Chapter 33
Muzzle flashes strobed through the dust. The air tasted like pulverized concrete. She had two of them working her from each side. Wells from the left, Barclay cutting off the right with the pistol Wells had tossed him. Rock peppered her shoulder like hail as another round bit into the concrete.
She was pinned. Where was Blade?
Wells and Barclay had a pattern. Controlled bursts on the left, Barclay covering the gaps on the right, walking her into a corner one shot at a time. One magazine against two shooters with an unconscious man at her back.
This wasn’t working.
Across the room, she saw Wells’s agent drop Blade’s body like a sack of sand. The sound hit Tori in the center of her chest. For a second, she wasn’t sure if he was alive, but then Blade’s foot twitched. His hand slid under his back, fingers searching for a weapon.
A chunk of concrete popped under her boot.
More were scattered around her feet. One the size of a golf ball.
One a softball. In the Kingdom parking lot, Stryker had spent an afternoon trying to teach her to pitch.
She’d nearly taken out his side mirror. He’d laughed and told her she had the arm of a pitcher and the aim of a blind man.
The memory pressed against the back of her throat, and she pushed it down hard.
Stryker was three feet behind her in a wheelchair. Her turn to save him.
Barclay’s shots kept coming. Wild. One-handed. The rounds landed two feet wide. He had one working eye and a shoulder Blade had pulverized. He couldn’t hit her if she stood up and waved.
But he could hit Stryker. Stryker was a stationary target.
She picked up both stones.
Lord, I need a David and Goliath here. Please.
Wells’s gun went quiet. He was reloading.
She hurled the small rock into the steel beams overhead. It rang hollow and loud.
Wells’s eyes went up. His hands paused on the reload.
She stood and threw the big chunk at his face with everything she had. The concrete connected. The magazine spun away across the floor.
Tori came out from behind the pillar at a dead run, boots loud on the concrete.
Barclay fired, but his shot went wild.
“Wells.”
He looked up.
She fired two shots. Center mass. He stumbled back, hit the wall, and slid. His wide eyes found hers.
“Impossible,” he whispered.
The agent over by Blade snatched his knife off the ground.
“Blade!”
Blade’s head came up. Groggy. His hand came from behind his back with his gun. He fired from the ground.
The agent standing over him dropped.
“Sebastian!” Barclay was beside Wells. Pistol gripped in his good hand, he patted Wells’s slack face. “No. Sebastian, no.”
“It’s over, Barclay.” Tori stared at him down her sights.
“You,” Barclay snarled, getting to his feet.
His gun came back up, aimed for her. He fired three shots, fast and wild.
Tori kept moving. Her ears rang with the shots.
Click. Click. Click.
The pistol’s slide locked. Empty.
He threw the gun at her and she dodged it, closing the distance in three strides.
She jabbed once, the impact running all the way to her elbow. Then she drove her right leg forward, hip rotating through the arc. Her boot connected with his midsection.
The teep folded him. Barclay went down backward, then rolled, grappling for Wells’s gun. She kicked the pistol into the dark and stood over him with her own Glock pointed at his face.
He looked up from flat on his back. His eyes were wet and his mouth was working, but whatever he was trying to say had already left him.
“You should have died with them,” Barclay finally spat out.
“Shut up.” She adjusted her finger on the trigger, ready to fire.
This man had killed her mother before Tori was old enough to know her voice. Killed her father before she could memorize his face. She’d spent her life believing she was alone because of what he chose to do one night in October.
“Do it.” His eyes drifted to Wells’s body. “Shoot me. You know you want to.”
The Glock sat heavy in her hand. The child who had hidden in that closet wanted to pull the trigger. She wanted to erase him the way he had erased her family.
“Do it!” Barclay shouted.
She looked at him and saw the evil she’d studied in textbooks. He was like a weed growing wild among the wheat, choking the life out of everything he touched. She wanted to rip him from the dark soil he lived in.
If she pulled the trigger, she became just like him.
She lowered the gun.
“It’s not my job to judge you. That’s for God.”
She turned away.
Ten feet away, Stryker was still in the wheelchair, head dropped forward but breathing.
Blade was standing there too. Blood soaked through his shirt in a dark map of the last hour. He crossed the space without a word. She met him halfway. His good arm pulled her against his chest. He smelled like blood and sweat. She pressed her face into him anyway.
His hand moved over her hair.
“You’re bleeding,” he said.
She pulled back to look at him. His nose was crooked. His eye was swelling shut. He looked like he’d been through a war, and he had. For her. “So are you.”
“No, Tori. You’ve been shot.”
She looked down.
A dark stain had soaked through the left side of her shirt. Three inches of torn fabric where the bullet had clipped her, the skin beneath it raw and weeping. Barclay’s wild shot. She hadn’t registered it.
It burned now.
She pulled the fabric aside. Clean entry, clean exit. The skin around it already purpling. “Through and through.”
Sirens outside. Ambulance. Cops. Real ones this time. Garrison didn’t bluff about calling for backup.
Blade stripped off his outer shirt and folded it into a pad, pressing it tight against her side. She put her hand over it to hold it.
“You’re going to need this cleaned and packed properly.”
“When the paramedics get here,” she said.
There was one more thing she had to do.
She limped over to Barclay, squatted, and fished Damien’s notebook from his jacket.
Barclay laughed from the floor, clutching his shoulder. “You think you’ve won? There are others. You haven’t touched the surface of this network. You’re done.”
“No,” Tori interrupted. “You are.”