Authors: Karyn Lawrence
“What?” Nerves made her voice shaky.
“My name is Ethan.”
The CIA agent who helped Jason and Laurel escape. “Why are —?”
“It’s complicated. It’s too dangerous for me to contact him, so I need you to get a message through.”
It seemed like this was the truth. Her gut was telling her that this man was dangerous but practical and efficient. If he’d wanted her dead, he wouldn’t sit in the back of the car talking to her. It would be done already.
“What’s the message?”
His face went hard with an eerie beauty to it. “The Italians never had him, it was all a setup. Run.”
Her breath left her in an instant as adrenaline snaked through her system. He uttered something else to the driver. The car lurched to a stop.
“Tell them I’m sorry. We lost control of the situation.”
He pushed the door open and stepped out, leaving the gun on the seat. As soon as the door slammed shut, he disappeared into the darkness between two buildings. A man that tall seemed like he’d stand out, but she hadn’t seen him until he was right on top of her.
No one would answer their goddamn phone, and her hands shook as she typed out text messages. Those went unanswered, too. In a blink, they were at the brewery. Her stomach knotted and twisted as she climbed from the backseat. Not safe.
Run.
The word repeated, making her almost hysterical with fear for her sister.
As soon as she reached security she asked for them to call Jason, but she was too impatient to wait. She dialed Laurel again and let her trembling legs ascend the lawn toward the crowd of people gathered there.
It was too loud. No one could hear their phone over the roar of laughter, music, and conversation going on between people gathered at the tables. She scanned the faces in vain. Too loud and too many people.
That’s when she saw him. He stood at a cocktail table, a glass of wine in one hand as the woman beside him tried to have a conversation. He could not look more disinterested. If Kara weren’t terrified, she would have enjoyed this moment. The woman beside him was attractive and young and pouring it on pretty thick, and Shawn couldn’t be bothered to maintain eye contact.
The heels sank into the soft grass as Kara hurried to him. She was two steps away when he noticed her approach, and the warm brown eyes lit up when they connected with her.
“Where’s Jason?” she said. Not “Happy birthday,” or even hello.
“You’re here.” The different versions of Shawn battled for control. His gaze drifted down the dress and it was obvious what he was thinking…. but he was also at a company event. She could feel his employees’ eyes on her, judging her just for being near him.
“I have to find Jason. It’s urgent.” Whatever expression was on her face did the trick, telling him that everything else needed to be put on hold until this happened.
“This way.” He said nothing to the woman who’d been trying to talk to him. Kara followed him through the crowd, his hand on her wrist, pulling her along. She bumped into Diana, the woman she would have reported to, had she taken the job Shawn had set up. Diana’s mouth dropped open at the sight of the snotty American holding hands with Shawn Fucking Dunn.
They snaked up to a side entrance and Kara followed him through the double-doors into a corporate-looking hallway, where Jason waited beside a door.
“Hey. I think we’re going to have to leave,” he said, when he spotted them. “L’s morning sickness is back.”
“We’ve got to get the hell out of here,” Kara said. Both of the Dunn men straightened. “Ethan found me on my way here and asked me to get you a message. That he’s sorry that they lost control of the situation. It was a setup. The Italians don’t have Juric.” The words almost died in her throat, and it was like she’d shot Jason in the face. He threw open the door and revealed Laurel sitting on the floor beside a toilet, glaring up at him.
“Jason, which part of ‘stay out’ did you not understand? I don’t like throwing up with an audience.” And then she saw Shawn and Kara. “Really?”
He ignored her, lifting her small frame up in his arms, which only made her angrier.
“What are you doing?”
“We have to leave.” Jason carried her swiftly towards the doors. “Juric’s in the open.”
Her comprehension of the situation was immediate. “Put me down, I can walk.”
It made Kara’s heart hurt. Her sister lived in constant fear of this moment. There was a dull ache in Kara’s fingers from how hard she’d been squeezing Shawn’s hand. They trailed behind their siblings, following them out onto the lawn and the party there. Everyone else having a good time only illustrated how unfair it was.
“Where are we going?” Shawn asked Jason. “Should I activate the flight crew?”
Jason didn’t get a chance to respond, for a rumble in the distance caught his attention. A pod of semi-trailers crawled toward the brewery with the Osterhägen logo plastered on the sides. They didn’t use the service entrance, instead coming up the front drive in a line. Their engine noise grew loud enough to halt the party as they closed in. The drivers pulled the trucks into a semi-circle to encase the large lawn between the trucks and the brewery behind it, a small gap at the center of the U they formed.
Kara glanced at Shawn, wondering if this was part of some presentation for the event, like the rest of the guests seemed to believe. But he looked confused. Whatever it was, he wasn’t in on it. Perhaps it was a company birthday surprise, but her gut told her otherwise. The angry hiss of the trucks’ air brakes was almost simultaneous and the drivers opened their doors, stepping down out of the cabs.
Guns.
Scary, deadly-looking automatic guns clutched in their hands. The drivers didn’t have to fire a single shot to stir people into a panic; all they had to do was descended on the crowd rapidly. One of the biggest gunmen leapt up on a table, kicking a flower arrangement out of his way.
“
Frau
Hayward!” he yelled, making time stop.
Her sister was twenty feet away from her and frozen in fear. Shawn’s arm locked tightly around Kara’s waist, crushing her against him and stopping her from going to Laurel.
“Nein?”
the driver said.
He smiled and produced a device, perhaps a cell phone, but it was difficult to tell. His hand moved.
The ground rocked beneath her feet. There was whoosh of air and heat behind her, coupled with a boom that reverberated in her chest. Glass and debris from the windows of the brewery flew out onto the lawn. The next explosion was like nothing she’d ever heard or felt. It came from all around, knocking everyone to the ground with either its concussion or their own fear. Her legs buckled beneath her and buried her knees into the lush grass.
