by Janie Crouch
“I’m still not going to build the fuel cell.”
Dillon tilted his head to the side. “You sure about that?”
She stepped closer. “Are you going to pull a gun on me too? If you shoot me, you won’t get what you want. And putting together the cell requires a steady hand, so hurting me means I won’t be able to do it either.” She shrugged and took a step closer to Dillon. She had to get closer to take him out.
Learson groaned on the floor. Before she could even figure out how she was going to divide her time between Learson and Dillon, Dillon pulled out a gun and shot Learson where he lay on the floor. The man’s body jerked before stilling.
Violet bit her lip, trying to suck in enough air in a room that suddenly felt stifling. This was Dillon trying to intimidate her. She couldn’t let that happen. He’d actually just done her a favor—one fewer bad guy she had to fight.
She had the upper hand. He couldn’t hurt her as long as he needed her to finish the fuel cell. The work was too delicate.
She feigned like she was getting farther away from Learson’s body, but the move brought her half the distance to Dillon. She tried to keep Edward in her peripheral vision.
“Killing him doesn’t scare me,” she lied. “You can’t do that to me if you want to get what you want.”
Dillon surprised her by smiling. “Look at you, taking a step closer as you talk so I won’t notice. What do you need, another ten feet before you’re close enough to make your move?”
Shit.
“You’ve obviously been well trained. By, let me guess . . . Teague? I only ask because I just saw him do the same thing to my men and almost completely get the drop on them. I had to step in.”
Dillon moved farther into the room, and her stomach dropped out when two more men entered, dragging a barely conscious Aiden between them. Dillon pulled a chair to the middle of the room, and they dumped Aiden into it.
“Aiden!” She ran over to him, dropping down on her knees in front of him, trying to figure out where he was most hurt. Blood was oozing from a bullet wound in his shoulder, and his face had been cut badly along the cheek. One eye was swollen shut.
“Firefly.” The word was slurred, and his head hung low.
“Aiden.” Panic welled up inside her. She ripped off her lab coat and held it against his bleeding shoulder. “Okay, hang in there. I’m going to get us out of this.”
“It’s time to get to work, Violet,” Dillon said. “Because I’m not going to hurt you if you don’t finish the fuel cell. I’m going to hurt him.”
Aiden rallied. “Violet, no. Don’t do it.”
Dillon calmly took something out of his pocket.
A Taser.
Violet couldn’t help herself, she scampered back from the weapon. Dillon shook his head, smiling almost gently.
“You obviously remember this.” Dillon shook his head. “Randy, what an overzealous bastard he was. But don’t worry, it’s not for you.”
He walked up behind Aiden and put the electroshock weapon against the back of his neck. Aiden’s body jerked violently as the electrical current blasted through his body.
“Stop!” Violet screamed. She couldn’t let Aiden go through this. She could remember with crystal clarity the Taser against her own skin. The brutal agony.
Dillon stopped for just a moment, then placed it back against Aiden again, turning it on.
“Stop! I’ll do it. Just stop. Please!” She was begging. Crying. She didn’t care.
Dillon switched it off. Aiden was moaning in the chair, barely conscious. He couldn’t take much more. Violet wouldn’t let him take more.
“I’ll do it.” She stood and walked over to Aiden, touching him softly on the head. The two men behind him had their weapons drawn, pointed at Aiden, ready if she made some sort of defensive move. She couldn’t take them both and Dillon before one of them shot Aiden.
She put his hand over the lab coat against his shoulder. “Try to hold this against your wound,” she whispered to him.
She turned back toward the table and got to work, not wanting to give Dillon any excuse to hurt Aiden further.
But he did it anyway, stunning Aiden every ten or fifteen minutes just to get her to work harder, faster. Aiden didn’t cry out, but she could tell he was getting weaker. He’d stopped trying to hold the lab coat to his gunshot wound, and the white material had fallen to the floor, stained red with his blood.
Aiden was running out of time.
As she continued to work, she tried to figure a way out of this. If she finished the micro fuel cell and handed it over, they would just kill both her and Aiden. There was no way they’d let them live knowing what they did.
She glanced over at the men. Four of them, including Edward. Maybe he wasn’t a problem, but taking out three armed men by herself? She couldn’t do it.
Panic and anger warred inside her. Why hadn’t she trained more? Learned how to handle multiple attackers? Her inability would end up costing her and Aiden their lives.
Dillon shocked Aiden again, and he moaned then slumped to the side.
“Enough!” She turned and glared at Dillon. “You want this done right, then you leave him alone. Every time you do that, it sets me back.”
Dillon just shrugged.
God, she wished she had a weapon. Any weapon would help level the playing field. But unless she was going to throw the fuel cell equipment at them, there was nothing.
Your mind will always be your best weapon.
She heard Aiden’s voice, almost like he was standing beside her. She looked down at the delicate equipment in her hands, which were shaking. She couldn’t fight her way out of this, but maybe she could buy herself and Aiden a little time to do . . . something.
