I PEERED out the windows over the vast lawn at the front of the house, scanning the front drive and the little I could see of the road beyond for approaching cars. For the moment, there was no sign of reinforcements coming to the aid of the men we’d taken down here.
It felt strange to be standing in the warmth of the mid-day sun for an operation. Normally we relied on darkness to make stealth easier. But with a mission at a residential home, we’d known we’d find less resistance during the day, when the owner of this house and any of the regular people who lived here with him would be off at work.
What a sight Gordell was going to come home to.
A smirk tugged at my lips. I glanced down at the foyer below—just as Dess whirled around from where she’d been crouched off to the side to parry a blow from a knife-wielding man who’d managed to sneak up on her.
My pulse stuttered, but I held myself in place. Dess was more than capable of fending off one attacker, even taken by surprise—more capable than I was at physical combat, that was for sure.
But as she grappled with the man, who looked like he must have been regular staff rather than official security from his more casual clothes and wiry frame, another figure emerged into view from beneath the mezzanine, just raising his gun.
Dess hadn’t seen him—she had her back to him, only just managing to smack the knife from her attacker’s hand. It would take no more than a split-second for the gunman to put a bullet in her brain.
I reacted on pure adrenaline—okay, and maybe a little panic. Before I’d even thought about what I was going to do, I leapt over the railing and plummeted down toward the gunman, trusting his bulky body to break my fall.
It wasn’t an enjoyable landing. I slammed into the gunman, and we both went sprawling, a grunt bursting from his lungs. My hip jarred against the floor as I toppled off him. I wrenched around as quickly as I could, grabbing for his weapon, which had slid a few inches from his fingertips.
I wasn’t fast enough. The man snatched up the gun and rammed it into my face so hard pain splintered through my skull. My thoughts felt as if they were rattling around in my brain. I groped for my own gun at my side, and then Dess was there, firing her pistol.
Blood splattered across the floor. The gunman crumpled to the ground. I glanced past him to see Dess’s other attacker lying in a ruddy pool, just as limp.
We didn’t get any time to celebrate. Footsteps thundered from down one of the halls, and Blaze’s voice echoed through the space. “Incoming!”
Two more men burst into the foyer, already firing at us. More shots boomed somewhere farther away, I guessed wherever Blaze had stirred up a hidden nest of hornets. I’d have to remember to thank him later—maybe with a fist to the head.
There wasn’t time for more than a flicker of annoyance. Then there was nothing to think about other than survival. Dess hauled me to my feet and yanked me toward a side hall. “I have to reload,” she said in a strained voice.
We dashed into what appeared to be a dining room. As the men charged after us, we lunged behind the table for cover. Dess shoved a fresh clip into her gun, and I managed to get my own pistol out to join the party.
The men barreled around opposite sides of the table, spewing bullets from their semi-automatic rifles as they came. Motherfuckers. I rolled under the table, kicked a chair into the closer guy’s legs, and fired a couple of shots, managing to catch him in the calf. But as he dropped to his knees, he pulled the trigger again, his bullet smacking into the floor just inches shy of Dess.
I kicked out again, slamming my heel into his hand. His gun dropped from his fingers. I whipped mine around, but he was already tackling me, wrenching at my wrist.
The man tried to twist my arm so he could fire my own gun at me, but I weakened his grasp with a knee to his gut. I couldn’t manage to dislodge his weight, though. No matter how I twisted, he remained on top of me, attempting to wrestle me into submission. I was barely holding him at bay, shaking with all the force he used to press down on me.
If I didn’t do something fast, he’d win. And I would die.
I wasn’t the strongest member of the team in combat, and my real skill sets wouldn’t help me here. That didn’t mean I was going to give up. I couldn’t—not with Dess fighting another man mere feet away. As long as his attention was focused on me, he couldn’t hurt her.
In a moment of adamant rebellion, I shifted my weight to one side quickly and finally threw my attacker off balance just enough that when I shoved back onto my other hip, he all but fell off me. I used the rest of my strength to jerk my arm from his grasp and pull the trigger.
I hit him square in the forehead. As he collapsed in a heap next to me, I resisted the urge to imitate his slumped pose while I caught my breath. Instead, I squirmed out from under the table, intent on protecting Dess any way I could. But I emerged to find Dess poised over the other man, one of her knives protruding from his throat.
