She clicked it on and shined it along the edge of the wall on either side. “There’s a void. I think the wall will slide in.”
They found handholds and pushed the wall in the direction she indicated. Inch by inch another room was revealed. They stopped when the heavy stone panel was half of the way in the recess, opening a space wide enough for three of them to stand shoulder to shoulder. Without discussing it, they stepped back and let Kinley shine the light inside.
“Oh. My. God. It’s real.”
“Ho-lee shit,” Harrison said.
Jordan leaned his arm against Shane’s shoulder. “That’s gold, right?”
“It’s mine! I found it!” Christine pointed the gun she held right at Kinley.
“No!” Shane dove for Kinley, knocking her to the ground.
Shots rang out and fire burst to life in his back.
“Shane. Shane!”
CHAPTER14
“No. Nonononono.” Kinley struggled under the weight of Shane’s body. Over his shoulder, she could see the blood spreading across his back. “Shane. Shane! Help him!”
Two of the men lifted Shane off her while the other one helped her upright. She jerked her arm from his grasp and crawled to Shane. “Please don’t be dead.”
“He’s not, but you need to let us work on him,” one of them said. Jordan, maybe? She couldn’t remember their names. She should, but she couldn’t. Not right now.
She spared a glance at Christine lying at the base of the altar, her eyes wide and unseeing, a dark crimson flower blooming on her chest. “How did she get the gun?”
“It was still on the floor,” Jordan said. “It was kicked out of the way when we took her down. None of us bothered to pick it up since she was secure. How’d she get her arms in front of her?”
“Yoga,” Kinley said. “She did yoga religiously.”
“Fuck,” one of the guys next to Shane said. “We need to get him topside. I can’t get Turner on the radio under all this stone.”
One of them handed his gun to Jordan and hefted Shane onto his shoulder. She clapped her hands over her mouth when he jostled Shane into a better position. God, he was so big. She’d laughed when he’d been hunched over in the entry tunnel, but they were all going to hunch—how were they going to get him out of there?
“Kinley, can you lead the way?” Jordan asked. “I’ll be right behind you.”
“What?” She looked from Shane to him. “Yes. I think so.” All she had to do was follow the lights, right?
Leading the way out of the chamber, she spared one last glance for Christine. She should feel something—regret, hate, something. All she felt was numb. She started off slowly, worried the team wouldn’t be able to keep up with their gear and carrying Shane, until one of them asked if she could go faster. She could sprint for the exit if they needed to, but she settled on a jog. The rattle of their gear echoed behind her.
What was that doing to Shane’s injuries? Was it making them worse? They hadn’t even sealed the bullet holes like Oakley had done with Jorge’s wound. Did that mean Shane was better or worse? Was he already dead and they weren’t telling her?
The final set of steps appeared and she angled her body through the last tunnel. She turned to watch the team exit, walking backward to give them space until she tripped over a stump, landing hard on her ass and back. Pushing up, she scrambled backward. She hadn’t tripped over a stump, but over the body of one of the guards.
Jordan helped her up once again. “Sorry. Should have warned you we cleared the camp.”
“It’s okay. Probably not something you usually have to tell people.”
He shrugged like it was something that happened more frequently than she thought. She opened her mouth to ask exactly how often but stopped at the sight of Devon and Harrison—their names finally coming back to her—exiting the tunnel, carrying Shane between them. They laid him on the ground right away and knelt beside him.
“Helo’s three minutes out,” Jordan said.
Kinley grasped her hands tight under her chin. She’d never, ever been the hand-wringing type, but the sight of Shane flat on the ground while his teammates attended to him was more than she could bear.
“Hey.” Jordan touched her shoulder. “We’ve got him. We won’t let him go without a fight.”
She closed her eyes, tears tracking down her cheeks, and nodded, grateful he wasn’t feeding her a crap load of platitudes about everything being fine.
