“Fuck…you,” she chokes out.
“Oh, you will.”
“Can you even get it up in your advanced aged, fucker?” a voice booms from behind us all of a sudden.
I can’t turn around with the guns trained on me, but I know it’s Dean. Who the hell else would utter something like that?
I’m wondering how the hell he’s able to walk into the room without Cartwright’s guys gunning him down. That is, until he walks into my line of sight as he makes his way over to Cartwright.
He’s holding my remote detonator up for them all to see.
“Get your fucking hands off her and step back, old man,” he orders Cartwright.
His eyes wide with fear, Cartwright does as he asks instantly.
Alana rubs her neck and rasps, “Dean, what are you doing?”
“Ending this.”
He points at the five guys blocking our exit. “Order them to stand down. Weapons on the fucking ground.”
Cartwright lifts his chin at them and I hear them drop their weapons behind me.
“And them,” Dean says, eyeing the ten guys in front of us.
Cartwright curses and has them do the same thing.
“Good boy,” Dean says, brushing past him and pistol-whipping him across the face. He ignores his grunting as he reaches Alana and wraps his arm around her. He walks her over to me and releases her. I take her in my arms and hold her tightly. She’s shivering, because of all the shit that asshole dredged up for her with his fucking threats and an unwanted trip down memory lane. Fucking hell.
“It’s okay, baby,” I whisper to her.
“So, you’re the guy who’s been causing us so much fucking trouble,” Dean says to Cartwright.
“It’s just business.”
“Yeah? You sending your boys around to stab me made it personal, asshole.” He gestures to the remote detonator. “And this is what happens when something becomes personal to me.”
“You fucking maniac. Do you realize what will happen if you press that damn button while we’re all inside the building?”
“It’ll bury all of us,” Dean answers simply.
Something flashes in Cartwright’s eyes. Recognition, it seems. “You’re Slasher.”
“Yeah.”
“I should’ve given you the contact, over your protégé. Things would’ve been far less complicated.” He scoffs to himself. “Women. I should’ve known.”
Dean gets in his face. “That woman was better than all of us. The best of the goddamn best. She deserves some professional courtesy, not being treated like a whore by a piece of shit like you. Guys like you make me sick. Misogynistic fuckers. You, Forest and Halton are all the fucking same.” His eyes flash. “I’m gonna show you where that got them. You’re about to join them.”
I watch Cartwright nod to one of his guys.
A split second later, the guy snaps up his gun with lightning speed and takes aim.
“Dean!” I bellow.
But it’s too late.
A shot is fired.
Dean grunts as it rips through his wrist, a through-and-through that has him dropping the detonator. My breath hitches in my throat as it hits the ground.
It doesn’t go off. It lands with the button facing upwards as well.
Jesus Christ.
Cartwright lunges at Dean, who’s clutching his wrist to try to stop the bleeding.
But Alana breaks from me. She’s there before he can touch him. She roundhouses him away from Dean. But she doesn’t stop there. She spins into a brutal flying kick that propels him across the room. He loses his balance and lands in a heap on the floor.
“Motherfucker!” she screams at him. “How dare you fucking touch me?”
I rush after her and grab her arm. “We need to go. Now,” I tell her urgently, gesturing to the situation around us.
Cartwright’s guys are picking up their weapons. Dean is bleeding all over the floor.
It’s chaos.
She comes with me. We stop quickly beside Dean and Alana grabs his good hand, pulling him along with us.
We sprint through the door. Once we’re through, I kick it shut quickly.
We make it through into the mess hall.
I can hear the heavy footsteps of Cartwright’s guys closing in on us and his irate barked orders.
We barrel through the door leading to the storage room corridor.
I slam it shut and lock it.
Just seconds later, his guys start wailing on it, trying to break it down.
I slam my body against it.
“We need to go,” Alana says.
