Chapter 34
Jed
Ifelt no pain, levitating through the place on a wild combat high. My body decided where to kick, when to duck, where to zig or to zag, where to punch or block. Bones were broken, but I didn’t feel them.
I looked for Freya with each beam of light that flashed, but I didn’t see her.
I heard screams that sounded female, so I lunged in that direction.
The room echoed with noise, yells, gunshots.
Bam. Bam. Fire scored my back. The muzzle flash pinpointed the shooter, so I ducked low behind a desk, then grabbed that desk and hurled it.
A thud, a grunt. I flung myself on the shooter while he was down, groping for his gun arm.
The guy fought like a mad dog. We writhed together on the floor, and he head-butted me on my broken nose, and everything went black—
The lights flooded back on, blinding me. I blinked, desperately.
Fuck, that was Boer. Screaming as we grappled, his face distorted with carefully landscaped fresh scar tissue, stretched into a rictus of pure rage.
We kicked and grunted and heaved, struggling for control of Boer’s gun hand. He clutched a Glock 19, and the barrel kept inching up, toward my face.
Bam, the gun went off, inches from my ear. I could feel the heat radiating out of the barrel. We were eye-to-eye, sweat dripping, muscles trembling as the gun wavered, moving closer, closer…until it was right in my face.
Boer’s lips stretched in a hideous grin of triumph—
Bam. Boer’s head exploded.
I fell back, startled. Splattered with blood, bone fragments, wet pinkish stuff. I wiped it off my face with a bloodied, shaking hand. Fuck. Brain tissue.
The one brain that knew the name of the person who had taken Shane. Gone.
Freya. I saw shadows flickering on the periphery of my vision as my sense of time and space reactivated. “Freya!” I yelled. “Frey! Where are you?”
“Jed! Stay down, man. You’re hurt bad. Let me—”
“Frey!” I ignored whoever was trying to push me down, lurching onto my feet. I wiped the blood out of my eyes. Someone grabbed my arm to steady me, but I shook them off and staggered out into the middle of the room.
Three bodies lay there in pools of blood. None were Freya.
There. I saw that black sweatshirt, the pale flash of hair. And red. Oh, shit.
I went for her, in a limping, shambling run, skidding up next to her on my knees, ready to kill whoever was leaning over her—
The guy looked up. It was Ethan Masters. He looked me up and down, cool and unfriendly. “You look like shit,” he said.
“Freya?” I gasped out.
“She’s shot,” he said curtly. “I think it missed the lung, but she’s lost a lot of blood. We need to hurry. Hey, Cade! What’s the situation up top?”
Cade, one of the Unredeemables who worked on Ethan’s private team, spoke into his handheld and turned to Ethan. “All the bad guys are down,” he said. “All clear.”
Ethan nodded “Good. Let’s get you guys to the hospital. Who was the guy I shot? The one who was trying to kill you?”
“That was Wex Boer,” I said. “The one who kidnapped Shane.”
Ethan looked startled. “That was Wex Boer? I didn’t recognize him.”
“No, you wouldn’t,” I said. “He’d gotten reconstructive surgery.”
“He took Shane?” Ethan pushed on. “Took him where?”
I shook my head with a weary shrug. “I guess we’ll never know now, will we?”
Dick move, giving the guy a hard time after he’d saved my life, and Freya’s. But I forgot all that as Freya’s eyes opened. I bent over her. “Hey. Frey?”
She sucked in air, wincing. “Nicole?” she croaked.
I looked up at Ethan. “Did you see Nicole? One of Boer’s staff. Young, slim build, Asian, long dark hair, fights like a demon from hell. Watch out for her.”
“She should have a lot of blood on her face,” Freya added, with satisfaction. “Cat bitch. I got her a good one.”
It looked as if Nicole had gotten in some licks as well. Freya’s face was streaked with blood. Ethan relayed a directive to his team to look out for Nicole.
I tried to pick Freya up, but Ethan knocked me out of his way and grabbed her himself. I limped after him, ineffectually. Up, up, up, endless fucking flights of stairs.
Finally, Darius and Amos materialized and grabbed me under my dislocated shoulders, which made me howl and swear, but in a short time, we were packed into a van.
Freya had an IV hooked up. They started in on me with the first aid, but I wasn’t interested.
I just wanted to stare down at Freya. Astonished that both of us were actually still alive. I couldn’t fucking believe it.
“Jed,” Darius said. “You’re all messed up. Let me work on you.”
“You guys should be hunting Nicole, not wasting time on me,” I said. “We need her alive. She might know the name of the guy who took Shane.”
“Ethan left a five-man team to sweep the area,” Darius said. “Let them handle it. Come on, man. Let me take a look at you.”
“Let him bleed if he wants to,” Ethan growled.
I was too exhausted to care about Ethan hating my guts. I just stretched out my arm and grabbed Frey’s bloody, sticky hand, holding it like it was a baby bird.
Her eyes opened, met mine. Her lips twitched. God, she was pale.
I just stared down at her, in awe. It blew my mind that she’d come to rescue me. All alone. She had played every card she had. All her brains and courage, put out there, on the line…for me.
I cradled her small, ice-cold hand, wondering if there could ever be any way on earth that I could possibly deserve it.