She went to work, completely focused now on the equipment in front of her. Evidently, Dillon was convinced she was legitimately trying now because he stopped hurting Aiden.
Or maybe Aiden wasn’t conscious and couldn’t be hurt any more.
They wanted a micro fuel cell? Violet was going to give them one. But it was also going to be more than they’d bargained for. Edward had set her up with more than enough equipment and supplies to do so.
Would it be enough for her to get Aiden out of here alive? Doubtful. But it wouldn’t be because she didn’t try. And it wouldn’t give Edward and Dillon—freaking Stellman—what they wanted.
She continued to work, focused on what was in front of her. Everyone was watching her, but nobody knew enough to know what she was going to do. When they turned the fuel cell on for a trial run, which they undoubtedly would do, it would blow up in their faces. Literally. Plus provide a nice little electromagnetic pulse to take out all the electronics around them—including the lights in the lab.
She couldn’t stand the thought of Aiden’s poor face, the abuse his body had been through. She had to push it completely out of her mind in order to function, yet allow part of her brain to consider how she was going to try to get him out when hell broke loose.
Within thirty minutes she had it finished. She turned, sparing a look at Aiden, who definitely wasn’t conscious.
“Here.” She picked up the fuel cell in her hand—it wasn’t any bigger than her fist—and walked it over to Edward, who was standing with Dillon. “It’s finished.”
She gave it to them and rushed over to Aiden, leaning over him to try to support his slouched body.
“How do we know it works?” Dillon asked.
She didn’t even look up from Aiden, her voice flat. “Try it for yourself.”
“If you’re lying, I will wake him up, then torture him until he dies right in front of you.”
Now she looked up, glaring at them. “I’m not lying.” And she wasn’t. It worked. It just did more than they expected.
Dillon turned to Edward. “What do you think? Would she lie?”
Edward shook his head. “No. Not about this. Not when his life is at stake. She did what we wanted.”
Dillon nodded. “Wel
l then, I guess you’ve served your purpose, Edward. It’s time for Stellman to die. No one will ever know I was even part of this.”
Edward’s eyes grew big. “What are you talk—”
Violet couldn’t hold back her surprised scream as Dillon pulled out his gun and shot Edward in the head.
Oh God.
Violet was struggling to hold it together. Dillon’s men were stirring, undoubtedly wondering if they were going to be the next ones he shot.
It was a reasonable fear, given that he’d already shot two of his own men today.
“He’s going to kill you too, you know,” she said to them, anything to help spread confusion and panic. “It’s just a matter of time.”
“Nonsense, Violet,” Dillon responded calmly. “These are my trusted men. I’m not going to kill them. I’m going to give you to them as a reward. As soon as I make sure your fuel cell really works.”
This was it.
“Oh God, Aiden, wake up,” she whispered. They were going to have to run, and she couldn’t carry him.
Then, amazingly, his fingers gripped hers. He was awake.
“Bomb,” she said while Dillon was distracted with the fuel cell, loud enough so only he could hear her. “Get ready to run.”
Two squeezes of her fingers. “You run.”
She didn’t know if his words were so soft because of his injuries or because of stealth, but it didn’t matter.
“No. Soldier’s creed. You don’t leave a fallen comrade behind.”
He squeezed her hand again. She knew he would argue if he could, but it didn’t matter.
He hadn’t left her. She wasn’t leaving him.
Dillon was about to test the device. He looked over at her. “You better hope this works.”
“It will.” Approximately five seconds after he turned it on.
She could feel the muscles in Aiden’s legs tense. She knew him well enough to know he was going to do his damnedest not to slow her down. Even if it killed him, which at this point, she had to consider was a distinct possibility. But staying and doing nothing was a surety.
A few seconds later, Dillon let out an angry, pain-filled screech as the fuel cell exploded in his hand. The tiny EMP blast was enough to blow out all the lights in the lab, leaving everything in darkness.
Aiden’s arm wrapped around her as he bounded from the chair, moving faster than she would’ve dreamed was possible with his injuries. Shots rang out in the direction where they’d just been standing.
If they had moved two seconds later, they’d be dead.
She wrapped an arm around his waist and sprinted with him toward the back door. They zigged and zagged, trying to avoid giving Dillon and his men a stationary target as they shot into the dark.
They made it to the door, and Violet threw it open. Aiden pushed her through as bullets began to fly their way now that it was clear where they were. She heard Aiden grunt as his body fell forward.
Oh God, he’d been shot again.
“You have to run,” he said as he hit the ground. “Please, Firefly. You can make it.”
His breathing was already labored. She couldn’t tell where he’d been shot, but he obviously wasn’t going to be able to go any farther.
“Violet!” Her head whipped up as her brother’s frantic yell came from the other side of the lab. He must have come in the front door.
More gunfire erupted inside the lab, but it was no longer just coming toward her and Aiden. She grabbed Aiden’s torso in her arms and pulled him against her, sheltering his body the way he’d once sheltered hers at that house.
