Safe at Last (Slow Burn #3) (2 page)

And then the decision was ripped from him when Alyssa glanced past her captor and betrayed his presence by widening her eyes in alarm. Thankfully, the girl lowered the knife and turned, perhaps thinking he was one of the men who’d abducted Alyssa. But when her gaze settled on him, she raised the hand holding the knife, her expression so vicious it gave him chills. Then she turned, clearly directing the knife toward Alyssa’s chest.

It all happened in a split second, and yet it was as though everything were in slow motion.

Alyssa screamed, straining sideways to avoid the wicked edge of the knife. Zack fired, his aim precise, penetrating Lana’s arm just above the wrist, causing the knife to drop. Lana’s scream mimicked Alyssa’s own and yet the obvious pain the bullet wound must have caused didn’t deter her from her determined vendetta.

She lunged at Alyssa, scratching furiously at Alyssa’s face while her other hand hung uselessly at her side.

Goddamn it!

Zack hurled himself forward, grabbing a fistful of the hell cat’s hair, and yanked her back. In his ear, two voices were demanding a status report. He ignored both, more worried about defending Alyssa from further harm if someone not on his team came down the stairs.

“I’ll kill you!” Lana screamed, turning her fury on Zack.

And just as suddenly, her anger turned to triumph as she turned a spiteful look in Alyssa’s direction.

“You’re too late anyway,” she said smugly.

Zack didn’t pause to consider what the crazy-ass girl meant. He shoved her down into a nearby chair and handcuffed her uninjured wrist to the arm. This time it was she who gave away the presence of another. Relief flared in her eyes and Zack immediately dropped and rolled toward Alyssa, placing his body between her and any possible threat.

His gun was up and he didn’t hesitate when he saw a man who was similarly attired as the one Zack had already taken down on the upper level. He didn’t have time to go for the kill shot but put a bullet in the assailant’s upper leg. Judging by the blood pumping from the wound as the man went down, it was likely Zack had hit his femoral artery. If that was the case, the man was finished and would bleed out in a matter of seconds.

Still, not one to assume anything, he took aim and put a second bullet through the downed man’s neck.

“Goddamn it, where the fuck is everyone?” Zack demanded, addressing his teammates for the first time. “Alyssa’s in the basement and two of the kidnappers are dead. Anyone care to offer some backup here?”

“Well, if you’d been a little more patient, you’d have gotten your backup,” Dane said dryly.

“If I’d waited any longer, Alyssa would be dead right now,” Zack snapped.

“We’ve cleared the main level,” Eliza broke in. “On our way now. And Zack, this is some fucked-up shit we’re dealing with.”

“You don’t even know the half of it,” Zack said grimly.

Satisfied that he’d encounter no further nasty surprises, Zack picked himself up and quickly freed Alyssa’s wrists, using the key lying on a table just a few feet away. As soon as she was free, she threw her arms around him and sobbed into his neck. He closed his eyes, cupping the back of her head as he gently stroked her hair.

“It’s all right now, sweetheart. You’re safe now.”

“No it’s not,” she said with gulping sobs. “It’ll
never
be all right again.”

She clung tightly to him, her grief causing a knot to form in Zack’s throat. The world was filled with all kinds of sick, twisted fucks, but even this had the power to surprise him. That someone so young was so evil and . . . sick. He didn’t have words.

“Can you get up or do you need me to carry you?” Zack said, using a soothing, calming voice. “How badly are you hurt?”

At his question, she completely fell apart, her cries so hopeless that it enraged him that such innocence had been destroyed. But even then, he wasn’t prepared for her answer.

“She broke my
knees
,” Alyssa sobbed. “She made it so I’ll never dance again. Dancing was all I had and now it’s
gone
. She was supposed to be my friend. We were going to room together, go to the same performing arts academy. Oh God. What if I never walk again?”

Zack went utterly still with shock. As gently as he could, considering he was shaking with rage, he pulled her away, just enough that he could evaluate her legs. He hadn’t seen them before. He’d been too focused on Lana and the knife she’d held and the fear in Alyssa’s eyes.

