“We’ve got concussions,” Michelle said. “Take your time. Don’t fall.”
“Time,” Axelle breathed on a forced laugh, and clutched at Michelle’s bedpost, dragged herself over. “Like we’ve got that.” She swayed a little, but her hands were steady as they started on the wingnut latch of Michelle’s nearest cuff.
Michelle waited, straining, listening. The murmurs and swells of the conversation downstairs reminded her, unpleasantly, of being at the clubhouse: the sound of men going back and forth, with an occasional shout to punctuate. She could pick out Luis’s voice, even if the words remained indistinct; he was furious. He was panicking. That could help or hinder them.
The chain went slack, and she had a hand loose. The sensation sent a bolt of adrenaline through her.
“I’ve got the other hand. Work on my feet.”
Axelle hurried to comply as Michelle sat up. And, oh, the room spun. Her stomach sloshed, and she thought she might bring up the water Luis had given her. She fought the nausea off; breathed in short bursts through her mouth and concentrated on getting loose.
Her other wrist. An ankle. Axelle was working on her second ankle when she hurried footsteps on the stairs.
Her stomach gave another violent lurch. “Go shut and lock the door,” she said, twisting her wrist out of the cuff.
“God,” Axelle murmured, but moved to do so.
Michelle twisted around, and saw that the other end of the chain was secured to the bedpost with a series of double-ended snaps. The whole rig had been designed for easy removal. She hadn’t been able to reach any of it, but Luis had planned on moving them, and not wasting time with difficult locks or tricky knots.
She unclipped the chain from its mooring, left the snap on the end, and hooked her fingers through the cuff.
The lock clicked as Axelle thumbed it, and a moment later the knob jiggled as someone tested it from the outside. A fist thumped on the panel and an angry voice shouted an order in Spanish. It wasn’t Luis, but one of his men.
Michelle swung her legs over the side of the bed and straightened as slowly as she dared. She was still dizzy, but her equilibrium was returning as adrenaline flooded her system. She might collapse after – if there was an after – but need and instinct drove her now. Barefoot, she walked across the rug and moved to stand on the far side of the door, where the hinges attached.
Another loud thump on the door.
She caught Axelle’s frightened gaze. “He’s going to kick the door in. Can you stand over there? I need a distraction.”
To her credit, Axelle didn’t argue; she moved to stand between the beds, hands hovering at her sides, body coiled to flee, to shield herself, to fight.
Another thump.
Michelle gripped the other end of the chain with her free hand; wound the links over her knuckles twice. Flexed her biceps, testing them, wishing she’d had more time to work out lately.
Fox’s voice in her head, a memory: it’s about leverage, not strength. Anyone can kill anyone else if they’ve got the right tool, the right timing, and, most importantly, the right leverage.
She took a deep breath…
The wood around the doorknob shattered, and the door swung inward, toward her – concealing her.
…and exhaled as the man stepped into the room. Not tall, but thickset, padded with muscle and fat. He wore a long-sleeved t-shirt, and her gaze zeroed in on the sun-browned back of his neck, the little roll there, beneath the sharp line of his close-cropped hair.
He went straight for Axelle.
Michelle lunged. Got a good flying jump, pushing off hard from the floor, arms raised – over her head, over his – there, down. She landed on his back, and locked her legs around his waist from behind. Gripped the chain tight as she could, and hauled backward on it.
The man staggered, and choked out a harsh breath. Good, Fox’s voice again. Don’t let him inhale again. She brought her hands together in the center of his back, and let her weight help her; gripped tight with her legs and leaned back as he pitched forward.
A wire would have been better – a true garotte. But Michelle pulled and pulled, and he choked, and sputtered, and clawed at the chain pressing against his windpipe.
Over his shoulder, Michelle saw Axelle strike: a hard kick to the groin. The man bellowed and went down hard to his knees. Michelle leaned forward, and toppled him face-down to the rug. Scrambled up with her knees in his back and pulled with all her might.
Axelle joined her: straddling his head, hands gripping the chain below Michelle’s, breath stuttering as she pulled, too.