All four trucks exploded in the moments after the eruption from inside the brewery. Even after the initial blast was over, there were secondary explosions inside the building that rumbled and groaned with catastrophe. Not more bombs, but unavoidable explosions caused by the deliberate one.
The trucks were engulfed in searing flames, so hot that it scorched the earth beneath them. Even from a hundred yards away she could feel the heat. The building behind them, the brewery Shawn and Jason’s great-grandfather had built, sounded like it was collapsing on itself. There was nowhere to go, everything was on fire. The gap between the burning semi-trucks was blocked by the gunmen.
People lay stunned on the ground, some wounded and others hysterical. Through the smoke that made her eyes water, she spotted Laurel cowering under Jason, his arms wrapped around her and concealing her face. Another explosion from inside the building drew her attention momentarily, and then she turned to see Shawn. The headquarters of his empire was burning. This was a new Shawn she hadn’t seen before, or maybe it was the real Shawn stripped bare of his disguises by the emotion of what had happened.
A woman in the crowd screamed. One of the gunmen had pulled a blond to her feet and examined her critically. The gun was shoved in her face and the loud crack of it going off was just audible over the burning carnage around her. The woman collapsed and was shoved away, lifeless, as several people screamed.
There was no choice to be made.
Kara knew how this was going to play out. Laurel wouldn’t let another person die in her place. She’d go to this team of gunmen, and they’d either kill her now or take her. And Juric would eventually kill her, or even worse: He’d kill the child inside of her. Kara couldn’t have children and didn’t want them, but she’d be damned if she’d let someone take that from her sister. She deserved her happiness, had earned it with all she’d survived.
Laurel struggled against Jason’s hold. Her hands clawed at his arms to release her, and his lips were moving, probably pleading with his wife to stay quiet. So the men wouldn’t take her.
Her older sister wouldn’t let that happen anymore than Jason would. And she had something that might actually prevent it. She could give them a chance to escape. She owed Laurel after what had been said that dark afternoon, when Kara’s angry words that had driven her sister away for five long years.
“Look at me,” she whispered to Shawn, who focused on the gunman who had just killed the blond. His eyes turned to her, filled with chaos.
She couldn’t go to her death without him knowing.
“I told you I wasn’t capable of giving you what you wanted. Everything.” Her voice broke on the words. “You were proving me wrong.”
It only added to the chaos in his eyes, and then there was a different horrified scream as another woman was plucked from the ground. Time was slipping away; she could not waste any more saying goodbye. Instead she gave a strangled cry before letting go of his hand and then launched to her feet. This time she moved out of his reach.
“Stop!” Kara yelled. “I’m Laurel Hayward.”
-10-
Kara didn’t know where the strength came from as she took steps towards the gunman. He was fixated on her, the blond American claiming to be exactly whom he was looking for. All eyes in the crowd were on her as she shuffled forward on the ridiculous shoes. She ignored Jason and Laurel when she passed them, not wanting to give anything away. Plus, it would be too much to handle, too emotional. Her last memory would not be of her sister’s face streaked with fear.
And when she reached the gunman who seemed to be the leader, the one who had jumped on the table and triggered the explosion, he came down to stand before her. This man was definitely not Juric.
The device used to set off the explosions was a phone, still clutched in his hand. On the tiny screen she could see a picture of Laurel, where she looked drugged. Thank god they looked alike and Kara continued to keep her hair blond even when it had begun to darken in college. She was more blond than Laurel was now, anyway.
The gunman was skeptical. She looked like Laurel, but it’s not like they were twins.
“Who are you?” His accent wasn’t thick, but the gravity of everything made thought difficult and she struggled to process his question.
“Laurel Hayward.”
He pressed a button on the phone and brought it to his ear, uttering a few words in a language she didn’t recognize. The man nodded, satisfied with whatever the person on the other line said, and pocketed the phone.
“Give me your hands,” he ordered.
“Why?”
“He said you’d put up a fight.”
She’d make sure Juric knew how true that statement was if she got the chance. She lifted her hands, which were shaking violently, and the man slipped the zip tie around her wrists. He yanked them together painfully, the plastic edges burying into her skin.
That was when it became real. She’d taken her sister’s place and successfully fooled these men. Successfully fooled herself into believing she could do this until it was too late to turn back. The man nudged her shoulder and forced her to turn and face the mass of people hovering on the lawn.
Black smoke poured from the windows of the brewery. There was a woman dead on the lawn near Kara’s feet. And before her, Shawn’s employees, bloodied and every pair of eyes on her. She didn’t want to see any of it. Certainly not her sister, who sobbed in Jason’s arms. His face was a mixture of emotions she couldn’t place. He looked shaken. Hopefully he was thinking about how to escape with Laurel and how to save the sister-in-law who had given him a tremendous gift.
Most of all, she didn’t want to see him.
Yet she faced the crowd and it was like being on stage. An unspeakable force compelled her gaze to go to him. Shawn couldn’t stop her. If he revealed that she was lying, he’d condemn her to the same fate as the woman laying face down in the grass, blood staining her blond hair, and the men would go back to looking for Laurel. He couldn’t go to her, because they’d kill him. All he could do was sit there and watch them take her while his office burned behind him.
It looked like he was furious, but she had no way of knowing how much of it was directed at her and how much of it was a result of the situation. But his anger visibly faded to nothing when he saw the black bag in the man’s hands beside her. Fear flooded down through every inch of her body and tears burned her eyes. She knew she’d be able to breathe inside the bag, but it somehow felt like she was about to go underwater and she gasped for breath. Everything she felt appeared on Shawn’s face.