Chapter 48
Wes cut the engine a hundred yards from the house and let the truck roll to a stop on the shoulder.
The gravel driveway was visible from here. A dark sedan sat parked just off to the side of the house, backed in toward the trees.
Blackthorne.
He quickly climbed from the truck, Remington at his heels. Then he eased the door shut behind him without latching it.
Wes grabbed his gun and moved into the trees, Remington falling into step beside him.
He kept low and parallel to the driveway, the undergrowth muffling his footsteps as he crept through the woods toward the house.
He slowed as the trees thinned near the edge of the yard.
The house sat quiet from the outside. Curtains were drawn on the front windows. The back door was visible from this angle, standing slightly ajar.
Then movement at the side window caught his eye.
A man stood just inside the glass, his back partially turned, his attention directed somewhere deeper in the house. He was big with controlled posture.
Wes went motionless.
Remington dropped into a crouch beside him without a sound, his eyes locked on the window.
They watched the man and waited.
Ten seconds.
Twenty.
Then the man stepped away from the window and out of sight.
This was Wes’s chance to move.
He broke from the woods at a low run and crossed the open yard in long, fast strides. Remington stayed a shadow at his side. The grass was soft enough to muffle their steps.
He reached the exterior wall and pressed his back against it, his breathing controlled, and he listened.
He could barely make out voices from inside. They were too low.
He moved along the wall toward the back door.
As he reached the corner of the house, he risked a glance through the kitchen window.
Everything inside him went cold and then immediately, incandescently hot.
Rowan was pinned against the counter, a man’s forearm across her chest, his hand at her jaw. Her face was turned toward him with rigid resistance.
Wes’s heart lurched in his throat at the sight.
Another woman—Lauren maybe—sat against the far cabinet, her knees drawn to her chest and her hands pressed over her mouth.
The second man, the one who’d just been at the window, now stood near the back door.
Three feet from where Wes stood.
He pulled back against the wall and looked at Remington.
The dog’s eyes were already on him. Waiting. Every muscle coiled and ready, his body a question with one answer.
Wes had worked enough operations to know that the next thirty seconds would determine everything. Two men, two targets, one dog, and no margin for error.
The man at the door would have to be his.
That put Remington on the beefy man at the counter—the one with his hands on Rowan.
Wes trusted his dog with his life every day. Right now he was trusting him with Rowan’s also.
He met Remington’s eyes and gave the signal.
Then he hit the back door.
It swung open hard on its hinges. The wood caught the man behind it full in the shoulder, knocking him sideways and off balance before he could react.
Wes was through the doorway in the same motion, closing the distance before the man could recover.
He’d only use his gun as a last resort. Instead, he drove the man back against the wall.
Window Man absorbed the impact and came back fast. One of his hands went for Wes’s collar and the other drove toward his midsection.
The gun flew out of Wes’s hand and skittered behind him on the floor.
He glanced at it. It was too far away to grab now.
Behind him, he heard Remington running.
The Doberman hit the man holding Rowen like a controlled explosion, a hundred pounds of muscle and training. He landed with a force that threw the man off Rowan.
The man recovered fast. He got a hand up before Remington could pin him and shoved the dog sideways.
Remington came back snarling.
Wes’s opponent drove an elbow back. It hit his jaw. White light scattered across his vision for a disorienting second.
His grip loosened for just a moment.
Rowan was somewhere behind him.
He couldn’t afford to look.
Instead, Wes slammed Window Man back against the wall a second time, harder.
The man’s head connected with the cabinet above the counter with a sound that should have ended it.
It didn’t.
He came off the wall swinging.
Wes had no choice but to keep fighting.
The man’s grip on Rowan’s jaw fractured for one half second as his attention moved to the sudden commotion at the back door.
That was enough.
Rowan wrenched her face sideways and spat, felt the pills leave her mouth, and didn’t wait to see where they landed.
Her gaze shot to the door.
Wes!
The relief hit her so hard and so fast that for a moment she couldn’t move at all. He was here. She didn’t know how—didn’t know what had brought him through that door at exactly this second.
But she couldn’t think about any of that right now because Remington was already airborne. The man who’d had his hand on her jaw was no longer thinking about her at all.
She pushed off the counter and stumbled toward the far wall, her knee screaming, her lungs pulling in air like they’d forgotten how.
For two seconds she just watched.
Wes had the second man against the wall near the door, controlled and relentless. Remington had driven the first man to the floor. Lauren had flattened herself against the refrigerator, both hands over her mouth.
Then the second man got an elbow free and drove it into Wes’s jaw, and the balance of things shifted in a way that snapped her out of it completely.
She couldn’t just stand here.
Wes had come through that door for her. Now she had to help him.
She frantically looked around the kitchen.
Then she saw it.
The first man’s jacket had ridden up when Remington hit him. The holster at his hip was unsnapped, the weapon partially visible. In the chaos of trying to get the dog off him, his hand had gone to Remington’s collar instead of the gun.
The weapon was right there.
Three feet away.
Rowan had never held a real gun in her life.
She’d held props—rubber and resin and carefully weighted replicas that the armorers walked her through on set.
She’d learned to look comfortable holding them, to keep her finger indexed along the frame, to point without aiming because the camera could always cheat the angle.
This wasn’t a prop.
She dove across the floor anyway.
Before she could think about what she was doing, she grabbed the man’s gun. It pulled free of the holster.
She pushed herself backward across the floor until her back hit the cabinet on the other side of the room.
She got her feet under her and stood.
The gun came up with her, both hands wrapped around it the way she’d been shown a dozen times by a dozen different armorers who’d never imagined she’d need to actually use one in real life.
Her arms shook. She couldn’t make them stop.
Across the room Wes still had the second man against the wall. But the man had gotten an arm free. The balance of the struggle shifted in a way that made her stomach drop.
Remington had the first man pinned but not neutralized. The guy kept fighting, kept driving at the dog with both arms in a way that was going to matter soon.
Lauren shrank into the corner near the refrigerator, her eyes moving from Rowan to the gun and back.
Rowan planted her feet.
Her hands wouldn’t stop shaking.
But she didn’t care.
She’d stood on stages and sets and red carpets in front of thousands of people and never once lost her nerve.
She couldn’t lose it now either.