“Brynn!”
Zoe’s scream was as excruciating as being dumped on the room’s cement floor. For several
seconds, Brynn couldn’t respond. As all the wind rushed into her lungs, her brain
decided to make a not-so-triumphant comeback to her head. The full horror of this
nightmare, until now just feeling like an episode of a graphic HBO show, gripped her
like the reality that it was.
Her sob erupted into a scream. She kicked away from the guards, not wasting time being
modest about it. Too damn late to play Laura Ingalls, when a pair of Neanderthals
were clearly thinking behind-the-barn-fun with naughty Nellie Oleson.
She had to keep her shit together. Had to make her brain stay put this time, and use
it to think clearly. It might be the only way to keep Zoe and herself alive.
Rhett.
Rebel.
Their names ripped into her consciousness again, this time bringing hope. They were
here. Somewhere. How much had they seen and heard on the feed? Did they know Adler
had exposed her?
Facial recognition software
. Didn’t that stuff exist only exist on TV shows? Again, she fought past the sense
that she was just playing out a movie scene—that any second, the director would call
“cut” and everyone would break for coffee. The two thugs would help her off the floor
before talking about their weekend plans with their wives and kids…
“Brynn. Oh my God!”
Zoe’s voice was thick with tears. Brynn’s own eyes stung, tears stemming from a mix
of joy and horror.
She’s here. I’ve finally found her
. But even turning toward her friend was impossible. Her arms had been pinned against
the floor. Her head was locked in place, too.
What the hell?
There was a third guard. Of course. The one who’d been keeping watch over Zo already.
The asshole had dropped behind her, then clamped her head using his knees. He trapped
her wrists beneath his hands. His face, upside down because of the position and that
much more disgusting for it, floated over hers with a slow smirk—and breath that smelled
like old cheese and stale beer.
“Awwww. A present. You guys really do care.”
“For all three of us.” She couldn’t tell whether Thing One or Thing Two had spoken.
Like it mattered. Didn’t matter. Her stomach would’ve churned with as much dread at
the sound of their pants unsnapping, their zipper sliding down. “I think she tried
to get in to save the duffed-up bitch.”
“Well, thank you, darling.” His friend knelt in front of her, pushing her knees out
wide. “You saved something, all right. Our very blue balls.” He tossed a look back
at his friend. “She’s all yours, Burt. Just push the lace out of the way, I guess.”
Burt chuckled. “Yeah, I’ll figure it out.” He stroked his rising erection while staring
down over her body. “This boy knows his way to the goods.”
Zoe’s cry pierced the air. “Oh, my God. Brynna.”
“Shut up.” The brute still holding her right thigh flung a threatening glare. “I can’t
fuck you but I sure as hell can smack you.”
Brynn bit her lip hard to refrain from hurling an insult of her own. It wouldn’t gain
her anything, and might get Zoe struck. God only knew how many times her friend’s
spicy temper had earned her such abuse over the last week. Her mind took off with
the worst possibilities, since she wasn’t able to run an actual visual check. Squeezing
her eyes shut only worsened the possibilities, but at least she didn’t have to look
at the third monster, who dropped to his knees between her legs with an oily growl—
Then burst into a stunned choke, as an explosion rocked the building. “What the fuck?”
Brynn’s head fell to the floor as the first guard lurched to his feet. “What the hell
was that?”
Even through the wall, the alarm peals were ear-shattering. Brynn had never heard
better music in her life, and that included all three of her favorite dance music
stations. Lurching to her feet and whirling, she found Zoe on a small daybed in the
corner, gripping the mattress like it was her life raft. Holy crap, her belly was
big. Brynn wondered if Adler had forced her to pad the swell out for ultimate protection,
until seeing the dent of her friend’s belly button against her cotton maternity tee.
“Zo!”
As she raced to her friend’s side, another explosion sounded, closer and louder. Though
the boom turned the adrenalin in her system to rocket fuel, it was a secondary boost
to hugging Zoe once more. “Finally.” She inhaled, treasuring the spicy scent that
belonged solely to her friend. At last she yanked back, peering carefully into the
eyes that nearly matched the sapphire stud in the woman’s nose. “Are you okay?”