She spun around and stared at me on the floor. “Are you okay?” she asked, breathless.
“Just peachy,” I replied, groaning as I pulled myself upright.
She offered her hand to help me stand. “Thank you. The other guard in the foyer—I hadn’t even noticed him. If you hadn’t tackled him…” She shook her head with a tightening of her jaw.
I didn’t like seeing her doubting herself. I offered my best cocky grin in an attempt to lighten the mood. “I’m always here for you, sweetheart.”
It set off a rush of pride in me to realize that I had saved her. If I hadn’t leapt off the mezzanine to tackle that prick, she might not be with me right now. She was standing in front of me like death incarnate, but she’d needed me.
A grin that was probably a little too goofy to be totally appropriate stretched across my face. Dess knuckled my arm, nudging me out of the dining room. “Let’s see if the others need any help. And if the building’s clear now, we need to get the girls out of here.”
We strode back to the foyer just as Julius and Talon came into view at the top of the stairs at the far end. They were herding several more young women down, and Blaze was standing by the hallway, urging them down it toward the back door.
“I think we got everyone,” Julius said as he and Talon reached the bottom of the stairs, and then frowned at me. “What are you doing down here? You were supposed to—”
He was interrupted by the crash of the front door bursting open. A squad of armed men burst into the room, pelting us with semi-automatic fire in an instant.
We flung ourselves to the floor instinctively, but some of us more purposefully than others. My gut lurched as I watched Talon jerk backward and fall on his ass, blood blooming from a shot to his chest. He clutched at the wound but managed to fire into the sudden crowd of attackers as well.
I squeezed my own trigger, aiming into the horde as well as I could. Dess was shooting frantically, as was Blaze where he’d crouched at the edge of the hall. As my pulse pounded in my ears, one thought pealed through the thrum of frantic adrenaline.
This was my fault. I’d been assigned to watch the front drive—if I hadn’t left my post, I’d have seen the reinforcements approaching and been able to warn everyone. We’d been taken by surprise because of my negligence. Fuck.
Another grunt of pain reached my ears. My gaze darted to where Julius had dropped. He was gripping the side of his abdomen with one hand while he kept shooting with the other.
“Julius!” Dess cried out, and whipped her remaining knives at the incoming attackers alongside our hail of bullets.
The last of the men in the room toppled over. Dess didn’t waste any time dashing to the front door. She fired several more times, and thumps carried from outside. Some of the newcomers had thought to hang back and assess the situation, but they’d met the same fate as their colleagues.
“That’s all of them,” Dess said, her voice tight, as she sprinted back to where Julius and Talon had fallen. “Oh my god. Are you all right? I—what can I do?”
Practical thoughts started racing through my head alongside the blare of guilt. “We have to get them out of here,” I said. “Medical attention. Fast.”
“Keep pressure on the wounds,” Blaze added, rushing in to help Julius to his feet as Dess did the same for Talon. A large red welt marked Julius’s lower abdomen. He held as firmly as his paling fingers could manage. Talon had two wounds—one in his side and another through his thigh—both bleeding just as profusely as Julius’s. I leapt in, wrenching off my shirt so I could wrap it around Talon’s leg as a makeshift bandage.
“What the hell happened?” Blaze said in disbelief as we hustled down the hall toward the nervously waiting girls as fast as we could.
I swallowed thickly. “I left my post. I wasn’t watching—I didn’t see them coming.”
Dess gave me a sharp look. “You left to protect me.”
But maybe I should have gone back after I’d taken the first guy down. Maybe I should have assumed she could handle the other arrivals by herself. Had I gotten so caught up in playing hero for her that I was now going to have the deaths of not one but two of the men I respected most on my conscience?
“There’s no point in assigning blame,” Julius said, his voice rough with pain. “We need to get out of here before more guards come. Small change in strategy. Dess, you and Blaze take the truck we set up for the girls to the place already discussed. Garrison, you drive us in the van. I assume you’ve got a contact or two in the area who’s medically inclined?”
His voice was already faltering by the end of that set of commands. His steps were wavering. I nodded with a jerk, my mind scrambling. I was to blame, and so I’d better fucking fix this. Who was the best person to turn to? Who could we trust that the Blood Hunter hadn’t compromised?
