“Working on a body count,” Gage bellows over the comm.
“Do you have eyes on her?” I ask as I jump the last quarter of the drop and bolt for my bike. I’ll run every last one of these motherfuckers over to get to her if I have to.
This is why I sprang for the Kawasaki once we found out about the trials. It’s fucking fast. And sometimes, we need to vanish. We’re always one heartbeat away from disappearing. I won’t be surprised if the current thump in my chest is the one to force my hand. This has been one disaster after another.
“I’ve got her,” Liam confirms. “She’s about ten seconds behind you. Get ready to crank it.”
Ten seconds is a fucking lifetime in a battle. The difference betweendead and alive.
People are running all over the goddamn parking lot, vomiting on the asphalt, choking from the gas. I have to weave through seven or eight to reach the bike, which is parked around the corner, shielded by another building.
As I’m slipping on my helmet, Rena comes barreling toward me. Liam was off.Thank fuck.That was less than five seconds, and she had farther to go. She grabs her helmet, jumps on behind me, and breathlessly yells into the comm as I’m revving the throttle.
“Is everyone out?” Panic threads that inquiry because before we can take off, we have to blow the place, and I’m holding the detonator in my hand.
“Looks like it,” Gage says.
“That’s not a fucking answer,” she retorts. “Ty, do not press that until we know.”
Liam grunts, plainly frustrated with the moral high ground—not that he’s in favor of killing innocents, but he’s engrossed in guiding us out of this, and based on the job, there’s a good chance these aren’t innocents we’re dealing with, or KORT would have been clearer about it. Still, it boils down to us not knowing.
“You’ve got less than thirty goddamn seconds before this place is crawling with five-O,” he grits out. “We’re tracking at least six cars right now.”
Six. Fuck.
Only one road out, and it’s the same that leads in.
“Give me a head count,” I demand.
“I got twenty-seven,” he replies. “Big Guy got twenty-eight.”
“It was twenty-eight. There were twenty-eight. Not counting the one who left,” she mutters. “You have to be sure.”
“Get me theall clear,” I insist, intent on keeping both her body and her soul intact.
“Fucking hell,” Gage grumbles as I cruise the alleyways between the warehouses, ready to hightail it. “I’m verifying with thermal imaging through the windows, and we’re doing another count.”
That will be tentative at best. The parking lot is a madhouse.
“We’ve got two cars less than ten seconds out,” Liam barks, and those seconds tick by, my heart thrashing in time. “Five, Tytan. Goddammit!”
“Hold on tight, Little Moon,” I order, and she fastens her arms snug around my waist.
“Got ’em,” Gage hollers. “Go!”
In a single breath—similar to the heartbeat between here and gone, then and now, erased and remade—I press the detonator and fly with my girl through the pandemonium. Swerving around shrieking, terrified souls, beyond the backdrop of billowing clouds of dirty-gray smoke and the thunderous roar of crumbling brick and mortar, and between two police cars with flashing lights and deafening sirens, hurtling toward us, head-on.
There’s a third car rushing onto the street as I charge off the warehouse road, but I easily careen around them, the bike leaning low into a sharp left. A victory against gravity. Unfortunately, there’s another squad car racing toward me on this road and a few civilian vehicles, which have me zigzagging between them, the weight of the bike rocking side to side like a ship encountering turbulent waves.
“Get me a goddamn route,” I spit. “They’re fucking everywhere.”
“We’re trying. We had to wait until they took off after you to follow,” Liam states in a tone that wrenches my stomach. “Jesus, they’ve got every cop in the goddamn city after you. Who the hell did we fuck over?”
He might be a passenger in Gage’s truck for this fiasco, but he’s in the position I’m accustomed to—hovering in the sky with eyes on it all through tracking and scanners and satellites, hoping to guide us all home.
“It was the girl who saw me. She pressed the panic button,” Rena squeals, her arms cinching firmer around my waist. “Seven minutes. I did this.”
“Doesn’t fucking matter,” I assure her.
