Convict: A Bad Boy Romance (28 page)

I
’m staring
into the forest, my eyes unfocused. I’m trying to force myself to calm down, trying to remember any of the
zillions
of meditation techniques I’ve learned in my life, and I can’t think of a single one.

Instead I feel like every nerve in my body is hooked up to its own personal cattle prod, and they’re all going off every five seconds.

Don’t think about Stone dead
, I tell myself.
Puppies. Kittens. The sun in the trees and the rain on the grass and all that bullshit oh Jesus Christ what if I’m too late, what if it’s my fault...

I close my eyes again. I breathe. I open them.

Something lights up in the forest. I blink, then open my eyes. The blue-white light is still there, but then it fades quickly and it’s black again.

Cedar’s also standing up straight, staring into the woods.

“You saw that, right?” I say.

He nods.

“I think I just got an email,” I say, keeping my voice low. “Cedar, text me.”

“I don’t have service,” he says, pulling his phone out.

I look at Batali and Tony, and they pull their phones out as well.

“Me either,” says Tony. “What provider do you have?”

“I’m on AT&T,” Cedar says, frowning. “But we’re in the middle of nowhere, I’d be surprised if any—”

“I have one bar,” Batali interrupts, then looks up at me. “There, did that work?”

We all stare into the trees, holding our breaths.

Nothing. For long second, there’s nothing.

Then, finally: a very faint buzzing noise, and the blue glow.

I charge toward it, but it fades and I stop.

“Do it again,” I hiss, and moments later, it lights up.

Please don’t let me find Stone’s body,
I think.
Please god please god please.

I walk toward the glow, my heart in my throat, terrified.

It lights up one more time, and now Cedar’s flashlight picks it out, lying face-up, on a carpet of pine needles.

No body. No dead Stone.

I nearly cry with relief and pick my phone up, looking at Cedar, but he’s frowning. I look around. So are Tony and Batali, and
then
comprehension dawns on me.

The SWAT team went the other way from the SUV.

If Stone dropped this, he’s not at the hunting cabin. He went in the opposite direction.

“The radio towers,” Cedar murmurs, and points. I can just barely see a rocky outcropping through the trees. “It’s on top of that,” he says.

We’re too late,
I think.
We’re already too late, and the SWAT team is behind us.

“How do we get up there?” I ask, still staring.

“If this is the one I’m thinking of, there’s a slow way and a fast way,” Cedar says, and starts walking toward the rocky bulge in the mountain. “The fast way sucks, but...”

“We’ll take the fast way,” I say, pocketing my phone. “You stay here with the SUV.”

Tony is quietly radioing the SWAT team, and his walkie talkie crackles softly.

“I’m not staying here,” Cedar says. “You have
no
idea how to get up there.”

“We’re all trained law enforcement professionals,” I say. “You don’t even know how to use a gun.”

Cedar crosses his arms and glares at me.

“Forest rangers are law enforcement,” he says.

“You know what I mean—”

“And yes, I goddamn
do
know how to use a gun, and if you think I’m letting my little sister climb up a mountain so she can face off against some goons, you’ve lost your mind.”

Tony starts walking back to the SUV, the walkie-talkie still to his mouth.

“Plus, as a federal agent, I technically have jurisdiction over all of you right now since we’re on federal land,” Cedar goes on.

“Tony’s also a federal agent, actually,” Batali points out. “So is Patricia.”

“Fine!” I hiss, the adrenaline coursing through my veins, feeling like someone’s injected me with acid. “You win, we can all go but we
need to go
, are you happy?”

The car door shuts and Tony walks back. He hands a holster belt to Cedar, who straps it on, then takes the gun from Tony.

“I can’t talk you out of this?” I ask, even though I already know the answer.

“Nope,” he says. “One thing, though.”

I just raise my eyebrows, my heart nearly beating through my ribcage.

“Don’t tell mom,” he says.

I nearly smile.

* * *

T
he fast way
up the mountain is hard, and I’m wearing someone else’s street clothes and tennis shoes. By the time we all make it to the top, my hands are scratched and bleeding, I’ve torn Miranda’s jeans and shirt, and I’m pretty certain my right leg is just one big bruise.

But we all make it, and then we crouch behind a huge rocky outcropping, staring.

“What is this thing?” I ask Cedar.

He shrugs.

“Apparently it was put up during the cold war,” he says, as we all look up at the blinking radio towers and satellite dishes behind a tall chain-link fence. “But I think it’s pretty much abandoned now. It’s not like repair trucks can still get here since the road got washed out ten years ago.”

There’s half a moon and no trees on the broad rocky mountaintop, so we all scan around, catching our breath.

There’s no sign of Stone. I don’t even know where he could be, because there’s not a building up here, only the tall, spindly radio towers and satellite dishes.

He could be anywhere,
I think.
They don’t need a building to kill him. You can kill someone outdoors.

Then Cedar points. I squint.

“There’s the roof to the bunker, right below the crest of the hill,” he says, keeping his voice low. “Or whatever it is. I don’t know if it’s actually a bunker, it might be more of a caretaker cabin.”

I want to scream
I don’t give a shit why it was built
, but I don’t.

We’re all quiet for a moment.

Then I hear a distinct
oof
from the direction of the cabin, along with the sound of something splintering apart.

I stand and unholster my weapon, but Tony grabs my wrist.

“Hold up,” he says, gesturing. “We need a little recon first. We came too far to go in blind.”

We need to go now
, I want to shout.
Right fucking now before anything else happens to him
.

But I know he’s right, so I crouch again. I feel like there’s a fist around my heart, like I can barely breathe, but I kneel behind the rock as Tony outlines a plan.

“
A
nd
?” Hammer coaxes.