“Agreed,” Dean says. Clutching his wounded arm, he looks over his shoulder at the security door. “You have maybe two minutes to get out the way we came in, before Cartwright sends his guys around to cut you off there. Go! Go now!”
“What?” Alana asks, grabbing his good arm and studying him. “You’re coming, too, Dean.”
“Someone needs to complete the mission, Alana.”
And right then, I understand his plan.
But, either Alana doesn’t, or she simply doesn’t want to believe it, because she presses, “What are you talking about?”
“There are too many of them for the three of us to take out. We can’t go through that many guys to get to Cartwright. But there’s another way.”
She looks between us. “What? What way? What is going on? What have you done?”
When Dean hesitates on telling her, I step in and reveal, “There’s enough C4 rigged in this area to wipe this entire compound off the map, Alana. It was our back up plan, if Cartwright was too heavily guarded and if our covert approach failed, forcing us to go head to head with him and his army.”
“And it did fail. He knew we were coming,” Dean tells her.
I go on, “We’d planned to remote detonate it once we’d cleared the area. But now that the remote’s…gone…someone needs to detonate it manually.”
“The explosion will be instant.” She eyes Dean. “If you detonate it, you won’t have time to make it out.”
“I know, Alana. It’s okay.”
“What? Okay? Like hell it is! No, Dean! I won’t let you do this!”
“It’s not your choice how I choose to go out, Alana.”
“No. I—”
“Respect my decision here, gorgeous.”
She shakes her head vehemently. And then she squeezes his hand. “Please, Dean. Don’t do this.”
“Alana—” he starts.
He doesn’t get to finish his sentence, as I’m blown forward from the guys ripping open the door. I land hard on my hands, grunting from the impact. Gunfire erupts around us, Cartwright’s guys firing wildly down the hallway.
I scramble to my feet and cover Alana’s body with mine. “Go! Go! Go!” I yell over the thunder of the gunfire. She runs towards the exit with me covering her.
I look over my shoulder and see Dean take a bullet to the side.
Shit.
I push Alana through the door and slam it closed behind her.
I turn back and sprint towards Dean.
“Which room?”
I’m asking him where he needs to detonate the explosion from.
He points to the room where Cartwright was keeping Forest and Halton. Right in the line of fire. Jesus Christ.
“Can you make it there?”
He nods and grunts, clutching his bloodied side. “Yeah. I got this.”
“All right. On my word, I’ll cover you. Okay?”
He grabs my hand and chokes out, “Take care of her. Even if she says she doesn’t want it, she does. Look after her, okay?”
“I swear.”
He smiles a bittersweet smile.
And then he pushes off the wall and makes a beeline for the room.
I pull both my guns and fire wild shot after wild shot at Cartwright’s guys.
As soon as I see Dean slip into the room, I start backing up and sticking close to the wall to avoid a hail of bullets. By
the grace of God, I manage to make it outside without taking a hit.
I slam the door closed and spin around, right into an irate-looking Alana.
There’s no time to get into me allowing Dean to stay in there to finish the job right now.
We have seconds to clear the area.
I grab her hand and pull her with me away from the building, back through the courtyard. I push her through the hole in the chain-link fence.
We’ve barely made it through when it happens.
“Get down!” I yell.
We both hit the deck and I instinctively cover Alana’s body with mine.
A thunderous blast rips through the compound. It explodes into a fierce ball of fire, lighting up the dark night and forcing us to shield our eyes from the harsh bright light. I squint to watch as it tears through the compound, causing the structure to fall into itself and collapse into a pile of rubble in a matter of seconds, utterly decimating it.
Alana tries to break from me, put I trap her safely beneath me with my body weight. She reaches out her hands, screaming, “No! Dean! No! No!”
“I’m so sorry, Alana.”
“You didn’t try to stop him!” she screams at me. She’s hysterical and a struggle to hold down as she thrashes beneath me on her stomach wildly.
“It was what he wanted, baby.”
“No! It wasn’t! No!”