As we reached the girls, Dess shepherded them out the back door ahead of her, still supporting Talon. She glanced back at Julius, her mouth set in a pale line. I knew she didn’t want to leave them, but she’d feel a duty to the girls we’d just broken out of this prison too. She wouldn’t let herself fail them.
Thankfully we’d already identified a door in the wall at the back of the property that we’d intended to use to bring the girls out through rather than over the wall anyway. It’d been deadbolted and padlocked from the inside, but Dess made short work of the lock now that we had direct access to it. We hurried through, Julius and Talon’s steps stumbling even more than before, their heads drooping. Guilt burned a hole right through my stomach.
Dess motioned the girls toward the truck we’d parked out of sight around a treed bend. “Head over there. We’ll be with you in a minute.” The girls looked at us like deer in headlights but managed to wander in the right direction. I ran ahead to the van, unlocking it and diving into the driver’s seat as soon as I reached the door. While Blaze and Dess helped the other guys into the back, I started the engine and strained my brain.
Where could I take them? Hospitals were obviously out. This was the job I was supposed to be good at—gathering resources, maintaining contacts. There had to be—
Fucking hell, how had I almost forgotten? I’d done some cautionary research when we’d first arrived in the DC area and identified a doctor who took private clients of the questionable sort under the table. He was independent, not under any gang’s thumb, and it was a small-time practice. If the Blood Hunter even knew about him, it was doubtful he’d bothered to harass him.
As soon as the doors slammed shut, I hit the gas and roared away from Gordell’s home. Keeping one hand on the wheel, tuning out the pained breaths carrying from behind me, I whipped out my phone and flicked through it for the contact.
The doctor answered on the third ring with a faded but audibly irritated Irish accent. “Who’s this?”
“Someone who had reasons to get this number,” I said. He used a separate line for our kind of clients. “I’ve got two patients for you, urgent—but we can pay very well.”
“Well, look here, I’ve got appointments this afternoon—”
“Bump them,” I snapped, and reined my temper in. I had to play this right. Had to use the skills of social manipulation that’d made me part of the Chaos Crew to begin with. “With the kind of money we can offer you, you’ll be able to buy every bit of equipment you’ve dreamed of to cure those patients faster the next time they see you.”
“Who says money’s the deciding factor?” he asked, but I could hear the interest in his voice. It hadn’t been quite enough to convince him, though. I took a gamble, assuming he cared about bumping those patients at the last minute because he actually cared about them and not because he felt like being a dick.
“How about this as a bonus: you’ll also be helping the crew who took down a child-torturing cult and who will be ending a human trafficking ring if you patch us up all right.”
The man sucked in a breath. For a second, in my desperate state, I was afraid I’d miscalculated his concern for the rest of humanity. But my instincts had obviously kicked in even through the haze of guilt and terror in my head.
“Fine,” he said. “Bloody hell. Fine. How soon will you get here?”
“If you’re still working out of your usual address on Painter Avenue, I’ll be aiming for under half an hour,” I said. “Be ready.”
When I reached the building where the doctor carried out his less legit work, I swerved around back and braked with a squeal of the tires. As I wrenched open the back doors, the doctor came out of the building. He took one look at Julius and Talon and dashed back inside for a couple of stretchers.
I helped him load one man and then the other onto the rolling beds. Julius had nearly passed out from blood loss, mumbling incoherently. Talon was entirely unconscious. I didn’t like the look of the bloody stains they’d left behind on the seats.
“Wait out there,” the doctor barked at me after I’d helped him wheel the stretchers over to the building. The door closed, and all I could do was slump against the side of the van and wonder whether I’d gotten them here in time.
Julius and Talon were the strongest men I’d ever known. This couldn’t be what beat them. No fucking way.
But even if they survived, their injuries were severe enough that they’d be laid up for several days if not weeks. Without the strength of our full crew, how could we ever take out the biggest threat we’d ever faced? The Blood Hunter wouldn’t wait for us to heal, and we couldn’t take him on like this. We might not even be able to defend ourselves from his next attack.
By leaving my post, I could have screwed over the crew more completely than I’d ever imagined was possible.
