This was what I was good at.
Stick me in a room full of people I was expected to socialize with, and I was pretty much just a body turning oxygen into carbon dioxide. But point a gun at me or come at me with a knife and I fucking came alive. I didn’t seek death out, but I sure as hell got a twisted thrill when it came at me with everything it had.
Normally, I would have just lifted my gun and pulled the trigger before my assailant even had the chance to verbalize another useless threat, but when I realized who it was beneath the gray hoodie that offered no protection from the brutal cold, I stayed my hand.
Because the person pointing the gun at me wasn’t the man I was looking for. Hell, he wasn’t even ahe.
No, I was staring into the wide-eyes of a fucking kid. And a girl at that.
I estimated her to be around fifteen or sixteen. Her long black hair was slung over one shoulder in a long braid and she was wearing a pair of tattered jeans. I couldn’t tell what kind of footwear she had on because her feet were buried in the ankle-deep snow. Several pieces of firewood were scattered around her and I realized she must have been getting the wood from the side of the cabin when she’d walked around to the front and spied me.
I scanned the rest of the area for other people, but no one appeared from the cabin and I didn’t see any other sets of footprints besides hers.
I eased my finger off the trigger of my gun, but didn’t put it away. The girl may not have been a typical threat, but she still posed a danger to me, especially considering how violently her hands were shaking as she held the gun on me. I estimated we were more than fifty feet apart; her chances of hitting me were slim, but not impossible. And I didn’t have a lot of places I could use for cover.
“I’m looking for Allen,” I called as I held my hands out. I took a couple of slow steps towards her.
“Don’t move!” she screamed.
I ignored the order and ever so slowly began closing the distance between us. “I just came to talk to him,” I said. “Do you know him?”
“Stay away from him! Do you hear me?!” she shouted.
Her skin was flushed, though I suspected it had more to do with her emotion than the cold weather.
“I hear you,” I said easily. “I just want to make sure he’s okay.”
“You’re a fucking liar!” she screamed. “I know he sent you!”
I had no idea whohewas, but before I could even ask, she wiped angrily at her face with one hand, holding the gun on me with the other. “Just leave us alone!”
Her voice was thick with emotion and I didn’t need to see her tears to know they were there. My insides clenched at the fear I was causing her, but I didn’t have a lot of options. I had closed the distance between us by more than half.
“I’m afraid I can’t do that,” I said quietly, not sure if she even heard me over the blowing wind.
“Please,” she choked out and I saw her close her eyes for the briefest of moments. I used those few seconds to take several more steps towards her. When she opened them and realized how much closer I was to her, her panic kicked up to a whole new level.
“I’ll shoot you!” she screamed. She waved the gun wildly as she took a few steps back.
“Lucy?”
I stilled at the sound of another voice and glanced over my shoulder to see a man standing hunched over near the front door of the cabin. I automatically pointed my gun at him as I tried to assess the change in circumstances, but the move set the girl off.
“No!” she cried out and then the gun went off. Her shot went wild and sailed past me and slammed into the side of my truck. In the several seconds that passed, I did two things. I determined that the man was unarmed and not an immediate threat and that the girl was in a state of shock from what she’d done. I used the latter to my advantage and ran towards her. She screamed when she saw me coming and pointed the gun at me, but her slight hesitation as her finger searched out the trigger gave me the time I needed. As our bodies collided, I tried to brace her fall as I knocked the gun free from her hand, but I couldn’t prevent some of my weight from crashing down on her as we both hit the ground. She let out a whoosh of air as the wind got knocked from her.
“Lucy!” I heard the man scream, and I barely had time to recover before his body slammed into mine. I automatically rolled, taking the man with me. Despite the fact that I still had ahold of my own gun, he came at me with punch after punch. But the guy clearly didn’t know the first thing about fighting because every swing failed to make contact with anything that would have caused me enough injury to loosen my hold on him or my gun. His struggles irritated me more than anything else, so I did the only thing I knew would end the whole thing and put my gun to his head. As expected, he froze instantly, his eyes going wide with fear. I used his stillness to study him as best I could, considering the heavy snowthat was falling around us. I guessed him to be my height and older than me by at least ten years, but he was leaner than me. Not skinny, just average build. His hair was dark brown and he was wearing jeans and a sweatshirt…like the girl, he was completely underdressed for the elements. The only feature on his face I could make out with any real clarity were his startlingly green eyes, even though one was swollen shut. Nearly his entire face was covered in bruises and his lip was swollen and split. Dried blood clung to a gash near his temple and I sucked in a breath when I saw the bruises on his throat.
Bruises I’d seen more times than I could count when I was a child.
Whoever had put the marks on his neck hadn’t just been trying to hurt him…they’d been trying to choke him. Either into submission…or worse.
I knew without a shadow of a doubt that at least some of the blood Ronan and I had found in the house had come from this man. And I knew Ronan had likely been right…he wasn’t running from the law. He was running from something much, much worse.
“Do it,” the man whispered harshly, his voice sounding scratchy…an aftereffect of being strangled probably.
I forced my eyes to his. His hands were fisted by his sides and he was sucking in deep breaths.
“Do it,” he repeated. I stiffened when I saw his hand reach for my gun, but I knew by the way he was moving that he wasn’t trying to disarm me. His cold fingers closed over my hand and I felt one finger press against the one I had resting on the trigger. I could say that after all the things I’d seen in my life, not much surprised me, but between the girl holding a gun on me and this moment, I was pretty much incapable of speech.
