I stole another glance back. Liam had successfully gotten three of the cartel vehicles off my back. But that still left two others.
“Fucking hell,” I muttered.
I couldn’t handle three vehicles like this. I saw an opportunity—I sped ahead of the car, turned around, and fired straight on at the car’s engine. The windshield had bulletproof glass, so I enacted no damage on it, but the bullets did their magic on the car. It, too, went out.
And then I heard an enormous screech. I looked up to see the truck coming to a full halt.
“Fuck!”
I barely swerved out of the way, but in doing so, my bike peeled out. I hit the ground tumbling, tucking myself in and rolling and bouncing on the ground. I had probably cracked a few bones, maybe even broken some, but I was able to stand on my own two feet and stagger as the truck came to a stop.
And then Scott emerged from the driver’s side window, giving a thumbs up.
“Get in the truck, fucker!” he said. “You’re in charge of weapons.”
“Better this than a goddamn bike,” I muttered.
I couldn’t really run in my condition, but I could hurriedly hop. It was a terribly awkward look, but I got up just as the cartel trucks arrived. Scott swung the truck around, breaking through a barrier on the highway, and started heading back to the city.
“Those girls must be wondering what the fuck is happening up here,” I said.
“Better they throw up than land in the lap of some creepy fuck.”
Truer words had never been spoken. I leaned out of the truck, turned, and laid fire down on one of the cartel trucks. It didn’t move.
“I’m starting to think we need something bigger and badder than machine-gun bullets,” I said as I pulled back to reload. “Something like, I don’t know, a fucking truck like this.”
“Well, we’ll get our first test here in a second,” Scott said, nodding up ahead.
We were catching up to Liam and the cartel trucks. I could see now why, Liam was trying to confuse them by zig-zagging and braking hard in different spots. It would have worked wonders against one truck; against two, it was difficult. Against three, it was prolonging the inevitable without some outside assistance.
Luckily, we liked the fucker.
“Hang on!” Scott yelled as he prepared to ram the eighteen-wheeler into the Jeep.
It was like watching a battering ram smash a window. The Jeep just ricocheted to the side, everyone inside presumably dead or at the very least completely incapacitated. It was fucking sweet.
“Now, let’s finish the job, shall we?”
The other two Jeeps did their best to avoid the damage, but in doing so, they fell behind. Whether they’d already gotten paid or just decided dying for Snake wasn’t worth the cost, they stopped giving chase shortly after. We let Liam get in the truck, and like that, we had a peaceful, if not entirely free, drive back to the city.
“Holy fuck,” Liam said. “Kelly would murder me if she knew what I just did.”
“That’s why I don’t ever tell Kaylie anything other than I have to go to work,” Scott said.
I didn’t say a word.
But I kinda wished that I could have.
But now that the tension and the adrenaline were wearing off, exhaustion was starting to kick in. And with it came the desire to know how she was doing.
We dropped the cargo off with our contact, hurrying away before the girls could give their thanks. We wouldn’t have long back at the bunker; a big-ass eighteen-wheeler in the middle of nowhere served as a sort of tip-off. But we were used to discarding bunkers and getting new ones as the situation dictated it.
“Fifteen minutes before we get out of here,” Scott said. “Do whatever the fuck you need to but hurry up.”
I slumped against the wall. I was utterly fucking exhausted from the adrenaline.
And we still hadn’t even begun considering part two of this mission—kill fucking Snake.
But I now had, well, probably fourteen or so minutes to do what I pleased. And I wasn’t about to let it go to waste.
At first, I just closed my eyes. I didn’t want to sleep, nor could I have even if I wanted to, but I did like the idea of just resting for a bit, just calming the mind so that I could focus on arguably a more dangerous part of this mission. Taking truckload of women from Snake would piss him off, but he could easily find more women to capture, shitty as it was to say; try to take his life from him, and he’d throw the full weight of everything he had at us.
But after probably no more than ten seconds, my mind went to a familiar theme from the last couple of days.
Emily Lorne.
God fucking damnit.
Just as I had when I’d gone out on the run this morning, I knew that I couldn’t keep pushing the question to the side. I needed to just fucking accept the fact that she was in my head and confront it. She was the last person I needed to be talking to right now, and yet she was the one that was coming to mind most easily.
I knew it wasn’t standard protocol to do so, but I grabbed my personal phone and turned it on so I could see if I had anything from Emily. I figured with Snake spooked by our efforts and our own certainty that we’d go after him soon, there wasn’t as much a need for precaution as before. Of course, seconds after my phone turned on, I recognized the utter stupidity of that, but too late by then.
As it was, given the texts and voice mail pings