I lean in and tell her softly, “It was his redemption, Alana.”
That has her stilling.
She knows I’m right. After all the awful things that he’s done throughout his life, this is the one exception. A selfless, true act. The one good thing he’s ever done. Sacrificing himself to save the lives of others. His one redeeming act.
I hear her sobbing then.
I push off her and gather her in my arms.
As I get to my feet, I catch sight of Mark hurrying across the street towards us.
“Jesus,” he says, eyeing what’s left of the compound. “Targets definitely neutralized.”
That makes Alana cry harder and she buries her face in my chest to avoid Mark seeing her break down.
He looks between her and the building. Realization plays on his face. “Dean…didn’t make it out?”
“The remote detonator was compromised. It had to be manual.”
“Fucking hell.”
“He saved us,” Alana chokes through her tears.
“Yeah, baby. Yeah, he did.”
I can tell by Mark’s expression that he can’t believe Dean actually did something so selfless.
“Then it’s over. It’s all over now.”
I glance at the building. “Yeah. Cartwright’s gone. It’s finally over.”
Epilogue
~Alana~
Ten Months Later
I hear the crunch of tires on the asphalt driveway a few feet behind me.
I smile to myself as I sit on the dock, gazing out over the beautiful lake and the amazing mountainous scenery surrounding the area.
Damon is back.
I look over my shoulder as I hear his footsteps approaching. He looks so sexy in his new casual look. Jeans, a white muscle shirt and a brown fleece jacket. I like it much better than his suit look. I love the down-to-earth look. And the days’ old stubble he’s sporting lately always turns me on. Mmm…he looks so rugged and fuckable.
I’ve ditched my leather get up, too. There’s no need for it anymore, not now that I’m officially retired. Jeans and an off-the-shoulder shirt are my go-to nowadays. And the off-the-shoulder style of shirt is coming in handy so much these days.
“My love,” he purrs in my ear as he kisses my neck tenderly and then sits down beside me. He drops a bunch of grocery bags on the grass and tells me, “Diapers and everything else from your list. It’ll last us for another couple of months.”
“Thank you, baby. Just in time. He’s on his last one.”
He reaches out and trails his fingers over the top of my breast, the one still covered by my shirt. He looks down at the other one. “He loves them just as much as I do,” he says in a seductive whisper.
“Damon,” I protest. “Don’t turn me on right now.”
He chuckles. “I like this side of you.”
“What side?”
“This maternal side.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. You’re really good with him.”
I look down and watch as he strokes our baby boy’s fuzzy blonde hair gently. I gaze at his eyes. They’re the same stunning color as Damon’s. He might have my hair, but he looks so much like a tiny version of Damon.
“He makes it easy,” I murmur, smiling down at him. “I love you, baby Ollie.”
Damon ruffles my hair. “So cute.”
He pulls away and I watch him go through the grocery bags, seemingly searching for something. A moment later he pulls something out of one of the bags and holds it up to me.
I cringe. “A breast pump?”
“The best one on the market.”
I shake my head. “Damon, I—”
“Alana, I know how self-conscious you’ve been about your body, since you had Oliver.”
I look away and mutter, “I don’t want to talk about it right now.”
“Well, that’s too bad.”
Argh. It’s always the same with him. He always pushes me to discuss awkward things that I can barely manage to even think about in my own head.
“You’re just upset, because you’re not getting any,” I snap at him.
He flinches, but doesn’t rise to it. Instead he says calmly, “I’m upset, because you’re not comfortable with your body.”
“Urgh. You don’t understand.”
“You’re used to being at the peak of physical fitness. You’re used to your body being tight and firm in all the right places. And now…since Ollie…it looks different. Am I understanding here?”
Wow. “Yes,” I murmur.
He shifts his weight and goes on, “You think it looks unattractive. But it’s just different, Alana. Believe me, you are as sexy as ever.”