And what he saw horrified him.

The leotards she’d worn in her recital were torn and bloodied, impossibly stretched by massive swelling caused by trauma to the kneecaps. He’d never felt so sick in his life. Not since the day . . .

He shook his head, refusing to go back to that time in his life. There was a young girl who needed him right now. He was all that had stood between her and death. And to her, such a devastating injury was tantamount to death.

He very carefully slid one arm underneath her thighs, above the backs of her knees and below her behind, and secured his other arm around her upper body, hooking it underneath her armpit.

“This will hurt, honey, but I have to get you out of here and to a hospital where it’s safe. Perhaps your injuries aren’t as severe as you fear.”

Devastation and doubt were clear in her tear-swollen eyes, but she clamped her lips shut and leaned into him, not uttering a single sound as he lifted her and carried her past Lana, who was still handcuffed to the chair.

“What about me?” Lana shrieked. “You
shot
me!”

Zack turned his cold gaze on her, ensuring Alyssa’s head was tucked firmly beneath his chin, her face buried against his neck so she would no longer have to lay eyes on her torturer.

“Sue me,” he growled.

TWO

ZACK
shifted position on an uncomfortable stool in a bar better described as a dive, several blocks from his apartment. It was a place he used as an escape, because no one knew him here. Despite his regularity, he kept to himself, never talking to others and definitely not using it as a place to pick up women for one-night stands. It was simply a place to blow off steam after a particularly bad assignment or the times when his past came back to haunt him despite his best efforts to move beyond it.

In this case, it was a double whammy.

Because the job from hell—literally—had brought back painful memories that he’d been able to keep at bay for a period of time he was proud of. He’d even thought he was beyond the worst. Moving on. Finally letting go and accepting. Accepting that the life he’d planned—the life he’d dreamed of—was never going to be a reality, and that it was time to focus on a new dream. A new vision. Or sacrifice forever any semblance of happiness and a satisfying, fulfilling life.

Yeah, when put like that, it didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out he’d been a prisoner of things he had no control of, for far, far too long. It was time to get the fuck over it and pull his head out of his ass.

“Hey.” A soft voice interrupted his litany of self-castigation.

He turned gratefully, relieved to have a reprieve from his current train of thought even if he preferred not to be disturbed when he was here, a place he could usually count on being left alone because everyone kept to themselves and minded their business.

He smiled when he saw Tonya, a nurse at the hospital where Alyssa had been taken earlier in the evening. She worked in the ER, which was how Zack, as well as other members of DSS, had become acquainted with her. It certainly wasn’t an uncommon occurrence for DSS to be in and out of the ER on a regular basis, whether it was an injury to one of their team members or someone they brought in as the result of a job. Like Alyssa.

“Rough night, huh,” Tonya said quietly, her gaze flitting over Zack’s features as if his inner torment were a flashing neon sign.

Zack sighed and took another long swig of his beer, setting the now-empty bottle back on the bar and motioning to the bartender for another.

“Yeah. It sucked. You want a drink?”

Tonya slid onto the stool beside him, hauling her purse into her lap between the edge of the bar and her midsection. “I’ll have what you’re having.”

Zack lifted his hand to gain the attention of the bartender and held up two fingers.

“The girl wasn’t my patient, but the entire ER was talking about it,” Tonya said, a grimace twisting her pretty features. “If you can’t talk about it, fine, but is it true that her
friend
did that to her because Alyssa was the better dancer?”

Zack made an indistinct garbled choking sound. “Some friend, huh.”

“Jesus. So it’s true. What the fuck kind of maniac teenagers are parents raising these days?”

“I think the problem is they aren’t being raised at all,” Zack said in disgust. “Rather, the parents are being managed and manipulated by their spoiled brats who have gross senses of entitlement. Whatever happened to pouting or throwing tantrums over not getting their favorite toys, for fuck’s sake? Apparently taking out a hit on your competition is the new norm.”

Tonya snagged one of the beers the bartender set in front of them and then clinked her bottle against Zack’s before taking a long swallow.

“Sure makes you think twice about procreating.”

