Chapter 24 Payton
PAYTON
No. No. No.
I struggled in Maverick’s hold when the door slammed shut behind me.
The sight of Tarron lying on the porch, in the cold, his body lifeless, was too much to bear.
I beat a fist against Maverick’s chest. “You can’t leave him out there.”
Someone…someone had to bring him inside where it was warm.
He didn’t deserve to stay out there in the cold where the snow would cover him and obliterate all that I knew and loved about the man who’d given his life to protect me.
My throat clogged with the onslaught of tears.
I worked them back.
Hysteria would not help me, but it crept into my voice and my actions as I raised my fist to hammer it into Maverick again.
“Take me back out there. Let go. I’ll go myself. Turn me over so no one else has to die for me.”
I’d rather die a thousand times than live a single day without any one of them. Tarron’s death was my fault.
I should have thrown myself down the steps as soon as Jack spoke.
I should have made it easier for them to walk away from the obligation of returning me to Dad.
“No, Payton.” Maverick’s tight grip held me together even as my heart broke into a million pieces.
I sobbed uncontrollably, my body quaking from the loss.
Tucker gave me a sympathetic pat on the shoulder. “He wouldn’t want you to give up your life for him. None of them would.”
Maverick nodded. “He’s right. We’d all die for you, Payton. You have to live. That’s what matters.”
“The hell it does.” I sagged forward, Maverick’s grip the only thing holding me up as my knees buckled.
I had to pull it together.
They deserved better than a woman who fell apart in the middle of a crisis.
Where was my fighting spirit?
Where was the woman who’d split Tarron’s and Reed’s lips when I thought they were my enemy?
I needed to find her. Fast.
Because I couldn’t live with this well of grief swamping my soul with excruciating pain.
I sucked in a breath, then another.
“Can you get Payton to Anchorage?” Maverick’s question roared in my ears.
Surely I’d heard him wrong.
He couldn’t be asking Tucker to take on the mission without him.
What about Reed?
The question thrummed in my mind. What did they plan on doing?
Tucker nodded. “Yes. I can do that.” He shot a look over his shoulder, toward the porch where Reed’s cursing soared louder and louder.
“Good.” Maverick rattled off the coordinates for our extraction site. “Get her there. Ride with her. Don’t stop for anything until she’s with her father.”
Tucker’s jaw hardened, and he slung the rifle over his shoulder and stuck out his hand. “You have my word.”
Reed burst into the kitchen behind his father, cheeks red from the cold and the anger that turned his expression harder than stone.
“He’s still out there, but he’s moving toward the front.”
“You have to go. Now.” Maverick shoved his pistol into the holster and framed my face in his hands. “Go, Payton. Let Tucker get you out of here. Reed and I will hold them off as long as we can.”
“Please.” I sucked a breath through the ache caving in my chest. “I can’t leave you.” Not now. Not ever. Words failed me before I told him everything in my heart.
He kissed me.
Not with the sweet, tender kiss of a goodbye, but with the heart-pounding delight of forever.
His fingers worked into my hair, and he swept his tongue into my mouth when I opened for him.
The kiss turned almost angry, the heat of his body radiating in waves that crested over me.
I rode out the echoes of passion and held on to his shoulders.
He softened slowly, the kiss growing tender and sweet. His lips grazed mine in slow, lingering sips.
“You have to go. None of us will survive if you stay.”
Agony tore through me.
“What do you mean?” But I knew, didn’t I?
I was a liability.
As long as they were torn between protecting me and themselves, my presence put them at risk. Tarron’s death proved that.
“Go, Payton.” Reed’s voice held enough anger to light the world on fire.
He pushed me toward his father, gave the man a back-slapping hug, and stalked toward the blown-out windows.
“Once we set up cover fire, you have to run. As fast as you can. You hear me?”
Tucker grabbed hold of me when I tried to follow Reed. “We understand.”
The hell I did.
My head and my heart struggled with reality.
If I stayed, I would put them in danger.
But how could I leave them?
They were the missing pieces of my heart.
I’d rather die with them than run away.
Get it together. The harshness of my own thoughts staggered me.
