“Kasia!” I yelled.
“It’s a fucking ambush,” she screamed, gunfire like lightning in her comm. I could hear it popping in the distance. “Where the fuck are you, Dean?”
“Fuckers,” he screamed, and I heard more gunfire join the fray. Instantly two of Dean’s men were dead too.
“What’s happening?” I yelled. “Report!”
“We’re pinned down. Dean is trying to break us free.” Kasia sounded stressed. “We have wounded and dead.”
“Pull out,” I said. “Pull the fuck out.”
“Fucking bastards!” Dean screamed. “Kasia, smokes out left. Brent, Jimmy, flash grenades up right. Make a fucking hole and let’s punch out!”
“Roger!” Kasia called.
I felt like I wanted to scream. I was sitting there, watching from the video screen. Kasia and her people were hiding behind a container while the mafia men came spilling out of their containers. Dean, meanwhile, was pushing in front the north, firing at the mafia men that had Kasia pinned down. Suddenly, they threw grenades out, and smoke billowed all over the place, blocking my view.
“Go, go, go!” someone screamed. It was pure chaos over the comm. I couldn’t follow it. “Duck left!” “Over top!” “I’m hit! Fuck, I’m hit!”
More heart rates dropped off, one by one. Six dead, seven dead, eight dead.
“Run!” Kasia screamed. “Fall back! Louisa, get the truck ready.”
I jumped up into the driver’s seat and turned the engine on. It roared to life. I checked the monitors again.
Twelve dead. Twelve out of twenty.
The comm went quiet for a few minutes. I could still hear the pops of gunfire as it drew closer, some booms, some cracks. I squeezed the steering wheel, my body a mess of anxiety and fear.
It was a fucking trap. The shipment was a trap. There was no ship, there never was one.
Arturo had lured us into a trap, and Wyatt fell for it.
And then it hit me. Wyatt had been working with Arturo for a long time.
Did that bastard betray me? Was this all a part of his plan from the start? Maybe Arturo had sent him to me, knowing that I would want to get involved with him. Wyatt could have been aiming to betray me from the very start.
I shook my head, anger and confusion rolling through me as I heard more random yelling over the comm system. Suddenly, I heard banging on the truck. I threw the doors open and Kasia jumped in, dragging a man behind her. More men followed, or at least what was left of her team.
“Trap,” she said. “We need to get him back. He’d bleeding.”
“Dean isn’t back yet,” I said.
“He’s coming. Fuck, Louisa.” She glared at me, anger and sadness clear on her face. “This was fucked from the start. They were fucking waiting for us.”
“I know,” I said. “I know.”
Suddenly, Dean and his men jumped over the fence and scrambled toward us. Gunshots peppered the truck, dinging off the bulletproof metal. The men dove into the back.
“Go!” Kasia screamed.
I didn’t need to be told twice. I hit the gas and we lurched forward. Another spray of bullets hit the truck as we pulled away, flying off into the night.
The wounded were tended to. The mood in the truck was tense and angry, and we had lost most of the men that had gone out that night. There were two more men that were seriously wounded, and at least one that I doubted would survive.
How could this have happened? Did Wyatt actually betray us? I couldn’t imagine that he actually did. I couldn’t see him doing that. Wyatt just wasn’t that kind of man. But based on the looks Kasia was giving me, I knew she was thinking that this was all Wyatt’s fault, and that I was a fool for ever believing him.
Maybe I was. Maybe I had been suckered into this from the start.
I kept my eyes on the road, driving quickly back toward the safe house. We needed to get these men into the medical bay and fast before we lost them, too.
And I needed to talk to Wyatt. I had to find out if he had betrayed me, or if we had all stumbled into a trap together.
I felt like my life had been torn open, ripped to shreds.
This was a horrible loss. This was a serious blow. I didn’t know if they had gotten someone alive.
But I did know that we just lost a serious portion of our army, and our whole operation was in jeopardy.
27
Wyatt
It was around two in the morning when I was woken up by the sound of someone pounding on our hotel room door. Groggy, I rolled out of bed and slipped into my gym shorts. I took a pistol from my side table and stepped out into the living room.
Ethan was already there, a gun in his hands. He looked through the peephole then looked back at me, grinning.