Knowing a blow like that would end her fight, Jayna tightened her fingers around the piece of mirror and swung at the most vulnerable area she could reach—his neck. The long, jagged piece of glass only stopped when the part she’d been holding broke off in her grasp. The rest was buried in the right side of Darren’s fat neck four inches deep.
He let her go and reached for his neck. Jayna twisted sideways, kicking him in the chest, then crawled out from under him and scrambled to her feet. She staggered toward the window, stumbling when she heard Darren behind her. Oh God, he was still coming!
She grabbed the porcelain Wonder Woman lamp that had been sitting on her nightstand since her real dad had given it to her fifth on her birthday, spun around, and smashed Darren over the head. The lamp shattered, and Darren slumped to the floor with the pieces.
Jayna looked around. There was a lot of blood on the floor, both hers and Darren’s. But she was still standing, and he wasn’t.
A sound from the doorway startled her out of her daze, and she lifted her head to see her mom standing staring at her in horror.
“What did you do?” her mother demanded, running to Darren’s side and kneeling down beside him.
Jayna didn’t try to explain. Her mom wouldn’t listen or care. Darren was still breathing, but Jayna had no idea if he was going to stay that way. The cops might believe she’d been defending herself, or they might not. She’d never had much faith in cops. They weren’t interested in helping people like her.
This wasn’t something she could get out of by spending the night at a friend’s house either. She had to get away from there.
Jayna stepped around her mom, who was still blubbering and fussing over the unconscious Darren, and grabbed the charger for her phone. Then she scooped up the small amount of money she had in her sock drawer and headed for the window. Her mom didn’t even say anything to her as she climbed out.
Jayna stood on the fire escape, afraid she’d take a header down it if she didn’t. But she felt surprisingly steady considering what had just happened. Her hand was barely bleeding and her arm didn’t hurt nearly as bad as before.
Maybe it was shock, she mused as she climbed down the fire escape. Or maybe she was simply a whole hell of a lot tougher than she ever thought she could be.
“Damn right you’re tough,” she muttered, almost believing it as the pain in her arm and hand receded a little more with each step. “You don’t need anyone to make it on your own.”
Chapter 1
Dallas, Texas, Present Day
Eyes glued to his binoculars, Officer Eric Becker surveyed the dimly lit warehouse across from the rooftop he was positioned on. It was four o’clock in the morning, and the place was about as quiet as you could expect a major import/export warehouse located outside the Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport to be.
“Anything yet?” Xander Riggs queried softly through Becker’s earpiece.
Becker checked the heavy shadows along the west side of the warehouse before answering his squad leader.
“Nothing yet. But they’ll be here. This target is too good to pass up.”
“They’d better show,” fellow SWAT officer Max Lowry muttered over the internal communications channel. “I have a hundred dollars riding on it.”
“Which I’ll be more than happy to take off your hands when it turns out Becker is wrong,” the team’s resident medic-slash-sniper, Alex Trevino, added.
“Cut the chatter and stay alert,” Xander growled.
Silence descended over the radio as Becker’s teammates went back to watching their assigned sectors. Like him, they were positioned in a loose circle around the main warehouse, either on rooftops or hidden inside trucks or shipping containers. The idea was to let the thieves slip past them and into the warehouse. Then Xander would give the word and they’d move in, trapping the bad guys in their net. Of course, the plan would only work if the thieves made an appearance. But Becker wasn’t worried. He’d studied the ring’s MO long enough to know they’d show. And soon. It was as quiet as it was going to get down there.
A secure and bonded freight company like World Cargo was open for business 24-7, but there were always lulls in the workload, and the biggest one was right now, after the midnight rush and before the pace picked up again at sunrise. It might have seemed like the warehouse was deserted, but there were four security guards roaming the twelve-foot-high perimeter fence, with another stationed in an armored shack located just inside the gated entrance. Becker couldn’t see them from his vantage point, but he knew there were two more guards inside the warehouse. It was risky leaving all the guards in place for this operation, but if they hadn’t, the thieves would have known something was up.
Movement out of the corner of Becker’s eye caught his attention, and he swung his binoculars to scan the long row of windows that covered the upper level of the warehouse. A moment later, a uniformed security guard walked past. That must have been what he’d seen.
Becker relaxed and swept his binoculars over the rest of his sector as he considered how the death of organized crime boss Walter Hardy had paved the way for these new thieves to move into the city and take over.
Hardy had been a major player in Dallas, but it wasn’t until Sergeant Gage Dixon, the commander of the SWAT team, had gone all werewolf on the jackass and ripped out his throat that people really understood what kind of grip Hardy had maintained on almost every criminal enterprise in the city.
Hell, for a few blissful weeks following Hardy’s death, violent crime rates had dropped to the lowest levels the city had seen in nearly forty years. Of course, that wasn’t the reason Gage had killed the man. He’d ripped Hardy to pieces because the son of a bitch had been dumb enough to kidnap the woman Gage had fallen in love with. Not a smart thing to do. But Hardy’s sudden departure from this earth had benefitted the local community in so many ways, Gage’s action probably should have counted as a public service.
Unfortunately, nature abhors a vacuum. Within a couple months of Hardy’s death, every violent offender with a gun and delusions of grandeur was making a play to take over control of the old man’s territory. At first, the scumbags spent most of their time killing each other. Soon enough though, deals started being made, alliances started forming, and it looked like Dallas was heading for a serious turf war.
Then, when it seemed like things couldn’t get worse, a group of outsiders showed up and the shit really hit the fan. Within weeks, they’d put a serious dent in the local criminal leadership, wiping out a lot of people in the process. In the last week alone, they’d taken out two jewelry stores, an art gallery, and an electronics store. They were good—and dangerous.
Becker was musing over how easy it had been to create a search algorithm to predict the crew’s next target based on the types of places they’d already hit when another shadowy movement through the warehouse’s windows caught his attention. He swung his binoculars up, expecting to see the security guard again, but instead, he saw a man dressed head to toe in black and carrying an MP5 submachine gun.
