by Jodie Bailey
Erin dropped to the clearer air, but a sudden force smashed into the back of her head. She struggled against pain and the darkness, but the world closed in and everything went black.
FOURTEEN
Four counts in, Caroline sputtered and coughed, heaving in air.
Jason didn’t know whether to cry or cheer. Brushing her hair from her face, he leaned close and whispered, “You’re okay, Caro. You’re okay.” He rolled her to her side and held a steadying hand against her back as she gasped for air, his gaze searching the yard. Webster had disappeared around the front of the house, likely to gain entrance from the front.
But where was Caesar? And how long had Erin been inside searching for Lisa? Had either of them left the house yet?
Two shadows appeared in the open kitchen door, and hope surged in Jason, but the figures that emerged coughing and gasping were Caesar and Lisa.
Webster met them on the patio and lifted Lisa, carrying her away from the house as Caesar’s wild eyes met Jason’s across the distance. “I can’t find her. I can’t find my wife!”
“I’ve got her!”
With a guttural cry that ripped Jason’s soul, Caesar tore across the yard and dropped beside her as her eyes fluttered open.
“Caro.” He whispered her name, then held her to his chest, rocking her against him. “This has to stop. It has to. I can’t... I can’t...”
Jason turned away to give them their privacy and to see if Erin had returned, his muscles taut and fighting to move. Still nothing. No motion at the door. The flames had burned through the roof and leaped for the sky. Through the downstairs windows, it was evident the fire was rapidly consuming the lower floor as well. To be moving so fast, it had to have been deliberately set. But by who? And when?
And where was Erin?
Erin had gone inside after Lisa... He had no idea how long ago, but it felt like an eternity.
There was a roar and a crash as the dining room window shattered and a shower of sparks dropped from the ceiling.
He was going in.
Jerking his sweatshirt over his head, Jason dragged it through the small fish pond near the fire pit, then tugged it back on and drove through the back door. Heat and smoke stung his eyes and seared his lungs, even through his damp sweatshirt. He couldn’t see a thing but red through the smoke, which hung heavy in the kitchen, illuminated into a horrifying glow by the fire roaring around him with a sound like fighter jets buzzing the ground.
Searching for clear air, he dropped to his knees and the pain of his injury shot through him. Jason’s breaths came faster, the visions in the kitchen melding with the horror of a firefight on a dusty Iraq road, of hooded men dragging Fitz away as Jason lay on the ground, his knee rendering him useless, his shoulder bleeding from an insurgent’s shot, his team incapacitated around him.
Fitz screaming as they tortured him a few meters away...
His ears roared with more than the fire as panic threatened to overtake and paralyze him.
He had to stop this, had to find something inside himself to bolster him, to get him to Erin. To save them both.
How do I get through it? I pray. A lot.
It had been years since Erin said those words to him, so long they’d faded into obscurity until this moment. He could see her, sitting on the couch at the fire station after an accident on an icy mountain road had left no survivors. He’d marveled at her faith, envied it even.
There had been a time when he’d prayed too, before his marriage died. Before he listened to his comrade succumb to a torture he couldn’t even imagine as the enemy tried to extract information from the Americans’ leader. Before he’d grown convinced God wouldn’t listen to the kid who couldn’t do anything right.
But maybe He did. Because Jason had never dared to pray aloud for another chance with Erin, but his heart had cried out with hope even when Jason didn’t realize it. And the way she’d looked at him tonight said this prayer might have an answer.
Jesus. Jason fought for air, his lungs burning from smoke and fire. Help me find her. Please.
There was no other way. Lisa’s house was huge, a massive two-story with an open layout. Erin could be anywhere.
A crash and a new, louder roar from his left. More of the ceiling had fallen. He was running out of time. If he didn’t find Erin soon...
No. He couldn’t leave without her. If he retreated and she died...
He’d die along with her.
