Kayla’s jaw tightened. I saw it but Vance didn’t, because he’d stopped seeing her as anything but a tool to get me to follow his orders.
And then he dared to threaten the thing she held most precious in the world: her son.
Whatever she did, I had to be ready.
I pushed off the guardrail. Took a step toward the syringes. Slow. Buying one more second, then another, because seconds were the only currency I had left.
Vance’s focus narrowed. His eyes tracked my hands as I crouched toward the asphalt. The gun followed, the barrel tilting downward with my movement, his attention contracting to the immediate task of making sure I picked up the syringes and didn’t try anything with them.
Kayla moved.
She didn’t hesitate. Didn’t scream. She leaped, diving for his gun arm, wrenching it sideways with everything she had.
Not trained. Not graceful. Just a mother who’d heard a man threaten her son—something I knew she was never going to allow again while she had breath in her body.
I was already sprinting for them. Three strides from the guardrail, closing fast, focused on the weapon.
Vance twisted his arm free and shoved Kayla back. She came at him again. Got a hand on the barrel this time and tried to yank it away.
He hit her. A punch to the face, hard enough that her head snapped sideways and her knees buckled. She went down to the pavement, and I was two steps away when Vance swung the gun toward me.
I pulled up hard. Point-blank range. No angle. He shot now, I died. There was no way around that.
I didn’t care. I was going to leap anyway.
But he reached down and grabbed Kayla, hauling her up by the back of her jacket before I could move. He got his arm around her throat and pulled her against his chest, the weapon pressed to her temple. She clawed at his forearm, eyes wide.
He was cutting off her air.
“Back up, Ben.”
“Let her go.”
He squeezed his arm tighter across her neck. “I don’t think so. Once she passes out, this will be easier. Although, now I think poor William will indeed suffer when I’m done here.”
He kept his eyes on me as Kayla’s struggles grew more frantic.
“Don’t worry,” he said against her ear. “It’ll be over soon.”
I was out of time. Kayla’s hands were slowing against his forearm. Her eyes were losing focus.
One option left. The kind with math that didn’t work out for me.
If I charged him, he’d have to choose. Shoot me or hold her. He couldn’t do both. And if he swung the weapon toward me—even for a second—his arm would come off her throat. She’d have air. She’d have a chance.
I shifted my weight forward. Planted my back foot.
Then something moved at the edge of my vision.
A shape in the tree line. Low, fast, dark against dark. My brain tried to process it and failed because the shape didn’t belong here. There was no reason for anything to be coming out of those trees at that speed, at this hour, on this mountain road where no one knew we were.
But I knew that gait anywhere.
I knew that stride the way I knew my own heartbeat. I’d watched it cross training fields and desert compounds andmidnight streets in a dozen countries. I’d felt it through a leash ten thousand times.
It wasn’t possible. Jolly was at home. In my house in town, miles from here, asleep on his bed.
But the dog coming out of the darkness wasn’t interested in what was possible. He was already at full speed, already committed, every year of training and every mile of trust compressed into a single trajectory aimed at the man holding the weapon.
