Tasha nodded. “Good guess,” she said as she looked up at him. His face was streaked by blood still oozing from the injury he'd suffered. His powerful body was covered by random pieces of her clothing, each more ridiculous than the next. Under normal circumstances, she wouldn’t have been able to keep from laughing. But they’d left normal behind a long time ago.
They were standing on the side of a desolate mountain in the rapidly fading daylight, with the temperature dropping—a handcuffed, pathetic princess-to-be, and a clown-costumed Navy SEAL who probably had a concussion.
Her own head was still ringing and pounding—and by covering her, Thomas had taken the brunt of the blast. It was amazing he was still standing upright.
Do we need to find a hospital, she’d asked him just moments earlier. She realized with another flash of hot and cold that she might as well have asked if he wanted her to find him a talking unicorn.
“Are you really okay?” she asked him now, her mouth suddenly dry as she imagined having to carry him the rest of the way across this desolate mountain range to the Ustanzian ski lodge—assuming that the road they were on led directly there, with no forks or turnoffs. If she had to, she would, but God, that was going to be hard.
“Bit of a headache,” he said, “but yeah. Things are looking up.”
She laughed at that. “Our car just exploded. We almost died.”
“But we didn’t. And I can crossFind you,Break you free from a compound of armed guards, andCover my bare assoff my to-do list,” he told her, “so I’m happy enough to surrender the SUV to the Gods of Holy-Crap, and instead stroll the rest of the way to Ted’s mom’s house.”
Stroll.
She looked at the mountains around them.
Right.
“We gotta move now, as fast as we can, while we can,” Thomas said. “Whoever wants you dead is gonna come looking. And when they don’t find your charred remains in that fire, or my body back where they left me...? They’re gonna realize they screwed up, and then they’re gonna try to hunt us down.”
Whoever wants you dead...
Words to put panic into her heart. If they—whoevertheywere—wantedherdead, what did that mean for Tedric and his parents, and everyone else up at the remote lodge?
“When we don’t show up, they’re going to lock down the lodge, right? I mean, more than they already have?” Tasha asked as they began walking up the road.
Thomas glanced at her. “Absolutely. And Uncle Admiral’s gonna send reinforcements. I predict this mountain will be buzzing with Navy helos shortly after dawn. Our job is to get through the night.”
When he put it like that, it didn’t sound too challenging. And yet...
Still, Tasha embraced hisWe got thisattitude. “It stopped raining,” she realized.
Thomas smiled. “See? Things are definitely looking up.”
Chapter Six
Rio Rosetti was halfway to his cousin Luc’s housewarming party when his GPS went out.
At first he thought it was his phone—an app malfunction due to craptastic battery power. Damn thing had been fading out on him with a vengeance over the past few weeks—going from fifty percent to zero in a heartbeat—a direct result of too many salt-water dunkings after his waterproof case had cracked.
Drying via rice only worked to a degree. His phone was ondead man walkingstatus, and he carried his charger in the front pocket of his cargo shorts.
But when he pulled over into the parking lot of a strip mall to plug it into the cigarette lighter—yeah, Gertie, his car, wasthatelderly—it soon became clear it wasn’t a power issue. He had no bars and no internet—like instead of being in suburban San Diego, he was suddenly on the dark side of the moon.
It was then he noticed the traffic lights at the corner were out. They were flashing yellow, as if some kind of emergency backup had switched on. Had the power gone out in this part of town? Apparently it had. People were coming out of shops and restaurants that were decidedly dark.
It wasn’t justhiscell service that was down—no one’s phone seemed to be working.
He halfway got out of his car to call to one of the women who’d come out of a sandwich shop. “Power out?”
She nodded. “Was there an earthquake?”
Rio shook his head. “Not that I know of.”
But quakes were weird. And yeah, as a Not-A-California-Native, earthquakes also freaked him out, but he’d been stationed in SoCal for years. He’d lived through enough to know how they worked.