Lungs screaming for air, he crawled forward, scanning the floor around the island, but there was no Erin. To his right, the way was blocked by the burning beams from the fallen ceiling. Please, God, don’t let her be under there. He couldn’t let himself think such things. Not now.
He crept onward, fighting his watering eyes, trying to see in the strange, shifting red glow. Help me find her. Please. He pleaded with a God he knew had to hear.
His hands swept the floor as his eyes burned and watered and robbed him of sight. Heat seared his skin. He had to find her or get out. Find her or get out... Find her or...
He crawled headfirst into a door and backed away. There were no landmarks left. No way to know where he was, whether this was the garage door, a bathroom, a closet...
Rising to his knees, he turned the handle.
The door flew open with a momentum Jason couldn’t stop and he tumbled backward, hitting the ground hard, a dead weight landing on his shoulder.
He rolled to the side and found himself looking into Erin’s pale face. Her eyes fluttered open, drifted closed, then opened again. “Lisa.” She moaned once and tried to sit. “Have to find...Lisa.”
He wanted to hug her, kiss her, reassure himself she was alive. But those things could come later. They had to get out. Fast. “She’s safe, but we have to get out of here.”
Adrenaline surging, he tried to rise to his feet but couldn’t. He tried to orient himself as his vision darkened, either from lack of oxygen or the thickening smoke, he wasn’t sure. He was at the pantry. He had to be. And next to the pantry...
Was a door leading to a side patio. He jerked the door open, then shoved a protesting Erin out ahead of him and barreled through behind her.
When she dropped to her back on the ground, he fell next to her, rolling on his side and inhaling clear air, stroking her cheek, brushing ash and soot from her skin. “You’re okay.”
She nodded once, then struggled to rise. “Lisa?”
Of course she’d be worried about the rescue. Before he could answer, someone pulled him away from Erin and shoved a mask over his nose and mouth. “Breathe.” A face wavered in front of him, a paramedic probably. The cold air burned its way to his lungs, which gratefully accepted the oxygen pouring into him. His thoughts gradually cleared, though his throat ached and his eyes stung.
But he couldn’t rest, not until he knew everyone had made it out safely.
Across the driveway, Lisa Fitzgerald sat wrapped in a white blanket on the back of an ambulance with a soot-covered Webster at her side. By an ambulance near the road, Caroline Augustus lifted a hand to her husband, who hovered over her, his face taut and gray.
And Erin... The paramedics had moved her several feet away and were tending to her as well. She appeared to be fine but Jason couldn’t stop scanning the area, searching for more danger.
Because the fact was, Erin hadn’t succumbed to the smoke or the heat in the house. There was no way she’d wandered into a pantry and shut the door behind her. Someone had put her there. Someone who had known she’d cast aside caution and go into the house after the other two women.
While all three women had been inside the house, Jason had no doubt the blaze had been set to target Erin specifically, and the pool of suspects had shrunk to the people he trusted most.
* * *
“Seriously, I’m fine.” Erin held her arm out to the nurse who hovered by th
e side of her bed in the emergency room. “I don’t need fluids. I don’t need oxygen. I’m good.” The argument might be more convincing if her throat wasn’t scratchy and her head wasn’t pounding so hard she had to narrow her eyes to keep the overhead lights from making everything worse. The spinning of the CT scan had been torture, and the wait for results was dragging on too long. This entire trip to the hospital was pointless. She was fine. Really.
If she kept acting as though everything was okay, eventually somebody would believe her.
She wanted out. To go home. To have a normal life, when terrorists didn’t have her on some kill list.
Except the definition of normal was fluid at the moment.
The nurse left, promising the test results soon. After sinking into the pillows, Erin pinned a hard stare on Wyatt, who stood at the foot of the bed, looking a little pale around the edges. “You’re sure Jason’s okay?”
Wyatt nodded. “For the ninety-seventh time, he’s three doors away acting as surly and stubborn as you are.” When she started to speak, he held up his hand. “Lisa Fitzgerald is being treated for smoke inhalation. And Caroline Augustus was admitted for smoke inhalation. If you don’t calm down and start promising some doctors you’ll keep still and follow orders, you’ll be the next to be hauled upstairs for an overnight stay. You took a hard hit to the back of the head. They won’t play with that.”
