Her gun fell from her nerveless hands to clatter on the concrete, and all the hours she’d spent training in preparation to face her enemies, completely deserted her.
The heat beating down on her turned to suffocating coldness, darkness consumed her, and the moment before Dillon was lost to the tsunami of pure, undiluted panic, she saw the surprised flare of recognition in Tobias's face.
He said, “Oh, shit.”
Then Dillon was drowning in the sound of her own screams, Elka's enraged barks, and the shouting.
CHAPTER FIVE
Nasa sat hunched over his keyboard, hard rock pumping through the stereo while his eyes tracked back and forth over the data being compiled before him. Even after five hours, he still couldn't find a single thing about Dillon's life that was suspicious.
Which was suspicious.
He'd so far managed to map her movements from traffic camera footage over the past three months, but that was it.
She went from her home to a few different hardware stores, the post office, a storage facility, and back with very few deviations other than to take alternate routes to and from. The map picked up her Bronco parked outside grocery stores, a few health food stores, and gas stations.
She never went to bars, didn't stay out late, and didn't travel outside a twenty-mile radius more than once a month.
He couldn't find any overlap between her travel patterns and the areas of Dallas known to be Leviathans territory.
In fact, Dillon's house was on the opposite side of the city. The closest known Leviathans hang out was over thirty miles away.
Everything about her background was meticulously manufactured, and had he not been the techno-God he was that noticed the infinitesimally incongruent details, it would have stood up to any inquiry.
Even after hours of searching, he hadn't found any evidence to prove she was a government agent. Still, a familiar pattern stood out to identify an expertly crafted back story that reeked of government fabrication.
The question was, did the false background mean she was still an active agent?
Or did it mean she'd been erased from the system because she was being protected?
He was in the middle of deciding whether or not the consequences of unraveling the tangled web of deceit was worth risking a visit from men in black suits and a possible return to prison, when the sensor light to his left went off.
He looked up to see Top shove open the basement door, hurrying down the stairs with his phone in hand and his beard jutting straight out from his jaw.
That look... Nasa's stomach dropped to his toes in a sickening rush as his mind supplied him with a rapid-fire slide-show of Dillon's body, dead and mutilated, because he’d failed to keep her here.
Nasa cut the music, expecting to hear Top tell him she was dead, but the sound of rabid dog barking filled the silence.
The hair on the back of his neck stood up to hear the fury of what had to be Dillon's dog going berserk, and the only reason the dog would be that pissed is if something happened to Dillon.
Nasa leapt to his feet to meet Top in the middle of the room, his heart thundering in his chest.
“What the fuck is going on? Is Dillon—”
“She's alive and unhurt. The commandos are with her, but things went FUBAR,” Top interrupted, both of them tense and staring at the phone between them, listening to Dillon's wild screams, Elka's vicious snarls, and most of Veracruz's team blistering the air with curses.
“Don't shoot the dog! Mother... mother fucker!” one of the team was shouting.
“RUSSIAN! RUSSIAN!” someone else bellowed.
“Ah, FUCK! Don't let her get at his throat!”
“RUSSIAN... FUCKING RUSSIAN!”
“What the fuck is he talking about? Get the hose or something; she's gonna rip his damn arm off!”
Remembering the few words in Russian Dillon used to command her dog, Nasa grabbed the phone out of Top's hand, wracking his brain for the damn word he'd heard in those training videos he'd been watching.
He didn't know if Elka would even respond to his voice, but he tried anyway.
“Shit! Fuck... ah...Vypusk! Elka! Vypusk!”
The sound of Elka's intense snarls leveled off to a low rattling growl, and the continuous stream of curses turned into a low, pained groan.
“Aw, hell. That's gonna leave a mark.”
“Shit, Tobias, you are one lucky bastard.”
Nasa demanded to know what was happening, but the phone must have been dropped in the rush to get Tobias some medical attention. It took what felt like forever for someone to pick up the damn thing and start talking.
“It's Veracruz,” the commando team leader grunted.
“What in the holy hell is going on?” Top snapped, glaring at the phone with his jaw clenched so tight his beard quivered.
“I have no fucking clue.” Veracruz heaved a sigh of unsteady relief. “We got here just in time to see two Leviathans coming around the side of Dillon's house.
"She was armed and didn't hesitate to fire on the one in front of her, sending the dog after the other one. Tore his fuckin throat out.
“Tobias went in to talk Dillon down, and it was going fine until she got a look at him. She went white as a sheet, lost her shit, and started screaming bloody murder.
"Tobias hesitated, the dog took him down, and snapped his arm like a damn twig.
“I think the only reason she didn't kill him like she killed the other fucker was because Dillon broke in half and pretty much crawled on her hands and knees back into the house.”
Picturing Dillon terrified to the point of hysteria, the echoes of her screams ringing in his ears, it shattered something inside him.
Instead of suspicious disbelief, Nasa felt the undeniable surge of protectiveness and the need to get to Dillon before anything else could happen to her.
“I've only ever seen a woman act like this twice, and both of them were traumatized victims we rescued from human trafficking rings who saw the men who abused
