She looked worse than terrified. “Aric, you can’t come with me.”
“Come with you?” His chuckle was cold with malice. “I’m dropping you back at the command center, then I’m going after Mackie alone. When I’m finished, Big Mack and all of his followers will be nothing but bad memories and a lot of bleeding flesh and bones.”
Her face blanched. “Aric, you don’t understand. You can’t do any of that.”
“Give me one good reason why I shouldn’t.”
“Because my sister is with him. Aric, she’s pregnant.”
CHAPTER 26
Aric took the wheel, and Kaya directed him to the place Mackie’s friend at the garage had surrendered to her unwillingly through his thoughts. The abandoned house sat on a weed-choked empty lot near the city dump.
“A fitting refuge for excrement like Big Mack,” Aric muttered as they parked the vehicle behind a rusted old water tower and prepared to execute the rough plan they’d discussed on the way. “You may not see me, but I promise I’ll be close.”
She nodded, reassured by his presence even if the conflict between them felt as wide as a cavern.
As soon as they were out of the car, Aric dissolved into shadows.
Kaya walked to the front porch of the sagging one-story eyesore and knocked on the door. A tall, scrawny man answered several moments later. Stringy hair covered his mottled skull, and beneath the scraggly brows that climbed high on his forehead at the sight of her, his bleary eyes blinked rapidly in confusion.
“What the fuck?” He blinked, then rubbed his eyes and blinked again. “You ain’t Raven.”
“No, I’m not.” Kaya smiled pleasantly, her hand resting at the small of her back where the pistol she’d brought with her from the command center was tucked into the waistband of her jeans. “Step aside. I’m here to talk to my sister.”
No sense pretending, she and Aric had decided. They were going to take Leah out of there and they were prepared to do so with guns blazing.
The aged junkie at the door gave a vigorous shake of his head. “Big Mack won’t like this. Raven ain’t takin’ visitors right now.”
“I say she is.” Aric’s deep voice and bared fangs as he emerged out of the shadows near the open door sent the man scrambling back into the house.
Mackie’s poor excuse for a guard frantically reached for the gun holstered at his hip. Mistake. Aric shot him dead in an instant.
He glanced over at Kaya, his eyes ablaze with battle rage. “Ready, partner?”
She nodded. “Let’s go get her.”
At the same moment, the house erupted in chaos following the sound of gunfire. Two men charged from the back. Kaya took out one with a bullet to the head. Aric got the other. Indistinct shouts joined the panicked sounds of half a dozen men caught unaware by the invasion.
“Leah!” Kaya shouted. She didn’t know where to look for her, only that the man at the garage knew Mackie had her sister with him at his hideout following the failed raid. She could be anywhere. Kaya only hoped her twin wouldn’t be coming at them as an enemy. “Leah, where are you?”
A blast of bullets from a semiautomatic ripped into the bowed wood paneling near Kaya’s head as she and Aric pushed farther inside the small house. They ducked out of range but only barely. Splinters rained down into Kaya’s hair.
“Leah!” Aric called now, his low bellow vibrating the floorboards beneath Kaya’s feet.
Then she heard it.
The smallest cry coming from somewhere down the far end of the hall. Female. It was Leah. And she sounded to be in pain.
Aric shot a big man who barreled out of a bedroom ahead of them. The body sprawled across the floor, blocking their clean path. The woman’s cry came again, more distinct now.
They hurried toward a closed bathroom door at the end of the narrow passage. Aric kicked it in with his boot. The thin door shattered off its hinges. And there, huddled in the filth of the avocado-tiled prison was Kaya’s twin.
“Oh, my God. Leah.”
She was handcuffed to the sink pipes like an animal, a gag tied around her mouth. Her clothing was torn and dirty. Bruises rode her left cheekbone. A scab covered an ugly split in her swollen lip.
Kaya’s heart lurched at the sight of her sister’s abuse. She hurried to her side along with Aric, who made quick work of the cuffs with a mental command that broke the locks open while Kaya unfastened the tight knots of the gag.
Leah’s sob as the punishing restraints fell away shredded all of the misgivings she’d ever had for her estranged sibling.
“I’m going to look for Mackie,” Aric said.
“Be careful.” It was Leah’s voice that spoke the words that were also on Kaya’s tongue. Leah glanced at both of them, remorse in her dark brown eyes. “Angus has weapons hidden everywhere.”
Aric nodded curtly, then vanished.
~ ~ ~
As furious as he had been for the fact that Kaya hadn’t trusted him enough to share the truth about her sister and her past with him, Aric’s rage had gone nuclear at the sight of her pregnant twin shackled like a dog inside Mackie’s newest hideout.
It was too easy to see Kaya in the pretty, battered face that stared up at them so helplessly and broken. Too easy to think of Kaya being subjected to the punishing hands and lecherous cravings of men like Angus Mackie and his ilk.
For that, every man in this place would die.
Aric moved through the house as a stealth assassin, keeping to the shadows except to fill each of Mackie’s men with lead. And now he had only to find the king of the rats.
Aric swept through the place, leaving no corner unturned.
And then he spotted the bastard.
Unshaven, dressed in only a pair of saggy yellowed cotton briefs, his hairy belly drooped in front of him and jiggling as he ran, the purportedly fearsome Big Mack made
