But God…please let it be long enough for Skip to find me.
I don’t want to wake up alone.
Not like this.
Not with Knuckles dead in my lap and me tied to a chair.
What if they never find us? I haven’t heard or seen anyone else. What if I die in this chair?
Surely, someone heard those gunshots….right?
The world squeezes in, sound fading into a tunnel, colors draining out…
And I fall.
Please, don’t let me wake up alone.
***one minute, twenty-three seconds later***
I woke up alone…and I’m so freaking scared.
Chapter Twenty-One
Skip
Nightfall hit an hour ago.
The desert went from blistering heat to bone-cutting cold, and still… nothing.
No movement in the house.
Most of the men in the tents have settled. A few patrol lazily, bored, unalert, confident in their empty godforsaken sandbox.
But the house?
Dead still.
Too still.
My teeth grind as I scan it again through binoculars…the sagging roofline, the cracked walls, the boarded windows. A house that shouldn’t legally exist, sitting in the middle of nowhere like a tomb marker.
“Are we sure they’re in there?” My voice comes out harsher than I intend…but fuck it. I’m beyond pretending I’m calm. “Not a single soul has entered or left that house since we started watching.”
Foster taps his tablet. “I followed Cortéz’s cell. Then hacked into nearby CCTV. His face and his phone’s location matched,” Foster confirms. “He’s inside. I couldn’t see in the van to see if Eli and Knuckles were inside, but it’s the same van that they were shoved into near the shop, and it didn’t make any stops.”
“Definitely feels like a trap,” Bones mutters, voice low, lethal.
“Everything about this feels like a trap,” Spike agrees. His arms crossed. “But what are we supposed to do? Our men are in there. We just have to be smart about getting them out.”
Tank shifts beside me, checking his rifle. “With no cover, we go in wrong, we lose half the team before we hit the porch.”
Foster zooms out the drone. Nothing but flat earth in all directions. No dunes, no rocks, no scrub. Just endless desert swallowing everything but that cursed house.
I clench my jaw so hard it aches.
Eli’s in there. Hurting. Scared.
God knows what those fuckers have done to him.
