Cold metal touched my forehead.
I stilled and raised both hands, knowing the barrel of a gun when I felt one. The weapon glinted in an eddy of fog, backed by a man in all black clothing, his features hidden.
He didn’t speak. The barrel shook.
“I’m here for the lass only,” I said. “I’ll take her and go.”
Bootsteps pounded the beach in our direction. Ash led the way, from the shout of delight at the body I’d left in my wake.
“Come at me and I’ll upgrade you from dickhead to corpse,” he snarled.
The man I’d decked must still be conscious. If Ash had him, the others could get the victim out of here. I just had to give her space to run.
I ducked and charged, crashing my assailant into the controls of the boat. We tussled, and I landed a punch that crunched bone. Then an explosion blasted my eardrums.
The gun fired at close range.
The shot scorched past at an angle, a hot kiss over flesh but not through. A graze. Lucky.
I hit the deck at the same moment Tyler dove on, a spectre emerging through the grey. With an expression of pure rage, he tackled the trafficker off me. A wicked-looking silver-handled blade flashed, and Tyler drove it into the man’s chest. Without hesitation, he repeated it, sprays of dark blood spattering until the fucker went limp. Only then did he turn to me.
Fucking hell. I remembered him describing the previous raid where the traffickers had been killed. Now I got why. For him, this was personal.
“The gunshot, how bad?” he snapped.
Behind him, two small figures curled up together, half under a bench. Not one girl, but two. Safe, now.
“I’ll live. I need to go.”
“To hospital?”
“To Lovelyn. She’s in trouble.”
My team leader stalled. Then his savage smile returned. “Ye did good. We’ve got this.”
The fog swallowed him and the shooter, but I’d already seen enough to guess the rest. Tyler didn’t stop killing when the body stopped moving. And I was wasting time.
Chapter 30
Lovelyn
I’d never tried the sedatives I’d been prescribed a year ago, never wanting to block out the feelings that felt so real to me, and which needed honouring. Tonight was different. I’d popped a pill as soon as I got home then let it chemically lull me to sleep.
A cop-out, but a failed one.
Sleep didn’t come.
Only a hazy half-life where I was neither out of it nor alert. It didn’t help the pain or the memories. I was right back in the hospital wing, crumpled over a bed, inconsolable and so, so lost.
Through my half-open eyelids, the darkness in my bedroom shifted. I couldn’t tell how long I’d been home. I couldn’t tell anything. I was adrift. Untethered.
Scared.
Someone rang the doorbell, but I couldn’t raise my hand to check the cameras on my phone.
A low-level dread churned in my belly, the registering of a fear I couldn’t ignore. What if the guy who’d threatened me showed up? Kane was away. He couldn’t help me. Only watch whatever happened.
And in my need to check out of the world for a few hours, I’d drugged myself. I could do nothing but lie here. It wasn’t supposed to be like this. I should’ve been unconscious. Unable to feel or be scared. Yet this house wasn’t the safe haven I’d needed when I’d walked out of the warehouse on autopilot.