“I’ll lose the baby weight. I just…there hasn’t been much time to work out.” Taking care of a newborn really is a fulltime job, even with Damon and I doing it together as a team.
“I know you will, baby. If that’s what you want. But if you don’t…you’re still the hottest damn woman I’ve ever laid eyes on. You have no idea what just looking at you does to me.”
“Damon,” I say, feeling myself blush at his words.
He leans in and lifts my chin with his finger. My eyes meet his.
He tells me, “Tonight I’m going to take you, baby.”
I shake my head. “I don’t—”
“Slow and soft, Alana. I know you’re anxious about it, but I promise I’ll have those thoughts leaving your head. I’m going to take my time with you as I worship this beautiful body of yours.” He leans in and kisses my neck. “Every. Fucking. Inch. Of. It.”
Ollie lets out a cry then and Damon pulls back, chuckling.
“I guess he didn’t like hearing that,” I joke.
“Looks like he’s just finished his meal, my love.”
“Oh,” I say, looking down to see Ollie trying to turn away, but I’m holding him a little too tightly, pressed up against my breast.
“Here. Let me take him for a bit. I’ve missed him,” Damon says, holding out his hands.
I hand Ollie over carefully.
Yeah, Damon has been gone for half the day, and I know he doesn’t like being away from us. It’s not that he’s worried. We’re safe here. It’s because he’s obsessed with our little family. I am too. Having Ollie is the best thing that’s ever happened to either of us. Neither of us thought we’d ever have what we do now. Love. A child. Our own family. And now that we do, we’re both holding on tightly to it, grateful that we’ve been given this gift.
But the nearest town where we can pick up groceries is a couple of hundred miles from where we’re living. A modest-sized bungalow
in the valley of a mountainous forest, cut off from civilization.
After what went down at Cartwright’s compound, we had to disappear. Nobody can blow up a building and assassinate over twenty people in the middle of a city without it being an issue and drawing a fuck load of attention. So, we’d had to go to ground and slip off the radar.
And that was more than fine with both of us.
We’d been determined to sever all ties with the dirty, dark and dangerous business we’d belonged to. And we’d done that in a spectacular fashion, disappearing and wiping all traces of our existence. We’d manipulated the situation to make it appear that we’d died in the explosion, along with the others. We’d planted DNA evidence at the scene. That was all that was left to determine who had died there. The bodies had been unrecognizable, horrifically charred and merely piles of ash.
The authorities had been able to ID all those who had died, except Dean.
Damon believes it’s because he was a ghost. To the rest of the world, he never existed to begin with. But if that was the case, some DNA would still have turned up for him and would’ve just been marked as being unidentifiable to any particular individual.
Had he somehow survived the explosion?
Looking at the pure logic of it, the pure hard facts, it shouldn’t be possible. The explosion decimated everything and everyone within the compound.
Unless he managed to get out in time. There was a way out through the vents that I’d left open in that room. But the speed with which he would’ve had to move…no…it’s not possible.
I guess I just want it to be.
I’m still in denial.
Almost a year has passed since that night and I still haven’t accepted his death. I can’t bring myself to believe that he’s truly gone. He’s been the one constant in my life. I’ve known him longer than anyone, even Mark. Although, I am wholly with Damon, there’s a connection between me and Dean that I can’t shake. It’s deep—soul deep. It’s not romantic in the least. It never was—not on my end. Having that severed, losing that…I haven’t been able to accept it.
Damon and I don’t talk about it, because all he can see when it comes to Dean is the physical relationship we had at one point. I know it upsets him, so I don’t discuss it.
What we have been discussing a lot, are our other issues. Post-traumatic stress, my demons concerning Andrew and my dad, and all of our guilt over the many lives we’ve taken over the course of our former careers. Damon hired an amazing therapist who comes out to us often to help us work through our issues. Mark joins us as well. It’s basically a support group and it’s been helping all three of us a lot.
Dark Hearts (Part 4) (The Bleeding Love Series) Page 8