He didn’t have to tell her she’d taken a beating. She couldn’t remember anything from the time she went back through the kitchen door until she awoke staring into Jason’s panic-filled eyes, but the back of her head throbbed in a way that left no doubt there had been a solid blow. “Did the roof cave in on me?”
Wyatt took a deep interest in the monitor beside the bed, which was reading Erin’s vitals. Everything read normal.
Except his expression. He was hiding something.
“Wyatt...” He’d mentioned Lisa and Caroline, but what about the men? “Where are Webster? Caesar?”
“Neither needed treatment.”
“So what are you hiding? You have a terrible poker face, almost as bad as Jason’s.”
Wyatt exhaled, but it sounded like a cross between a cough and a chuckle. He stepped away from the curtained doorway and lowered his voice. “Caroline Augustus took a hit to the back of the head, just like you did.”
“How?” She’d found Caroline in the middle of the kitchen floor with no debris around her. It didn’t make sense.
“The other guy? Webster? He claims he found Lisa Fitzgerald incapacitated in a downstairs bathroom.”
Fear drove her pulse faster. Erin sat up and reached for Wyatt. “What happened to me? I remember going back into the house, but after—”
“I found you in the pantry.” Jason’s voice from the doorway drove the beeping of the heart monitor faster. He seemed to fill the space between the curtain and the wall, his face and clothes smudged with smoke, his hair wild and his focus on her. “Someone targeted you tonight. Someone who’s...” His face grim, his eyes haunted, Jason pressed his lips together and refused to say more.
It should have shocked her. Maybe should have scared her, but a numbness crept through Erin that defied logic. With hit after hit coming, she’d half expected it, had essentially known from the moment she saw the smoke this was a deliberate attack. She couldn’t think about being trapped in a pantry now, couldn’t take the time to wonder how Jason had found her. She could only thank God he had, and she could only pray about what happened next. Going into hiding wasn’t an option, not with her father in the mix.
Wyatt stood silently, his gaze going back and forth between Jason and Erin as though he were waiting for something. It was the analytical expression he got when he was puzzling through a case, not that Mountain Springs had many high crimes to worry about. But Erin knew the look, even if she couldn’t puzzle through what he was thinking. After a long moment, he seemed to come to a decision. Pressing a kiss to Erin’s forehead, he squeezed her hand and headed for the door, where he paused and said something under his breath to Jason before he disappeared into the hallway.
Jason didn’t move as Wyatt passed, although the set of his jaw tightened and his gaze locked on Erin.
She felt exposed, as though he could see her fears, her frustration...her softening toward him. That was the one thing he could never know, because it would give him hope. It was a hope she couldn’t act on, not as long as her father needed her.
She should end this right now, tell him to leave and spare them both the fast-approaching heartache.
But when he sat in the small chair beside her and took her hand, the thought flew away, and only the here and now mattered. Here they were the only two in the world. Battered, singed, bruised...but alive.
Even if his eyes were haunted by something she couldn’t understand. A smudge of ash along his cheekbone made the blue in his eyes deeper, darker. Erin ached to swipe it away with her thumb, but she had no right...even if he was sitting here with his fingers warm around hers. “What’s wrong?”
“It’s been a rough night.”
“It has. But that’s not it.” No, this wasn’t exhaustion or fear or even worry. It was something else. An anger and a pain hinting at deeper things, maybe even deeper than their past together. “What happened that I don’t know about?”
Jason’s forehead creased, and his thumb turned lazy circles on her wrist, an action he probably didn’t even realize he was doing, even though it was quivering Erin’s insides into mush for reasons entirely incongruous to the conversation. Eventually, he sniffed and stared at something on the wall behind her. “I don’t think the person doing this is a terrorist.”
