True Shot (2 page)

She dropped her dripping bag on the floor and pushed the door closed, her arms and legs leaden now, weighed down by her sodden denim shirt and jeans. All she had to do was make it to the couch and get the blanket, and she’d be warm in no time.

But her knees buckled, and as they hit the floor, pain seared through her shoulder. A burst of light flashed the world bright, and she flinched. A deep, quaking rumble vibrated the worn wooden floor under her knees. Thunder.

On the next flash of light, she noticed the pink water pooling near her left knee.

Oh, yeah. She’d been shot in the shoulder. Funny how she couldn’t feel it anymore.

In fact, she couldn’t feel much of anything. Maybe that should alarm her, but somehow it didn’t.

It figures, she thought. Make it almost home, and it wasn’t going to matter.

She was still going to die alone.

CHAPTER TWO

M
ac Hunter squinted against the rain slashing the windshield and hoped he was going the right way. He had no clue at this point. No street signs for miles, just this crappy, pothole-ridden road that kept going. Thank God for four-wheel drive, or his back end would have sunk into three feet of mud by now.

A streak of lightning made the towering trees pressing in on all sides look menacing against the night sky. Why had he let Alex and Charlie talk him into a week by himself in the middle of the Shenandoahs with nothing to do but brood? He didn’t need to get away to get his act together. He was fine.

Okay, yeah, he was a little burned out, and, yes, he’d started drinking more than he should. But it wasn’t like he was downing shots at the local bar every night then stumbling home at two in the morning with no memory the next day of how he got there. He wasn’t sneaking drinks at work from a bottle stashed in a bottom desk drawer. He wasn’t slipping out at midday for a three-martini lunch. The Trudeau sisters seemed to think a few drinks after a stressful day meant he was veering onto the off-ramp to alcoholism.

He supposed he could see their point. His father had drunk himself to death, after all. But that was why Mac had always tried to be careful about his alcohol intake. Not so much lately, though. So, yeah, maybe he did need someone to slap him upside the head. Maybe he was lucky that Alex and Charlie had staged their version of an intervention before more serious measures became necessary. They wanted to stop the self-medicating drunk before he became an alcoholic. He had to appreciate the depth of their friendship, whether he agreed with them or not. Every man should have friends like his.

Finally, he saw it.

The dark clouds of the storm lightened, and there sat the Trudeau family cabin, nestled among tall trees dressed up in the golden colors of fall. He suddenly wished he knew what kind of trees those were, but he had no idea. Some people knew plants. Mac Hunter knew inverted pyramids and how many picas in an inch. He knew how to write a story hook that’d pique your interest, even if it was about nothing more exciting than a city council meeting. He knew nut graphs and hammer heads and how to get a shooter to the scene of a fire in less than ten minutes. But trees? The closest he came to knowing anything about trees was that the newsprint he spent his days filling with stories and photos started out as trees.

With a relieved sigh—because now he wouldn’t have to drive the hour back down the mountain to find a crappy motel for the night—he parked the Jeep Commander and stepped out onto the soft, squishy ground. As rain pelted his leather jacket, muddy water oozed up around his loafers. He should have put on his new Gore-Tex hiking boots when he’d stopped for supplies, but he’d shrugged off the threatening clouds, too eager to get to the cabin and crash. The flight had been long, picking up the rental SUV a hassle. The cherry on top of his shit sundae: an unrelenting thunderstorm the entire way up the mountain, at times so fierce the windshield wipers couldn’t keep up with the deluge. So far, not a fun trip.

On the porch, he found the notch exactly where Charlie said the key resided. Three feet up, a handy little nook. But there was no key.

His heart thumped. Maybe he was destined to spend the night in a ratty motel after all. But, with his luck, the road he’d just put behind him would have washed out by now, trapping him.

He stuffed his hand into his front pocket and retrieved the new Swiss Army knife Alex had given him for the trip. Maybe he could pick the lock.

