Until Zoe stiffened. Crumpled. Fell to the bed once more, a taut scream pouring out of her.
"What the fuck?"
So much for Shay buying a clue.
Brynn whipped toward the next-best hope for Bommer brother logic. "She's in labor," she told Tait. "We need to get her out of here. Now!"
Tait's scowl, copied nearly feature-for-feature by Kellan, wasn't the answer she'd hoped for. He glanced at his little brother and Zoe as if hoping Brynn's assertion wasn't true. A hard exhalation left him. "At the moment, that is much easier said than done."
Kellan nodded. "Adler's booby-trapped the building. The second we breached the hallway, steel doors dropped behind us. There's also a set blocking the route to the front door."
Another form materialized from the gloom. Her heart turned over at the sight of a scowling, grit-covered Rhett. Though his eyes nearly matched the smoke as they caught sight of her, nothing else about his face was gentle or reassuring. The next moment, they all learned why. "That's not the worst of it." He swung his gaze back toward the corridor. "If I'm reading the control panel right, he's rigged the whole room to blow in ten minutes."
Brynn blinked. "This whole room?"
Shay lurched to his feet, eyes more fierce than one of the animals his blood was spliced with. "Not an option."
Rhett grunted. "Want to tell me something I don't know?"
"So why the fuck aren't you doing something? Christ, Lange! My wife's in labor!"
Tait planted a hand to the center of Shay's chest. "And you're not doing her or your child any good with the melodrama."
Shay snarled. "He's the goddamn tech specialist-"
"And you're not helping him focus!"
Rhett dropped his head, but not before Brynn took in every tormented twist of his noble face. He thrived on being a hero the way other people needed air and water. Shay's agony, while justified, was tearing him apart. She yearned to run to him-and confess her love to him. If only nine minutes remained of her life, she wanted to spend every one of them declaring how deeply his and Reb's devotion, passion, and patience had changed her, to the very bindings of her heart.
"It's not a matter of focusing," he finally confessed. "I can't just go into the panel and cut the red wire or the blue wire. Adler's system is on an auto cut. If the sequence gets started and the box is popped, the explosives will fire right away."
Tait scrubbed a hand over his grimy face. "So we have either nine minutes or thirty seconds."
As he finished the bleak prognosis, all their comm links squawked. The sound echoed in Brynn's ear too, making her jump. In the chaos since she'd exited the bathroom, she forgotten about her audio bud. The voice that filled the link, husky and thick with odds-be-damned resolve, seared her belly with dread-and wrenched her heart with love.
"Double-Oh … I've got this."
In front of her, Rhett's head snapped up. His mouth was contorted-and his eyes were wide with terrible knowledge. He scared the living shit out of her even before shouting, "The fuck you do!"
"Tell everyone to get back. Way back."
"No! Goddammit it, Rebel!"
But everyone shot to action, anyhow. Tait, Kellan, and Shay helped Zoe, yanking the bed to its side to shield them. Garrett and Zeke towed their prisoner and hunkered against the wall too. Brynn rushed the other way, reaching out.
"Rhett?"
He grabbed her in return, clutching her so close that her breath punched out, shaky and shocked. Just as abruptly, he shoved her away. "Brynna, what the hell? Get down!"
"Why? What's-"
"He's going to try and blow the hall door. But all the explosives he has left … it's all too much fire power." He fell to his knees, jerking her down with him. "He won't have time to try and figure it out. He's just going to use too much and-"
"And what?" She seized his face, forcing him to lock gazes with her. Though she hated every dark, awful light she confronted in his eyes, she peered deeper-hoping to find a single shred of hope. "And what, Rhett?"
Her answer came in the form of a deafening explosion from the hall.
Literally, a deafening explosion.
By the time she pushed through the ringing in her ears and the pounding in her blood, she realized that she was standing. No … walking. Then running. No, that wasn't right, either. She was attempting to run, urged on by Kellan. Somehow, he'd latched onto her elbow. He was also yelling things at her.