“Yeah.” Zoe braved a wan smile while picking up a T-shirt off the bed and tossing
it at Brynn. The all-white thing draped to the middle of her thighs. Perfect.
“Oh, honey. Your dancing always
was
way better than your acting.”
Zoe rolled her eyes. “Fine. They’ve kept me alive. Let’s leave it at that.”
“And the baby?”
“Good.” She suddenly grabbed her belly. “Ow!” Gritted out a laugh. “
Really
good. Especially today.
Owwww.
”
Brynn watched her friend even more closely, while letting Zoe nearly squeeze her hand
off her wrist. “That doesn’t look ‘good’.”
“No.” It was damn near a snarl. “It’s fine. I’m fine. She’s just…kicking.”
“Kicking. For a full minute?”
Another boom. Bellows followed it, male yet indiscernible, orders and countermands
that pounded the walls like billiard balls in a drain pipe.
“What’s going on?” Zoe gasped out.
“I didn’t come alone.”
Thank God
. Her Doms had saved her from that very fatal mistake.
Her Doms.
New tears jabbed, welled, and flowed.
Somehow, in some way, those two words had become two of the best syllables in the
English language. And if the wrong side was winning in the skirmish outside this room,
she’d never have the chance to tell them.
No. She couldn’t believe that. She wouldn’t.
This time, she chose to believe. To trust. To throw her heart completely into the
power of love.
“Rhett Lange and Rebel Stafford came with me.” She murmured it close to Zoe’s ear,
so the Neanderthals wouldn’t be alerted. “If anyone can get past that door, it’ll
be them. But keep acting scared.”
Zoe hugged her tight again. “
Gracia a Dios,
it won’t be that huge an act.”
But her friend didn’t get a chance to stretch her thespian chops. Before they could
release each other, Zoe curled in, emitting a longer cry of pain. “Ohhhh shit!”
Brynna held her as she sank back onto the mattress, clutching her stomach, lost to
an agonized grimace.
Ohhhh shit
was right. “Zo. I think you’re in labor.”
“No!” Her friend moaned it while clutching the meager pillow. “No. Not here. Not now!”
The last of her scream was devoured—by a blast that left the walls shaking and Brynn’s
ears clanging. She pressed herself over Zoe as smoke billowed into the room, smelling
horrible, stinging her throat.
“
Ay
!” Zoe yelled.
Burt the guard fell, downed by a single gunshot.
“Holy crap.” Brynn gulped.
The second guard toppled, taken down the same way.
Through the smoke, Brynn watched Garrett and Zeke tackle the third guard. They
thwick
ed him into plastic cuffs before ordering him back onto his knees. Bursting into the
room behind them were Kellan, Tait, and Shay, guns brandished, warrior glares blazing.
“Here!” The word fell from Brynn on a desperate shout. She coughed from the effort
of drawing air to get it out. “Over here! Shay!”
“Shay?” Zoe jolted up, invigorated now that her baby’s “kicking” had abated. With
the sheen across her face and breaths whooshing in and out, she wasn’t fooling anyone
about what was really going on. Maybe she’d listen to her husband, once he—
“Dancer?” He swept her up into his arms, crushing her close, frantically kissing her
hair, neck, cheeks. Once his mouth found hers, it was time to cue the swelling Hollywood
soundtrack again. Despite the chaos, Brynn swooned a little inside at the epic passion
of their kiss.
Until Zoe stiffened. Crumpled. Fell to the bed once more, a taut scream pouring out
of her.
“What the fuck?”
So much for Shay buying a clue.
Brynn whipped toward the next-best hope for Bommer brother logic. “She’s in labor,”
she told Tait. “We need to get her out of here. Now!”
Tait’s scowl, copied nearly feature-for-feature by Kellan, wasn’t the answer she’d
hoped for. He glanced at his little brother and Zoe as if hoping Brynn’s assertion
wasn’t true. A hard exhalation left him. “At the moment, that is
much
easier said than done.”
Kellan nodded. “Adler’s booby-trapped the building. The second we breached the hallway,
steel doors dropped behind us. There’s also a set blocking the route to the front
door.”
Another form materialized from the gloom. Her heart turned over at the sight of a
scowling, grit-covered Rhett. Though his eyes nearly matched the smoke as they caught
sight of her, nothing else about his face was gentle or reassuring. The next moment,
they all learned why. “That’s not the worst of it.” He swung his gaze back toward
the corridor. “If I’m reading the control panel right, he’s rigged the whole room
to blow in ten minutes.”