Zack nodded, even if a large family had been exactly what he’d always wanted. If things had gone as he’d planned . . . He closed his eyes, but not before the unfinished mental statement drifted through his mind as a fully formed thought. If things had gone as planned, he would be retired from the pros and have his second, possibly even third child by now instead of taking a bad hit as a quarterback in his second year and opting not to go back.

“Hey, you okay?” Tonya asked.

He glanced her way to see concern in her eyes. He didn’t attempt to lie, because she saw this kind of shit on a daily basis, and she wasn’t any more immune to the effects than he was.

“Yeah. Just another bad day at the office.”

She laughed and held her bottle to his again. “I’ll drink to that. But then isn’t every day a bad one when you have jobs like ours? Makes you wonder if we have rocks in our heads.”

Zack knew why he hadn’t gone back to the pros. Why he’d pursued a career in law enforcement. Some would say he was just following in his old man’s footsteps, even if that was the very last thing he’d ever do. And he also knew why he’d ended up taking a job with DSS at an important crossroads in his life when he was being recruited by a government agency.

But he liked DSS and the people he worked with. And he liked the fact that certain gifts that most people viewed with skepticism or outright derision were not only accepted but witnessed through the extraordinary powers that both Caleb’s and Beau’s wives possessed.

Because Zack had firsthand experience with the extraordinary. Gracie had possessed one such gift. The ability to read minds. There was no explanation for it. It certainly wasn’t genetic, because her parents were complete wastes of human DNA and yet somehow they’d managed to produce an extraordinary daughter, so divergent from her upbringing and surroundings that it was astonishing. It brought to mind the possibility of being switched at birth or that the entire scientific argument of nature versus nurture was a bunch of bullshit thought of by brilliant minds with nothing better to do than hypothesize about why people become the people they do.

Because Gracie defied both nature and nurture. If one looked at her gene pool, she was fucked and doomed to life as a complete loser. If one looked at the nurture aspect, she was equally fucked, because in no way had she been brought up in an environment conducive to forming a responsible, empathetic, intelligent and sweet individual. And yet Gracie was all of those things. Her reward? He had not a fucking clue, but his imagination had come up with all manner of gruesome possibilities over the years and every single one of them tortured him endlessly.

“Hey,” Tonya said, once more diverting his thoughts from the blackness into which they’d descended.

And once more he glanced her way, meeting her sweet smile, warm, sparkling eyes and inviting features.

“Want to go blow off some steam together? Your place, my place. Doesn’t really matter. And no, before you ask, I’m not proposing marriage and no, I’m not looking for a relationship. I’m happy with my life the way it is at present, but that doesn’t mean I’m blind, nor would I turn down a night of mindless sex with a gorgeous hunk of alpha male.”

Her question rattled him, even though he considered himself as steady as they come and a master at masking any sort of reaction he might be feeling. He stared blankly at her a moment, pondering why he was even hesitating.

Tonya was a beautiful, intelligent woman. More than that, she had a sense of humor, didn’t have an ego and didn’t take herself too seriously. And she was a good woman. A woman any man would be damn lucky to have, and not just on the temporary basis she was proposing.

So why the hell was he sitting here staring like he had no idea how to respond instead of already herding her toward the door?

What the hell was wrong with him?

Shame twisted in his gut, filled his chest until it was tight with it. She was offering what most guys would give their left nut for, but damn it, she deserved more than some mindless fuck from a guy not completely and utterly focused on her. And tonight he couldn’t give her that kind of guarantee. He couldn’t give her anything at all except an orgasm, and well, that was questionable too. Because neither of his “heads” were focused, and while he didn’t need his dick to get a woman off and rock her world, he just wasn’t feeling it tonight.

Tonya slid her hand down his arm and then wrapped her fingers around his wrist, squeezing gently, her smile never faltering.

“I don’t have a fragile ego, Zack. The look on your face says it all, so stop beating yourself up trying to figure out what to say to break it to me gently that you aren’t looking for a one-night stand. I get it, okay? Well, and if you ever want a rain check, it’s not like I’ll harbor a grudge over being rejected and punish you for eternity.”