“No one can help me,” she murmurs.
“I—”
“Bermuda,” she says.
“What?”
“That’s when I knew you were one of the good ones.”
I suck in another breath, remember the little girl I’d returned to her parents…and the beating I received for not following through with my orders to get her onto the boat that would have taken her who knew where for who knew what.
Okay, I knew what would happen to her.
And I couldn’t let that happen.
“Oh, my God,” I whisper. “That’s why you?—”
Angela had come with me on the next few missions and after that the tasks I was assigned had changed. No more close calls with pervy men they needed blackmail material for. No more kids or women.
There’s a knock and a whir, the lock disengaging.
Her head whips toward the door as it slams into the deadbolt and she moves faster than I thought possible, grabbing a chair and jamming it under the handle.
Yeah, I so wouldn’t have been able to disarm her.
The door pulls back then slams open again, meeting the resistance of the deadbolt—and now the chair.
“Briar!” I hear Brooks shout from the other side.
“I’m okay!” I call and stand up.
But freeze, when the gun points my way again.
“Stay there,” she says quietly as the door starts reverberating, Brooks trying to break through. I freeze, sit back down, and she turns for the hall as the noise becomes almost deafening.
That door isn’t going to hold much longer.
“Angela!” I call.
Her eyes come to mine.
“How did you know Brooks and I would work it out?”
A pregnant pause.
“True love,” she says just before the chair splinters, the deadbolt gives way, and Brooks shoves his way through the opening, Pascal’s team pushing through behind him.
He rushes over to me.
They spot her and give chase?—
But she’s already sprinting down the hall, disappearing into the bedroom.
And by the time they make it through that locked door, then through the one into the bathroom, she’s given Pascal a run for his money and disappeared.
Leaving nothing but a series of broken doors, an open skylight, and…
Our salvation on the counter.