All of the butterflies in Erin’s stomach died. This wasn’t about her. This was bigger and potentially so much more dangerous. “What?”
“That footprint at your house. I can’t stop thinking about it. I was hoping I was wrong, but tonight...”
Erin shuddered. He didn’t have to say it. “Webster, Caesar, you... Every man present was in Lisa’s house.”
“And nobody saw a stranger in the fire.”
“Jason...” She exhaled his name and caught some of his grief. The men he trusted the most—his family—may have turned on him. “You’ve been through so much together.”
“You have no idea.” He was far away, as though whatever had wounded him overseas lay just on the other side of a veil Erin couldn’t see through.
“Tell me what happened. What really happened.” Maybe if he talked about it, he’d remember something. Or if nothing else, the haunted air below the surface would dim.
Jason started to speak, then dropped his gaze to their fingers, laced together on the white blanket that did nothing to stop a chill that had started in his heart and transferred to hers. Finally, he sniffed and started talking, though he never looked at her.
“We were on a mission outside the wire and had been for a few days, hunting a target who kept slipping by us.” His fingers tightened around hers. “Honestly, we should have come in and taken a break but Fitz was determined not to fail and we were right there with him. Catching this guy, it was a personal challenge or something.” His Adam’s apple bobbed as his shoulders grew tight. “We hit an IED. Rich and I got out of the vehicle on one side, Fitz and Caesar on the other. The rest of the guys were behind us. We were ambushed. Found ourselves in a firefight. They were on all sides. I got hit in the arm, nicked, not bad enough to hold me down. But Fitz...” His eyes grew darker, his expression twisted as though he was in pain.
“You don’t have to—”
“Fitz got separated from us somehow. I don’t know how. It never should have...” It was as though he didn’t hear her, didn’t even realize she was there, even though he was squeezing her hand hard enough to cause pain. “They grabbed him. Started dragging him away. They pinned us down, hit all of us and...”
Tears coursed down Er
in’s cheeks, the images in her mind horrible and grief-filled, likely nothing compared to what Jason could see and hear in his memory.
“All of us were wounded. Medics stayed back with the worst, and the rest of us regrouped, went after him. They were torturing him already, in the back of one of our own trucks. He was screaming...”
Wrapping her other hand around his, Erin held on tight. He had to know he wasn’t alone. She wouldn’t let him go. From the way he told the story, this was the first time he’d ever spoken about it aloud, and she didn’t want to violate or cheapen the trust he was placing in her.
For the first time, he was giving her all of himself.
“We ran for him, fighting back, but they detonated an IED in the middle of us. I took shrapnel to the shoulder, blew out my knee. It hit while I was running. Couldn’t move, couldn’t hear, couldn’t do anything. And then there was silence. They tossed Fitz’s body out of the truck, and it was... All I remember is blood. Mine. His. All of us.” Jason dug his teeth into his lower lip and seemed to realize he had an audience. Gently, he extracted his hand from hers and sat back in the chair, staring at the wall. There was a long stretch of silence before he sat straighter and his expression cleared. “Lisa lost her husband. The rest of us were injured, some bad enough to medically retire. And the army sent the rest of us here to lick our wounds and to train other soldiers, because a calculated attack of such magnitude? That many men coming at us? Torturing Fitz right there? It was a targeted thing. One nobody on my team was ready for.”
He stood and paced the small room, his back to her as he stared at the whiteboard on the wall. “And now one of those men? One of my brothers?” When he turned to face her, the grief on his face nearly crushed her. “One of them is a killer.”
FIFTEEN
Erin leaned her head back against the seat in Jason’s pickup and closed her eyes. Her throat ached, her lungs burned and her eyes itched. It was past noon on a day that had started years earlier. She opened one eye to peek at Jason, who’d overridden Wyatt on driving her home from the hospital. According to him, Wyatt needed more rest than any of them, and he’d better get it before he had to go back on duty later in the evening. “When was the last time you slept?”