls and the white fucking couches. The TV that the men had been watching cracked and fell .
He dropped the gun when it clicked, dragging the next from his waistband as he shifted to the opposite wall. Bullets slammed into the entryway he’d abandoned, making Diego duck next to the broken front door. Ramiro shot the two men still standing even as Diego shot down the hall in the opposite direction, taking out a shooter Ramiro hadn’t seen.
Diego glared but nodded at him to take the lead.
Ramiro tilted his head toward the now quiet living room. “Make sure they’re all dead.”
More shots came from the opposite side of the house.
“Naz took the kitchen. Seb’s got the garage.”
Ramiro nodded and headed deeper into the house, away from the shots. The doors down here looked like bedrooms. Ovidio’s taunting last words circled inside his head. He knew Ovidio Guzman well. He’d want a bed for the nightmare he’d promised to inflict.
The knob turned on the first door, and inside were more men. The picture-perfect family framed in the hall took the bullet meant for him, and Ramiro took out three of the cartel. The next room was empty, but men poured into the hall from a third. Ramiro ducked into the frame of the empty room, squeezing off more shots as fire burned along his arm.
Diego added bullets from farther down the hall.
The only sounds were from the guns and the men. Ramiro’s throat closed more and more when there were no distant sobs, no screams. Not that he wanted to hear Summer screaming, but at least screaming meant she was alive .
More than anything, he wanted Summer to call his name.
Silence fell over the house instead. Ramiro pushed forward to the last door down the hall. The door was locked. Diego kicked it in for him, backing up after.
Ovidio held a gun pointed down at Summer. Ramiro wanted more than anything to look at her, but he also couldn’t look, couldn’t see what he’d let happen.
“I’ll kill her, Rodriguez. Let me go, or I’ll—”
Ramiro shot the arm holding the gun, and Ovidio shouted in pain even before Ramiro’s second shot blew off his goddamn ear. Ovidio clutched at it as he fell back against the wall, his gun falling to the carpet.
Ramiro was already on him, holding him there.
“You were supposed to be dead!”
Ramiro didn’t want to hear the asshole talk. He smashed the gun he held into the man’s face, the crack of his nose so satisfying he did it again, taking out teeth, and again, cracking a cheekbone. With each smash, something else broke or tore or bruised until Ovidio’s face was goddamn mush. Ovidio had passed out, but his broken nose still dragged in air.
Shooting him would be too quick of an end.
Summer was too still. She was naked and curled on the ground, one hand limp where her arm lay across her face, the other curled around her bruised stomach. Purples and greens mottled her delicate bump, along with her arms and legs.
Ramiro dropped down beside her, his hands hovering before stroking her hair back from her face. She was breathing. Every breath looked like it hurt, but she was breathing. Summer was alive.
“I’m here, baby girl,” he choked out.
A whimper slipped from her raw and busted lips as her eye squinted up at him from beneath her limp arm.
“Ram,” she breathed out.
“It’s me,” he tried to say, but he doubted the words escaped his tight throat.
“Dreamed… of you.” Her fingers tightened on her stomach as her face twisted in pain. “Dreamed… you came,” she gasped. Her eye slid shut as she turned her face into the carpet and shook. “You never came.”
Ramiro’s eyes burned, hot tears dripping down into his beard. “I’m sorry,” he choked out, reaching for her, ripped apart inside by her gasp of pain and the tensing of her body as she tried to curl tighter. He started to freeze, but there was no helping it. No way in hell could he leave her lying there for a moment longer. He lifted her into his arms, rewarded when her face burrowed into his shirt instead of the carpet.
Blood coated her thighs and stained the carpet where she’d been lying. Her whimper of pain slid through him as he struggled to his feet.
Diego steadied him before stepping back, glaring at the blood on the carpet.
“Hurts,” Summer cried into Ramiro’s chest. “It hurts. ”
Ramiro pulled her in closer, burying his face in her hair. She’d been clutching her stomach. There’d been bruises there. No cuts, but way too much bruising.
“For… the best,” Summer sobbed, the words muffled. “I didn’t… deserve her.”
“You deserve her. You deserve everything in the world.” Ramiro carried her out of the room. A part of him had died inside, would stay dead if she lost the baby. “I’ve got you now. Just hold on to me.”
Her hand clutched at his shoulder as she continued to cry.