Brynn blinked. “
This
whole room?”
Shay lurched to his feet, eyes more fierce than one of the animals his blood was spliced
with. “Not an option.”
Rhett grunted. “Want to tell me something I don’t know?”
“So why the fuck aren’t you doing something? Christ, Lange! My wife’s in labor!”
Tait planted a hand to the center of Shay’s chest. “And you’re not doing her or your
child any good with the melodrama.”
Shay snarled. “He’s the goddamn tech specialist—”
“And you’re not helping him focus!”
Rhett dropped his head, but not before Brynn took in every tormented twist of his
noble face. He thrived on being a hero the way other people needed air and water.
Shay’s agony, while justified, was tearing him apart. She yearned to run to him—and
confess her love to him. If only nine minutes remained of her life, she wanted to
spend every one of them declaring how deeply his and Reb’s devotion, passion, and
patience had changed her, to the very bindings of her heart.
“It’s not a matter of focusing,” he finally confessed. “I can’t just go into the panel
and cut the red wire or the blue wire. Adler’s system is on an auto cut. If the sequence
gets started and the box is popped, the explosives will fire right away.”
Tait scrubbed a hand over his grimy face. “So we have either nine minutes or thirty
seconds.”
As he finished the bleak prognosis, all their comm links squawked. The sound echoed
in Brynn’s ear too, making her jump. In the chaos since she’d exited the bathroom,
she forgotten about her audio bud. The voice that filled the link, husky and thick
with odds-be-damned resolve, seared her belly with dread—and wrenched her heart with
love.
“Double-Oh…I’ve got this.”
In front of her, Rhett’s head snapped up. His mouth was contorted—and his eyes were
wide with terrible knowledge. He scared the living shit out of her even before shouting,
“The fuck you do!”
“Tell everyone to get back.
Way
back.”
“No! Goddammit it, Rebel!”
But everyone shot to action, anyhow. Tait, Kellan, and Shay helped Zoe, yanking the
bed to its side to shield them. Garrett and Zeke towed their prisoner and hunkered
against the wall too. Brynn rushed the other way, reaching out.
“Rhett?”
He grabbed her in return, clutching her so close that her breath punched out, shaky
and shocked. Just as abruptly, he shoved her away. “Brynna, what the hell? Get down!”
“Why? What’s—”
“He’s going to try and blow the hall door. But all the explosives he has left…it’s
all too much fire power.” He fell to his knees, jerking her down with him. “He won’t
have time to try and figure it out. He’s just going to use too much and—”
“And what?” She seized his face, forcing him to lock gazes with her. Though she hated
every dark, awful light she confronted in his eyes, she peered deeper—hoping to find
a single shred of hope. “And
what
, Rhett?”
Her answer came in the form of a deafening explosion from the hall.
Literally, a deafening explosion.
By the time she pushed through the ringing in her ears and the pounding in her blood,
she realized that she was standing. No…walking. Then running. No, that wasn’t right,
either. She was
attempting
to run, urged on by Kellan. Somehow, he’d latched onto her elbow. He was also yelling
things at her.
Come on.
Move, Brynn. You have to move.
Run. Run. Run.
But the world was a bowl of Jell-O. A giant, smoke-flavored gelatin, through which
she tried to force her feet with terrible, painful steps.
I’m trying.
The words reverberated in her head as if she’d spoken them but Kell didn’t let up
on the pressure, just kept pulling her toward—
What?
She finally understood. There was a knife in the gelatin. Kell wanted her to get to
the knife. No…
it was…
light.
It penetrated at strange angles, cutting through the dark one way then the next as
different figures crossed the acrid-smelling corridor.
Shadows. There were so many shadows. With her hearing still so jacked up, she couldn’t
discern which were real and which weren’t. In one, she found the tatters of her purse.
Real
. As she jerked Kell to a stop in order to pick it up, her gaze rolled to the next—which
held another strange shape.
A head.
Homer Adler’s head. Severed…somehow. Blown off by the blast? Hacked away before or
after? Did she care?
She screamed. At least her head vibrated as if she did.