The choking sounds cut off first, and then he went still. Michelle pulled a little longer, and then finally let go, arms numb and shaking.
“Is he dead?” Axelle asked, voice shaking.
“I think so.” She felt for a pulse as she pulled the chain loose, and couldn’t find one. “God, I hope. Let’s go.”
Downstairs: shouting.
~*~
Fox made noise about going around the back, about being subtle and properly cautious, but Candy had reached a point where he couldn’t listen anymore. Lights burned in an upstairs window, and Michelle was here, she was so close, and fuck careful.
The door splintered in a gratifying shower of slivers when he kicked just below the doorknob. Albie was right with him; he could feel his body heat as he charged into the tile-floored entryway, gun raised.
A staircase lay just ahead, and a man stood on the first landing; he turned toward Candy, eyes going wide. His lips formed a curse, one left unspoken; Candy took him with a clean chest shot, already moving before the body dropped.
He heard shouts, and the slap of footsteps, and moved toward the sound, down a short hallway past empty rooms, and toward a kitchen. He was nearly there when a door opened suddenly to his right. He glimpsed dark clothes, and a snarling face, and a gun that wasn’t his went off: Albie. The would-be attacker fell back with a grunt, and Candy stepped through a wide cased opening into a gleaming chrome kitchen full of bodies.
He was on autopilot now: kill, kill, kill. The gun kicked in his hand, and a body dropped, and then another. He didn’t register faces, didn’t think of shielding himself or strategizing, or doing anything but pulling the trigger, again and again.
He hit the end of his mag, and reached into his pocket with his gummy, bloody hand for a second.
A sound like a cannon blast ripped through the house. A massive hole opened up in the sheetrock above Candy’s head.
A rifle, he thought. Dropped to a crouch, spun, and ejected his mag all in one movement.
But, no, not a rifle. There was a second staircase, one that led down into the kitchen. On the final landing, framed by the nightglow from a circular window, stood Luis, a gun even more ridiculous than the one Reese had described held in two shaking hands, teeth bared in an expression that looked more fearful than feral.
Candy slid the mag home – and pain blossomed in his back, right beneath his shoulder blade. Sharp, bright pain, and the heat of fresh blood.
He could still move, though.
As he turned, the pain spiked – a knife pulling out, he knew, because the weight of a man landed on his back, and then the knife was at his throat, a clean-edged kitchen knife in a tattooed hand.
Candy heard gunshots, and hoped they were Albie’s. The knife nicked his throat, a little papercut burn followed by a hot trickle of blood. Fox probably knew some slick, efficient sequence of moves that would have dislodged the man, killed him, and left himself with not a scratch to show for it. That was because Fox possessed superhuman reasoning in these moments – and because he lacked the straight-up brute strength to do what Candy did.
He reached up and gripped the man’s knife-wielding arm with both hands, bent forward at the waist, and threw him off.
The man yelped before he crashed face-first into the tiled front of the kitchen island, and collapsed in a motionless heap.
Candy lifted his gun – but not in time to get a s
hot off before a hulking guy with a shaved head and a muscle shirt barreled into him.
Candy wasn’t aware of losing his gun, but when he brought both hands up to meet his attacker, they were bare and bloodied. He caught him in the chest and shoved; grunt, pain spiking when he got a fist to the ribs. The man was a caricature, neckless and snarling, like someone who’d go ten rounds with Sly Stallone in a movie.
Shoulda gone for the face, Candy thought, cocked his own fist back, and let it fly. It connected with the crunch and snap of bone cracking – and not his own. He felt the pain of the hit move up his arm – sharp and tooth-rattling in the gunshot wound – but his knuckles were fine. The other guy’s face was very not. He staggered back, jaw offset, blood spilling out of his mouth and down his chin.
Candy bent, picked up the knife that had been at his own throat, and slit the big man’s throat with a vicious surge of satisfaction.
