Davis was kneeling in the middle of the shooting lane, blood on his head and swaying. Her uncle stood at the front of the lane, a Petrov pistol centered on Davis like a target.
BECA HAD KNOWN they were coming.
One minute, the SUV was driving down the narrow lane toward the mansion where one of the wealthiest BECA members lived, toward a meeting supposedly in progress. Each member of the TCD team had been clutching their submachine guns, gazes steady, jaws tight. Kane’s gaze had been on Melinda, cool and slightly angry, as she’d stared back at him.
Then, the world around him exploded in light and sound and the SUV tipped sideways, slamming to the ground on the side away from him.
Kane’s head bounced off JC’s. The agent had gotten stuck in the middle of their row. Pain filled his head and something dripped in his eye, and then the team around him was scrambling, most of them responding on instinct and training. Across from him, Melinda looked dazed, one hand to her head, blinking rapidly. JC, with his military background, was the first to move, despite the conk to the head.
“Move, move, move,” JC ordered. “We’re target practice here.”
BECA must have had some kind of camera or alert system at the beginning of the long, winding entry to the mansion. They were the kind of group that was always armed, always prepared for a fight. They’d had the place booby-trapped. And Kane knew the BECA members would get here fast, to finish them off. He could already hear them coming, the growl of a large engine speeding toward them, then the screech of brakes.
He scrambled to both brace himself against the seat in front of him and the door and release his seat belt. It took longer than he would have liked. Then there was a face at the window, one that managed to be both snarling and smiling as he lifted his gun.
Forgetting the seat belt, Kane went for his pistol instead. He’d always been a quick draw, but as he saw his face reflected back at him superimposed on the guy intent on killing him, he wasn’t sure he was fast enough. Even as he fired three shots and the window exploded, showering glass all over him and the teammates below him, Kane didn’t know if he’d hit his mark until the guy dropped out of sight.
He waited for the pain of a bullet to his own body to register, but he only felt the needle-sting of what seemed like hundreds of tiny shards of glass. Not the searing intensity of a bullet. Then more shots boomed, way too many, and Kane cringed, knowing the SUV wasn’t armored. A scream from inside the car emphasized the thought, and Kane’s stomach clenched even as his mind cleared.
This was it. There was no good way out of this vehicle.
He’d always known he would die on the job. He’d accepted that years ago, in some ways longed for it, because it was no less than he deserved.
But he didn’t want to go like this. Not surrounded by more teammates.
His gaze shifted to Melinda, still tethered to her seat, an easy target if someone else managed to clamber up to the side windows—now directly above them. He moved his gaze past her, to the front windshield, now on ground level. Past the two teammates in front, who were either hit or out cold, to the man bending down there, a furious intensity on his face as he lifted his weapon.
Kane shifted, aiming and firing at the same time as JC. Apparently Laura in the driver’s seat wasn’t as unconscious as she’d seemed, because her gun hand rose at the same time. The guy dropped in a shower of bullets. The front windshield shattered, too, and as shots started coming through the floorboards—now facing toward the zealots—JC yelled, “Ballistic shields!”
Then, someone was handing him a shield and Kane propped it between him and the bottom—now side—of the car, protecting him and the agents below him. Across from him, Melinda was being handed a shield, too. But she urged Evan Duran, in the seat next to her, to trade places.
Awkwardly he swapped with her. Melinda almost fell, but managed to slip between the agents, down to the other side of the SUV, pressed to the ground. But the vehicle wasn’t entirely flat, Kane realized. The SUV had landed on something—maybe a boulder—putting the vehicle at a weird tilt. The front of the vehicle was actually slanted downward, too. And as Melinda shoved at the passenger door, it opened a crack.
“Time for BECA to get a surprise,” Melinda muttered.
Kane grabbed for her, realizing what she was going to do. Melinda was tiny—five foot four and no more than 115 pounds. She could fit through that crack. But no one else would be able to follow.
Kane’s fingers closed around Melinda’s shirt, gripped hard. But his angle was awkward, and the SUV was crowded, especially as Laura yanked the other agent who’d been sitting up front—Ana Sofia—into the back. More shields were pressed around them and JC lifted his arm over Kane’s, firing through the space in the middle. A BECA member screamed outside the front of the vehicle.
Then, it was too late. The fabric slipped out of his grasp and Melinda was gone.
Out of the SUV, alone, facing an unknown number of armed BECA members.
Chapter Twenty
This was a very bad idea.
Melinda had been a regular special agent once, working a Civil Rights squad. With her background in psychology, her supervisor had figured she was a perfect fit for the myriad of human trafficking cases that came their way. That work had been dangerous at times, but it had been the people she’d run into—both victims and perpetrators—who’d made her go into profiling.
She’d been there so long, she’d started to forget what it was like in the field. Profiling sometimes sent her into the thick of a case,