Come on.
Move, Brynn. You have to move.
Run. Run. Run.
But the world was a bowl of Jell-O. A giant, smoke-flavored gelatin, through which she tried to force her feet with terrible, painful steps. I'm trying. The words reverberated in her head as if she'd spoken them but Kell didn't let up on the pressure, just kept pulling her toward-
What?
She finally understood. There was a knife in the gelatin. Kell wanted her to get to the knife. No …
it was …
light.
It penetrated at strange angles, cutting through the dark one way then the next as different figures crossed the acrid-smelling corridor.
Shadows. There were so many shadows. With her hearing still so jacked up, she couldn't discern which were real and which weren't. In one, she found the tatters of her purse. Real. As she jerked Kell to a stop in order to pick it up, her gaze rolled to the next-which held another strange shape.
A head.
Homer Adler's head. Severed … somehow. Blown off by the blast? Hacked away before or after? Did she care?
She screamed. At least her head vibrated as if she did.
Kellan, thank God, jerked her back to her feet, and farther away-
Until another shadow moved. This time, prompting her to throw down her purse, shove away Kellan, and deny anything else existed-even time.
The shadow surrendered a man.
The Viking of a man she loved.
Steps ragged. Dirty face tracked with tears. Arms stretched up and out … carrying the limp body of the other man she loved.
Chapter Nineteen
‡
They were out, thank fuck. Free. Then running as fast as they could, through the fence Rebel had severed with that first grenade launch, into the wide field beyond. With burning legs and raging lungs, Rhett pushed himself faster. Torqued himself to the edge of cardio resistance, in order to get as far away from the next detonation that rocked the twilight air, exploding more birds out of the trees, and turning the sky more orange than the sunset toward the west.
Thankfully, the ground dipped a little. The nine of them dropped into the crevice, breathing hard, anxiously eyeing their wake.
"Holy crap," Kellan panted.
"Holy shit," Tait seconded.
"Holy fuck!" Zoe screamed.
Shay, having never left her side, murmured words of encouragement that did little to ease the tension in the air. Though emergency truck sirens wailed in the distance, Kellan and Zeke went elbows-up against the berm, sighting the horizon through their guns in case any of Adler's goons decided to play hero and give them pursuit. Tait had joined his brother, attending to Zoe.
That left Garrett and Brynn to join Rhett-at the side of the man he'd laid in the grass as if he were suddenly handling sheer glass.
"Moon." He touched fingers to Rebel's face with the same hesitant care.
Rebel didn't move.
He pressed in harder.
"Moon."
He lifted his hand, brushing the distinct black waves back from that noble French forehead. They were covered in so much soot, they now looked gray. Shit. The Cajun bastard was going to be just as hot as an old man as he was now.
You will grow old, damn it. Prove it to me now. Prove it, and laugh in my face all you want to about it.
Garrett leaned in. Rhett snarled at him, and at the hand he extended toward Rebel's carotid. "Get away." He glared at Garrett's hand, making it clear he was ready to bite it off if he had to. A little blood and flesh would blend fine to the stew of agony boiling in his gut.
Garrett froze but didn't back off. "Double-Oh. Let me help."
"You can help by backing the hell off, Hawk. Are you fucking listening to me?" He lunged out, hovering over Reb like an overprotective wolf, until a soft, quivering hand scraped against his scalp.
"Rhett." Brynn's husky whisper shook as erratically as her fingers. "Let him help. We-we need to know-if-"
Her high gasp sliced it into a hundred shaky slivers. Each one of those blades gashed at him, too. He hated his own breath. Hated himself for sitting here, whole and alive, while-
No. Not whole.
He clutched Brynn's hand in, smashing it against his face. He framed Reb's face the same way. "Cold. He's so cold." It tumbled out of him on one of those hated breaths as Garrett checked for vitals … and was ominously silent about what he found. Or hadn't found.