He heard the crack of a gun. The shattering of glass. The body hitting the tiles in front of him. Vision red at the edges, body burning with pain and adrenaline. And then he heard a sound that brought him up short. A sound like sweet music breaking above all the chaos and cacophony.
“Candy?”
Michelle.
~*~
Michelle went down the staircase with her chain brandished like a weapon. She felt the breeze coming in through the window, saw the broken glass littering the carpet on the landing. Heard the thuds, and grunts, and cracks of gunfire, and all she wanted to do was duck down and cover her head and will all of this to go away.
But she’d told Candy she was a spy, and spies didn’t give up just because their legs were shaking, and their hearts were racing, and they could hear men dying just around the corner.
She stopped shy of the landing, felt Axelle crowd in close behind her, and listened. No more gunshots. No more running feet. A groan. A shift.
“What happened to Luis?” That was Albie’s voice.
Axelle gasped.
Michelle took the last step down, and glanced across the wide kitchen. Across the scattered bodies, and the artful smears and splashes of blood. She registered Albie, in a distant way – he was on his feet, and seemed unharmed – and then her gaze locked on Candy.
Her man stood in the center of the room, feet braced, hands at his sides, shoulders heaving as he fought for breath, overhead lights catching on all the gold threads in his wheaten hair.
“Candy?”
He turned. Blood ran in streamers down his neck; it covered his hand completely in a tacky mess when he lifted it toward her. The way his expression broke nearly broke her; she almost sprinted down the last of the stairs and straight across the room to get to him.
But she was a spy. Born and trained, so she picked her way carefully over the glass, and she glanced side to side as she descended, checking for threats. Met Albie’s gaze, briefly – he still held his gun ready, its muzzle trained on the ground, and his throat bobbed as he swallowed hard. A wealth of unspoken meaning passed between them in that one quick look: his relief and gladness that she was alive, his love, the letting go of a fear so crushing it glazed his eyes with moisture. And then he glanced up to Axelle, and didn’t glance back.
“You okay?” he asked, his voice as full of cracks as Candy’s expression: all that joy and terror and wonderment. Is it really true? Or am I dead and dreaming?
Michelle reached the main floor, the tile cold beneath her bare toes. Bodies lay between them, crumpled and bleeding, some dead and some dying. She took the first step.
And Candy took the rest of them. Rushed to her, long legs eating up the distance, and he snatched her off her feet, the length of chain still in her hands caught between them. She had fingers free, though, and clutched at his shirt. Pressed her face into the hot, sweat-damp fabric that covered his strong, strong chest and exhaled properly for the first time in hours.
One of his arms banded tight around her, enfolding her ribs, her back, his big hand splaying across her side. The other hand cupped the back of her head, and held her to him; held her still while he dropped his face into her hair and breathed raggedly through his mouth, humid breaths ruffling across her scalp.
“Little baby thing,” he murmured, prayerful, before his voice choked off into nothing.
Michelle couldn’t speak; she didn’t try to. Swayed with him, breathing in the blood-and-sweat smell of him, the dead spread out around them like so many crumpled petals.
~*~
Axelle thought she’d read somewhere that moments of extreme shock and stress were the moments in which you found out how you really felt about something. If that was true, then this was definitely one of those, and seeing Albie, alive and unhurt, and coming toward her, now, up the steps, past the broken glass, spawned a bright, fierce tangle of joy and relief inside her. So acute it ached; a wash of dull pain through her chest. Love, she categorized it, as her gaze locked with his very blue one, and her own eyes filled with tears.
She all but tackled him, arms going around his neck, face jammed into his throat. He stood straight and tall and held her; didn’t let her fall.
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” he said, over and over, his free hand rubbing circles into her back, the other digging his gun against her hip. She welcomed that small pain; oh, what she wouldn’t have given for a gun minutes ago, when she’d helped Michelle strangle a man to death.
“Are you okay?” he asked. “Are you hurt?”
“I’m not hurt,” she managed, between desperate gasps for breath, her pulse thundering. She didn’t say I’m okay, because she wasn’t. And maybe unhurt was a stretch, too, but she was whole, and so was he, and the rest they could sort out later.