After a few seconds of fumbling with the knife, trying to figure out which tool to use, he gave up. Before beginning the wet slog back to the truck, he tried the door, just in case the universe took pity on his pathetic soul.

The knob turned.

He pushed the door open and blinked several times as his eyes tried to adjust to the gloom inside. Alex had told him a lantern sat on a table right by the door. All he had to do was pop in some batteries and he’d be good to go until he could get the generator going. Batteries, of course, that still sat with the rest of the supplies in the back of the Jeep.

He sprinted back to where he’d parked, figuring his shoes were ruined anyway, and it was kind of liberating to splash through the mud puddles like a kid.

Batteries in hand, he stepped into the cabin while ripping into the packaging. Within a minute, he cranked the light on and, eager to see where he’d be spending the week, held up the lantern.

And just about dropped it.

CHAPTER THREE

Earlier the same afternoon

Z
oe, you have to calm down and tell me what’s wrong.”

“They did it to me, so they might have done it to you.”

“Done what? You’re not making any sense.” Sam tried to guide her friend out of the entryway and toward the sofa. She’d arrived home in DC less than an hour ago, relieved to drop her bag by the door and start shedding the persona she’d worn for the latest assignment. She’d gotten as far as shrugging out of the denim shirt she’d worn as a jacket when Zoe started pounding on the door.

“Come sit down and talk to me,” Sam said. “I’ll pour us some drinks.”

“No!” It burst out of her, and Zoe covered her tear-streaked face with shaking hands. A wild sob quickly followed. “I can’t . . . I can’t . . .”

Seriously concerned now, Sam pulled her weeping friend into her arms and held her tight, smoothing her hand over Zoe’s quaking back. “It’s okay. Everything’s going to be okay.”

She didn’t even know what was wrong, but it seemed like the right thing to say. At the same time, her alarm grew. This was
Zoe
. Stoic, ramrod-straight-posture, I-didn’t-cry-at-
Bambi
-as-a-kid Zoe Harris. She never cried, rarely even showed much emotion. What the hell had happened while Sam was undercover in San Francisco?

“No, it’s not all right,” Zoe said and pushed her back with surprising strength. “Everything will
never
be okay. He betrayed us, Sam. We trusted him, and he betrayed us.”

“Who? Who betrayed us?”

“Flinn.”

Sam’s stomach did a flip. “What?”

“I’m pregnant,” Zoe blurted.

More shock had Sam shaking her head, denying herself the leap to conclusions. “You and Flinn?”

Zoe’s blond, spiral curls bounced as she violently shook her head and stalked into the living room as though she couldn’t stand still. “No! Never.”

Zoe sank onto the sofa and dropped her face into her hands as stronger sobs tore out of her. “I don’t know when it happened. I . . . he must have . . . must have drugged me or something. I don’t . . . remember . . .”

Drugged
her? Sam’s heart took off at a sprint as she thought of the night a month and a half ago when she’d suspected Flinn had drugged
her
. But she’d decided then that she was wrong. The days of being strapped down and forced to endure experiments designed to test the limits, and extent, of her abilities were over. Weren’t they?

Zoe raised her face to Sam, her brown eyes red and puffy. “He’s using me as an . . . as an . . .” Her breath started hitching, and fresh tears poured down her reddened cheeks. “As an . . .
incubator
.”

Sam’s stomach rolled with dread. She knew when she needed backup and never hesitated to make the request. As soon as she picked up the phone, though, Zoe clamped iron-strong fingers around her wrist and twisted until Sam winced. Before she could think to create an empathic block, memory that wasn’t hers crashed over her.

Sam fell out of the empathic memory as Zoe jerked her up close so that they were nose to nose. For the first time since she’d come weeping through Sam’s front door, Zoe looked coherent and deadly. “Do you get it now?” she hissed. “Did you
see
?”

Sam resisted the instinct to try to break Zoe’s grip on her wrist. They were both combat trained, both knew the moves and countermoves for incapacitating an attacker. But this was her friend. She knew Zoe’s intention was not to hurt her.

