Page 30 of His Kidnapped Irish Mafia Virgin

Fresh footprints crossed it in several directions, but they told a story that made less sense the longer I studied them. Whoever had moved through the building hadn’t made the slightest attempt to hide their tracks, and that struck me as far more suspicious than if they’d tried to erase them altogether, as they’d done outside. The phone hadn’t been dropped during a hurried escape. It had been positioned exactly where someone wanted it to be found.

I let my eyes travel slowly around the warehouse once again, studying every dark doorway. Paddy followed my gaze before quietly admitting that he didn’t like any of it, and I answered him with nothing more than a nod because there wasn’t anything else to say. The feeling pressing against the back of my mind had already become certainty by then.

I closed the remaining distance, stopping beside the phone without touching it. The screen had been smashed beyond recognition, and when I nudged it carefully with my boot, the damaged casing shifted just enough for the crushed battery beneath it to become visible. Whoever had left it here hadn’t simply wanted to discard it. They’d wanted to make absolutely certain that nobody would ever recover a single piece of information from it.

I looked down at the ruined device for another second before lifting my eyes to the empty warehouse around us.

“There it is,” I said quietly.

Paddy looked from the phone to me, unable to understand what I meant. “The phone?”

I shook my head slowly, never taking my eyes off the shadows stretching across the upper levels of the building.

“No,” I said. “The reason we’re here.”

The words had scarcely left my mouth when something heavy crashed against the metal walkway above us. The sound rang through the warehouse with unnatural force, and every instinct I possessed reacted before conscious thought had a chance to catch up. My hand moved beneath my jacket at the exact same moment Paddy reached for his weapon, and I had barely enough time to turn toward the noise.

The first gunshot tore through the warehouse with a bang. Shards of concrete flew everywhere. Bullets sprayed the floor a foot away from me. I dove sideways behind a stack of rusty machinery. Another set of shots echoed from the walkway. Steel rang out as bullets hit the railing.

Sparks burst from the beams. The silence that had been around us just seconds before was replaced by a loud roar of gunfire.

Paddy was already on the move. One minute he was standing a meter away, and the next he was behind a concrete support column. He started firing at the shadows above. Whoever had planned this ambush knew where to put their shooters. They chose the higher level, which gave them height and visibility. They had cover to pin us down on the warehouse floor. But they’d made a mistake. They thought we’d panic and be confused. We hadn’t survived this long by letting that happen.

A man leaned far over the railing. He was trying to adjust his aim. I saw him out of the corner of my eye as I raised my pistol…and fired. He stumbled backward without making a sound. His gun slipped from his hands as his body vanished into the darkness. I didn’t wait to see if he stayed down. Another muzzle flash happened immediately. It forced me lower. Bullets ripped through the machine that was shielding me. Chunks of metal broke away and showered my shoulders with rust and dust.

“They’ve boxed us in.” Paddy shouted from somewhere to my right.

They were trying to. The difference mattered. If they’d truly boxed us in, they would have stopped shooting and closed in, but instead they kept us pinned down. That told me they were waiting for something. Men who wanted a kill didn’t hesitate. Men who hesitated thought time was on their side. That meant there had to be another part of the plan that we hadn’t seen yet.

I took another look across the warehouse. Shapes shifted behind the railings above, but something else caught my attention. Two men were moving at ground level. They were hiding in the shadows of the steel columns to creep closer. The shooters overhead kept our attention occupied. The men on the ground floor weren’t rushing. They moved with confidence. They thought we had nowhere left to run.

“They’re coming from this floor!” I called out to Paddy.

Paddy replied by firing two shots. One of the guys went back behind cover. The other guy kept moving. He appeared briefly between two columns, with his rifle raised toward me. I fired as soon as I saw him, but he disappeared before I could tell if I’d hit him. The curse that echoed through the warehouse suggested my bullet had hit something.

The return fire got even heavier. Bullets slammed into the machinery around me and punched holes through metal that was already weak. One round struck close to my head. The impact burst fragments across my cheek. For a moment the world narrowed to nothing but noise, dust, and instinct. Every movement became automatic.

An explosion sent splintering wood everywhere. Another burst of gunfire chewed through a stack of pallets, filling the warehouse with drifting sawdust. It mixed with the dust already in the air, and visibility dropped immediately. For the first time since the shooting began, I saw uncertainty creeping into the attackers’ movements. They’d prepared for an ambush in a warehouse. They hadn’t prepared for half the building to disappear behind a cloud of debris.

I signaled to Paddy and we broke cover. We sprinted toward another row of machinery. More rounds chased us across the concrete. Each impact exploded behind our heels. I almost reached cover when something struck my left shoulder with a lot of force. The impact spun me sideways. I didn’t understand what had happened at first. Heat spread beneath my jacket, sharp enough to steal my breath. My arm threatened to give out as I crashed against the floor. For a second, the warehouse tilted around me as pain shot through my arm.

“Liam!”

“I’m fine,” I replied.

It was a lie. The bullet had carved a burning path across my shoulder. Warm blood soaked through my sleeve immediately. I ignored it, gritted my teeth, and forced myself upright. Pain could wait. We had to get out of the trap alive. That was all that mattered.

Paddy caught up to me before I could take two steps. He looked at the blood on my sleeve, but he knew better than to ask if I was okay. He already knew it didn’t matter. If I could still stand, I could still fight. And if I could still fight, we weren’t going to stay there long enough for my wound to become a problem.

“You’ve been shot,” Paddy said.

“It can wait,” I replied.

Then we heard another burst of gunfire hitting the machines behind us. It showered us with rust and broken metal. Our attackers were getting impatient. At first they’d been shooting carefully, but now they were just firing all the time. They no longer cared about saving bullets. They just wanted us dead before we could find a way out.

I looked toward the end of the warehouse. Through the dust and old equipment, I saw a steel door that was slightly open on the eastern wall. It wasn’t much, but it was better than staying where the attackers thought we would be.

“Look.” I pointed at the door. Paddy looked where I was pointing.