Maverick and Reed crouched on either side of the windows. They shared a solemn look, and at Mav’s nod, they opened fire.
Tucker wrenched open the front door and hauled me through it like I was nothing more than a sack of potatoes.
I tripped and nearly fell, my body weight crashing toward the ground.
Tucker’s hold kept me aloft, and I churned my feet in the thick powder, struggling for purchase.
I stopped looking where we were going and walked with my head turned as far as it would go.
Desperate for one last look at Mav and Reed, I gripped Tucker’s arm around my waist and managed to turn so I walked sideways.
“You’re making this harder for everyone.” Tucker’s jaw set in a rigid line.
He shook his head when he caught my gaping mouth and the staggered breaths that puffed in white clouds.
“I get it. Trust me. But you need to do what they said. We have to get out of here. Let them do what they’re trained to do. You don’t think I want to be back there, fighting at my son’s side?”
Honestly, I hadn’t really thought about that.
Shame threatened to slow me further, and I tried to play on his emotions, knowing damned well I was creating more problems.
“We could help. Give me a gun. We’ll sneak around behind the mercenaries.”
“And likely get caught in the crossfire. Those men are primed to shoot at anything that moves.” Tucker kept hauling me toward the blue truck parked underneath a large overhang of pine boughs.
My breath staggered in and out so fast that dark spots danced in my vision.
“What if they’re waiting for us at the car? It could be a trap.”
They could kill Tucker and take me hostage, and Mav and Reed wouldn’t know until they discovered Tucker’s body.
I’d been willing to turn myself over if it saved them, but this would only make things worse.
I twisted to look back at the cabin. Bullets peppered the air, turning it thick with the acrid stench of burned gunpowder.
Muzzle flashes spotted my vision, taking over the blackness creeping in.
Men crept out of the trees and angled around to the sides, trying to get a better line of sight on Mav.
Reed stopped firing.
I’d marked his gunfire last time I looked, but it stopped, and so did my heart. Had he been shot?
My insides shriveled. “Tucker.”
He ignored the pleading in my voice and reached for the door handle.
Mav slipped out of the house and approached the soldiers.
His lithe movements carried him forward in that military run I’d always found incredible to watch.
His legs churned, but his upper body remained still, the gun in his hands expelling bullets at a fast clip.
The return barrage of bullets came so thick and fast I couldn’t tell if there were a hundred or five hundred.
My hands flew to cover my mouth to smother my scream, when one of the bullets landed in Maverick’s leg.
Blood spurted in an arc beneath the sunlight and covered the snow in a crimson spray.
He dropped to a knee, grasping his leg with one hand. He never stopped shooting.
Seeing him go down twisted something inside me.
Fuck escape.
Fuck everything except getting to Maverick and helping him.
I tore out of Tucker’s hold, my adrenaline spiking so high my ears roared.
I’d never experienced tunnel vision before, but I recognized it when everything else in my line of sight disappeared except for Maverick.
I burst across the space, going as fast as I could in the thick snow.
My lungs burned, and it took way too much effort to fill my lungs.
With every step I made toward him, I expected to be yanked backward.
Tucker called my name, but he did it so quietly that I couldn’t be sure it was real.
“I can’t watch him die.” The words scorched the air around me and put a new burst of energy in my throbbing legs. If the men I loved were going to die, then I would too.
I would not survive the pain of losing them. They couldn’t ask me to make that kind of sacrifice.
“Payton, please.” Tucker was gaining on me.
The only reason I’d outrun him this long was his age.
I had love on my side, and it propelled me even closer. “I’m coming, Mav.”
There was no way he’d hear me, but I needed to say it, needed to hear the words in the screaming void that my mind had become.
Almost there.
Only a few feet separated us.
A few more seconds and I’d be in his arms.
Firelight bloomed behind Maverick.
It happened so suddenly, so unexpectedly, that I didn’t understand what happened until the cabin exploded into millions of wooden shards.
The wave hit me in the chest and threw me into the air.
My arms windmilled, but there was no way in hell I’d find my way to my feet in the onslaught of the blast.
We should have expected it.
That was my last thought as I crashed into a tree, my head snapping backward with a sickening thud that turned the world black.