“Who lives there?”
“My brother Liam,” he said, skidding to a stop just outside the house.
“Wait!” I shouted as Parker leapt from the truck and ran toward the house.
I tore off my seatbelt and raced after him, terrified he was going to get himself killed.
“Parker, wait!” I shouted, but he was already rushing through the door. “Dammit!”
There was no thinking as I ran after him, pushing through the heat pouring from the front door. Thick smoke curled around me as I followed Parker into the house and toward a prone figure on the ground, pinned under a beam.
I immediately tore off my jacket, wrapping it around my hands as Parker shouted for me to get the other side. The beam weighed a ton, and my arms shook as I struggled along with Parker to remove it from his brother’s back and lower legs.
Smoke choked the air around me, making it impossible to breathe as we shifted the beam off his legs and tossed it to the ground just beyond his feet. In seconds, Parker hauled his brother to his feet and practically carried him to the front door.
I rushed after them, gulping in a lungful of fresh air the moment I crossed the line between life and death.
“Holy shit,” I whispered, bending over to catch my breath.
That was not the welcome I had been expecting. We’d just escaped dying multiple times in the past few months and had left for a simpler life. Somehow, I had the feeling that nothing about this was going to be easy, or anything as I expected.
Expected.
My hand drifted to my stomach as I remembered my earlier fears of being pregnant. And I’d just rushed into a burning house with no care for myself or the potential life I was carrying. What the hell was wrong with me?
Shoving that thought aside, I focused on the here and now. There was a building on fire and his brother needed medical attention. I pulled out my phone and dialed 9-1-1, pushing all thoughts of potential babies aside.
I couldn’t do a damn thing about a baby, but I sure as hell could make a phone call.
I’d have to worry about the rest later.
2
MICHAEL
This was notthe homecoming I had planned.
Pacing the waiting room, I watched as every single person in my family eyed me with either suspicion or unease. It wasn’t supposed to go like this. I was supposed to explain that my dishonorable discharge had been erased, and I had been honorably discharged from the military.
This was a huge deal for me. Getting accused of raping a woman while deployed was enough to send me into a tailspin, but then to be kicked out of the military without so much as a good word to my name…it had ruined my life, and now, that was over.
My life was finally normal.
Except, it wasn’t. My brother was in the hospital fighting for his life, and every single one of them looked at me like I was somehow involved. So much for starting over.
“Are you okay?” Blake asked, resting her hand on my arm.
“Yeah,” I sighed, taking a seat.
Sitting next to me, she wrapped her arm through mine and rested her head on my shoulder. “I take it this was not how you planned on making your big return.”
Chuckling, I turned and pressed a kiss to her forehead, grateful she was here beside me. We’d had a hell of a time recently, and I was exhausted from everything, still trying to wrap my head around the fact that senators hadconspired to unleash a deadly virus on the population, all in the hopes of gaining control of the government.
And nobody knew about it. All of it had been swept under the rug. Aside from the few people in government who worked to take control from the men trying to seize power, and the men and women I worked with at Reed Security, the rest of the country—hell, the world—were blissfully unaware of the danger they had been in.
How close they had come to dying for a few selfish men.
They didn’t know how we had fought to kill the men responsible, to keep the virus from being unleashed on everyone, and what it took to survive.