Sam relaxed her muscles and waited until the taller woman’s shoulders sagged. Regret added to the emotional chaos of her expression as Zoe dropped Sam’s wrist and took a step back. “God, I’m so sor—”

Her brows arched sharply, and shock wiped the despair from her eyes.

The wet splat against the front of Sam’s shirt had her flinching back and glancing down to see a thick spray pattern of red against the white backdrop of cotton. It took a second to register.

Blood.

Sam lunged toward her friend. As she tackled her friend to the floor behind the sofa, she felt a tug of pain burn through her left shoulder. Too late. She’d let the enemy take her by surprise.

She scrambled to her knees and pressed shaking fingers to Zoe’s neck. That was when she realized trying to find a pulse was pointless: Her eyes were open and empty.

Sam fought down the nausea and grief and forced herself to remember her training. The sniper who had just killed Zoe no doubt waited patiently for Sam to come into view so he could take a second kill shot.

She had to
do
something. Move.

A ticklish feather-stroke down her arm drew her gaze, and she watched the thin stream of blood tracking over her forearm. Numbness spread from her shoulder into the hand resting palm up on her thigh.

The sound of breaking glass snapped her out of her paralysis, and she slithered across the slippery hardwood floor toward her bag, toward her SIG. With cold, hard—comforting—metal pressed to her palm, she flipped over onto her back and fired one shot into the chest of the intruder tearing toward her.

He dropped about a yard from her feet, crumpling into a heap, and she kept the gun aimed at him. She didn’t so much as breathe until she saw his fingers go lax on the trigger of his weapon.

She crawled to him, forcing herself to focus, to do her job, to not think about Zoe, and used both hands to shove him over onto his back. She trained her SIG on him, hyperalert to the tiniest twitch. In head-to-toe black, a balaclava obscuring his features, he looked like any other assassin. Yet, something about him seemed familiar.

She yanked off the balaclava and sat back on her heels with a startled gasp.

She knew him.

He wasn’t a fellow N3 operative, but he was part of the team, one of three men Flinn called “the muscle.”

And Flinn had sent him to kill Zoe, to kill Sam.

Disbelief lightened her head. Betrayal tightened her lungs.

She had to run.

CHAPTER FOUR

The present

F
rustrated, Mac Hunter hunched over the steering wheel and glanced at the wet, dark-haired woman unconscious in the passenger seat. She hadn’t so much as whimpered when he’d wadded a clean T-shirt and stuffed it between her denim shirt and oozing shoulder to help staunch the bleeding. Then he’d bundled her up in the red plaid blanket from the sofa and hustled her into the Jeep, careful to protect her shoulder from too much jarring. He’d turned the heat on high, conscious of the wet-dog smell of the blanket’s old wool while he’d navigated the rutted road back toward Skyline Drive.

Now, the rain drumming against the roof of the SUV drowned out the wild pounding of his heart as he watched the frothy, muddy water surging past the front bumper. Just as he’d feared: The storm had washed out the road.

He had no choice but to turn back.

He executed a tight T-turn, praying the Jeep’s wheels wouldn’t get bogged down. Four-wheel drive could handle only so much.

Back at the cabin, he carried the woman through the torrents of rain for a second time. Inside, he kicked the door closed and settled her on the sofa. After cranking the lantern to its brightest setting and positioning it on the table next to the couch, he knelt by her side and smoothed soaked hair off her forehead. Her skin felt cool under the heat of his palm, her dark eyelashes stark against her pale complexion.

He fished his cell phone out of his jacket and checked again for a signal. None. “Of course,” he muttered. “That would be too easy.”

Alex had rattled off something about cell signals here, but he’d already forgotten what she’d said. He hadn’t planned to make any calls from here, anyway. Not that a cell signal would help much. He doubted anyone could manage to get anywhere near this cabin tonight with the road washed out.

Okay, first things first. He had to get the woman dry. Then he’d crank up the generator to heat the chill out of the air and help warm her up.