Kendrick came running at them from outside. He gently touched the top of Violet’s head before rushing inside through the back door.
Three shots later and everything fell silent.
“Clear,” Kendrick called out.
“I’m good too,” Gabe responded. “Where’s Violet?”
“By the back door,” she yelled, panic lacing her words. “Call an ambulance, Gabe. Hurry!”
Aiden’s breathing was becoming more and more erratic. She looked down at him.
“You’re not leaving me, Teague. You got that?” she whispered, stroking her fingers along his forehead. “Breathe with me, soldier. In. Out. I’m not going to live without you, Aiden. I love you. Breathe with me. In. Out.”
The one eye that he could open, cloudy with pain, he kept pinned on her. Within a few seconds his breathing was evening out. Following hers.
“That’s right. In. Out. You and me together. Every breath. Always.”
Chapter 29
Three days later, Aiden was finally awake and sitting up in a hospital bed, surrounded by most of his Linear friends. Violet was perched on his bed by his side.
He’d never been on this side of a hospital visit before. Always the visitor, not the visitee.
“You know we called you Shamrock because you’d never been shot, stabbed, or blown up,” Finn said. “If you didn’t want that name anymore, you could’ve just told us. You didn’t have to go and have all three done to you in one day.”
Aiden chuckled, wincing a little, because, damn it, everything still hurt. The second bullet had hit him in the fleshy part of his waist. The doctor said if it had been half an inch over, he would’ve bled out before anyone could have stopped it, but as it was, it wasn’t going to give him many problems. The shoulder wound was going to take a lot of physical therapy to regain a full range of motion.
But all things considered, he would take it.
Dillon Bassler and his two cronies had been arrested after being shot and subdued by Gabe and Kendrick. If it hadn’t been for Gabe’s quick thinking and suspicious nature, Aiden and Violet would’ve been dead. Gabe had immediately called CT to find out what was going on after their meeting in the tampon aisle, and when no one could get ahold of Violet or Edward, he’d tracked Violet through an app he’d placed on her phone.
Both of them were taking Edward’s betrayal and death hard. The man had been in their lives for as long as they could remember.
Stellman was gone for good now, but the price for taking him—them—down was much higher than Aiden had thought it would be when he’d first gone undercover months ago.
One by one his friends began to leave, cracking jokes as they went. He assured them he had no plans to be in the hospital regularly for them to visit.
“Actually, if you wouldn’t mind getting shot a couple more times, there’s a nurse I have my eye on, and that would give me a legit reason to stop by,” Gavin told him on his way out the door.
Aiden flipped him off and Gavin blew him a kiss as he walked out.
Violet shifted on his bed, looking at him with concern, like she had since he’d woken up and found her at his side.
“You can go, too, if you want. I know staying here has to be boring.”
She shook her head. “I’m staying. I’ll go home when you do. It was bad enough when you were in intensive care, and they wouldn’t let me in at all. So I’m staying.”
“Firefly—”
She raised an eyebrow. “Want to spar for it?”
He laughed. “Seeing as how you can kick my ass half the time when I’m one hundred percent, I think I’ll concede.”
“Good. Because I’m not leaving you.” She scrubbed her hand over her eyes, her voice cracking. “I thought we were going to die, Aiden. I didn’t know how to fight that many people, and you were so hurt. And I had no weapon.”
He reached up with his good arm and wrapped both her hands in his. “But you did have a weapon. One you’ll always have with you.”
She brought his fingers up to her lips. “I kept hearing you say my mind was my greatest strength.”
“It’s always going to be, fight or not. And besides your kindness, sense of humor, zest for life, lips, boobs, and ass, it’s what I love most about you.”
She smiled, then reached out and cupped his injured cheek gently over the gauze. “The doctor said this was going to scar because of how long i
t went untreated. But I’ve been looking into possible reconstructive treatments if you want.”
He shook his head. “I don’t mind the scar if you don’t.”
“No, it doesn’t bother me. But what about being Shamrock? All luck, no scars.”
He crooked his finger at her, so she came in closer. “I’ll look at this scar in the mirror every day and be damned happy to see it. Because the people who gave it to me were the same people who brought me to you.”
Those green eyes filled with tears, and he wiped them away as they fell.
“The luck I had not ever being wounded is nothing compared to the luck I have from loving you. And I do love you, Firefly. From the first second I saw you, I knew I was yours. Watching the warrior you’ve become has just made me love you more.”
As more tears fell from her cheeks to his, she kissed him, her touch gentle, soft, full of every promise in the world.
He would take that too.
She lay down next to him, cuddling up to his uninjured side. “Since you were so brave and somehow found the superhuman strength to get yourself out of that chair despite what you’d been through, I’ll even let you choose the music while we’re doing all your recuperation training together.”
He kissed the top of her head. “See? Shamrock’s luck lives on.”
***
Thank you for reading SHAMROCK. The Linear Tactical series continues with Gabe & Jordan’s passionate story in ANGEL.
Even angels have their demons.
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Acknowledgments