My ribs are in agony. I think one shoulder is dislocated, I’m pretty sure a tooth is loose, and I’ve got a feeling my entire face is black and blue.

“And, if you snitch, you’ll end up in the woods with some asshole who’s confused guns with baseball bats,” I say.

The thug wallops me again, getting me right in the temple with the butt of his pistol. Fireworks shoot across my vision and everything goes wavy, and I feel myself slumping to one side.

Sit up straight
, I think frantically.
Don’t give them the satisfaction, sit up—

There’s a cracking sound, and the whole chair falls over. I land on the concrete floor hard, my head smacking it hard enough to rattle my brain. I’m still tied to the chair, though the wooden chair is in worse condition than I am, coming apart at the joints.

Hammer looks thoughtfully at the camera. Then he reaches down and turns it off.

I shut my eyes, because I know what that means. I pull my wrists hard against my restraints, because even as Luna’s face floats in front of me, I don’t want to die. The duct tape is a little loose, because I’ve been sweating like crazy for the past twenty minutes, and I flex my arms against it.

It’s useless,
my dazed brain whispers.
Just give up and hope they shoot you.

“I heard the mafia cuts snitches’ tongues out,” one of the guys says.

“We’re not the mafia,” Hammer rumbles.

He walks across the room, his steps uneven because of his limp. He picks something up, and I open my eyes.

Even though everything is blurry and there are sparkles moving through my vision, I don’t need to see well to know I’m watching him examine a gun. Hammer calmly checks that it’s loaded, that there’s a silencer, and that the action is all working.

His three thugs and I are watching, all totally silent. Even though everything hurts, I can barely see, and I know I’m about to get shot, I have the strange realization that they’re more afraid of him than I am.

I’m not afraid of him at all right now. I feel strangely peaceful, watching him check the gun, like I’m floating somewhere far away, watching myself here on this concrete floor.

Just get it over with
, I think.

Hammer walks over to me, clicking the safety off. Even though he’s blurry I keep my eyes open. I may be tied to a chair and on the floor, but the least I can do is look death in the eye.

At least I know that, at the end, I did the right thing and wasn’t afraid.

“You wanna say anything?” Hammer asks.

The thugs snicker. In the silence, I can hear the ceiling creak.

“Not to you,” I say.

There’s another creak, louder. Hammer glances up, and the thugs look behind them. One goes over and stares up at the ugly exposed beams, frowning.

Suddenly, half the roof caves in on top of him. He screams and falls to the floor. His leg is pinned down by two rocks, and the other two thugs both shout at once.

“It’s a fuckin’ avalanche!”

“I fuckin’ told you this was a bad—”

There’s a gunshot and the light goes out, plunging us into darkness, and at almost the same second, the door flies open with a bang.

“Hands up, guns down,” a clipped, military-sounding voice says.

I can’t see shit. My vision is still blurry and sparkling, plus my eyes aren’t used to the dark, but it really,
really
sounds like Tony.

I pull harder at the duct tape around my wrists. My arms scream with pain from the shoulder all the way down, but I ignore it. The chair splinters more, but no one is looking at me. I kick and a chair leg snaps off. The guy pinned under the rocks is crying quietly, his breath coming in soft hiccups.

“I know I didn’t stutter,” Tony says.

Hammer’s just looking at him, like he’s doing some sort of math equation. Even with one man down, they’re three against one.

I pull harder at my wrists. The duct tape pulls out most of my arm hair, but it finally starts to loosen and I slide my arm further and further out. I look around.

If I could break off a piece of this chair, that would be a pretty good bat...

Hammer looks at his thugs, then back at Tony. My wrist finally slips free, and I open and close my fist, most of my arm numb.

“Don’t,” says a voice from behind them.

The thugs turn and look, and there she is: standing on the rocky ridge that overlooks the bunker, gun pointed straight at them. Batali’s right next to her.

“Told you we should have killed her,” Red says.

“Guns
down
,” Luna says.

It seems like a stalemate. Not that I’m tactically trained, but Luna, Tony, and Batali seem like they’re at a disadvantage, shooting through a doorway and a hole in the roof. It’s too easy for the thugs to get behind a wall and turn this into a terrible, bloody shootout.

Behind myself, I grab the back of the chair and work it side to side. The wood is old, dried out and half-rotted, and it splinters and comes free slowly. Both my arms are pure pain, but I grit my teeth and ignore it, rocking the wood side to side.

“You’ve got until three,” Tony says from the doorway. “One.”

I squeeze my eyes shut and
pull
, even as black clouds my vision.

“Two.”

Hammer looks back at his thugs again. There’s a cracking noise as the back of the chair comes free, but no one is paying me any attention.

“Th—“

I heave the broken chair as hard as I can at the nearest guy. It goes wildly off-course and just clips the guy I
wasn’t
aiming at, but it works. Everyone turns at looks at me for a split second, and it’s long enough.

Tony charges forward and next thing I know he and Hammer are fighting, a gun going off. Someone comes at me, and I raise myself on one elbow but one leg is still taped to the bottom of the chair and I can’t get up, so I kick at his legs as hard as I can.

There’s another gunshot as I connect, and everything goes quiet except for ringing. The guy’s landed on my leg and I scrabble at his hand, unlocking it from around the gun, and I kick my leg, trying to get hi off of me but everything goes fuzzy again, black spots opening up in front of my eyes.

I breathe. I try to breathe, but everything is quiet and blurry, in slow motion, just shapes moving in front of me. The guy’s weight moves off my leg and then someone’s in front of me, kneeling, a hand on my forehead.

It’s Luna. She’s telling me something.

I got ball sweat on your phone
, I think.

Someone’s behind her, with the guy I kicked. I don’t know what they’re doing. Luna says something else, but she’s fuzzy and silent and fading into black spots.

Holy shit, this really is like when you die in video games
, I think.