~*~
Fox stalked the perimeter of the house. He found a small pile of cigarette butts on the back patio that gave evidence to lots of smoke breaks. Around the back, on the outside wall, his gaze landed on the bright glint of broken glass – just a few slivers lying on the sod – and lifted to find the shattered window above. The grass, though short and new, was crushed below it. Someone had jumped out, had fallen; had taken off on foot afterward. He jogged along the backs of the two neighboring yards, but whoever it had been, he was long gone.
Or she. The girls?
The sounds of gunfire had ceased. He jogged back to the house, and peered in the back windows, expected a massacre – he found one, but he found a reunion, too. Candy and Chelle, and Albie and Axelle. Safe. Alive.
He let out a deep breath, fished out his phone, and dialed Eden.
She picked up on the second ring. “Did you find them?”
“Yeah. They’re okay.”
She let out a deep breath of her own, this one ending in a low murmur of “thank God.” Then an inhale, and another exhale, like she’d been running and was winded; Fox knew she wasn’t, knew she just needed to breathe a minute, same as him. He envisioned her massaging the tension from the back of her neck, and wished he was with her, and that he could do it for her.
He gave her a moment, and took one for himself, then said, “How are things there?”
“As good as they can be, I guess. No more surprise guests. All of the women are awake now, and appear mostly stable. One got cut on a nail and she’ll need a tetanus shot.”
“They all need to go get checked out.”
“Yeah. Wow. Talk about inundating the hospital.” She was standing outside; he could hear the rustle of the breeze, the stirring of boughs overhead. “Who are we calling this in to?”
“PD, I guess.” He felt an itching between his shoulder blades, a tension of uneasiness, but he had no other ideas at the moment. “Maddox reached out to Quantico, and I’m sure they’re sending someone.”
“Right.” She sounded doubtful, too. “Have to hope they aren’t all crooked, I suppose.”
“Call it in,” he said. “Disguise your voice, then get the girls all set up and get out of sight. I don’t want anybody else in a cut getting cuffed tonight.”
“Okay.”
“Eden.” He hesitated, scanning the fallen forms through the window. All of them were hired muscle, and though he couldn’t see upstairs, he knew what he was about to say was true, sick foresight. “Luis got away.”
She hissed. “Damn.” But she didn’t ask if he was sure. “Little bastard.”
“We’ve decimated his crew, though. We’ve got his dad. We know his face, and his name. I’ve got his bloody birth certificate. We’ll catch up to him,” he said with a confidence he didn’t feel. This whole thing just – stank. Ripe as washed-up bodies.
The way Eden murmured “right” said she smelled it, too. “There’s a lot to sort out now, darling,” she said, half-exhausted, half-thrilled. She did love a tricky job, his girl.
“I know.”
In the illuminated kitchen, he watched Candy draw back from Michelle, and cup her face reverently between bloodied palms. The look they shared wasn’t meant to be witnessed by anyone; it was like looking at the sun and having your eyes burned.
He shifted his gaze over, and saw Axelle crying on Albie’s shoulder while he stroked her hair. Theirs was still a fresh tenderness; still uncertain, still breakable in an all-too-real way. For his dumb brother’s sake, he hoped Axelle was strong and smart enough to walk away from this moment in the correct direction. It would be so easy to flee; abandon the club and all it promised and never look back.
“I’ll see you in a little while,” he said into the phone, much less steady than he’d intended.
Her voice shook, too. “See you.”
Fifty-Seven
Michelle protested weakly that Candy needed to go to the ER. Standing in the kitchen, surrounded by bodies, she’d been too overcome by the feel, and sight, and scent of him – his presence with her, the solidity of him – to register that all the blood on him was his own, and that he was hurt. But then he’d winced, and she’d felt a hot trickle of fresh blood slide out of his sleeve, and she’d probed up his arm with one hand until she found the hole in the material – and he hissed in a pained breath.
Lone Star (Dartmoor Book 7) Page 48