Hungry Like the Wolf(95)

Chapter 13


Maybe she’d heard wrong. Pushing the heavy shelving unit under the window had made a lot of noise. But no. She’d heard just fine. A car had pulled into the hangar. That squeal of tires had to be Hardy. She was out of time.

Heart racing, Mac glanced over at the door to make sure the pieces of the ruler she’d broken and wedged underneath it were in place. They wouldn’t keep Hardy and his men out, but they would slow them down long enough for her to escape. She hoped.

Of course, she would have been out of here fifteen minutes ago if the shelf hadn’t been so damn heavy to move. She was probably taking her life in her hands climbing up on the precariously balanced boxes she’d put on the top shelf so she could reach the window, but she didn’t have a choice. She couldn’t wait around for Gage and his pack to show up and save her. Oh, she knew they’d come—she was just worried she’d be dead by the time they got here. She hated to think about it, but there was a real possibility that Brooks, Cooper, and Becker had succumbed to their injuries after trying to rescue her. Gage might not even know what happened to her.

Mac swallowed hard at that painful thought and reached for another box just as footsteps sounded outside the door. She froze, holding her breath. Go away, she prayed silently. Just give me one more minute.

The doorknob jiggled. Muttering a curse, she hefted another case of paper to the top shelf, then scrambled up after it. The boxes of paper made the unit top-heavy as hell, and it wobbled wildly under her weight.

Just stay together long enough to let me reach the window.

It would be just her luck to have the shelf collapse. Hardy wouldn’t have to kill her. She’d break her neck all on her own.

The door shuddered as someone big slammed against it, but her wedges held. She quickly finished stacking the two cases of paper, then climbed on top of them. The shelf swayed dangerously, but she kept herself balanced in the center of her makeshift ladder and kept going.

“I don’t know what you think you’re gaining by this, Ms. Stone,” Hardy shouted over the whir of a nearby jet engine. “I was only going to shoot you in the head, but if you make me work for it, I’m going to make it so much more painful for you.”

Not exactly a great motivational speaker, was he? Unless he was trying to get her to hurry even more.

Mac grabbed the windowsill as a gunshot rang out. The bullet went clean through the door and smacked into the wall near the shelf she was standing on. If she wasn’t so focused on keeping herself from tumbling off her precarious perch, she would have screamed for sure.

She grabbed the handle and levered it upward, then pushed open the window. It only tilted out about a foot, but that was more than she needed. She yanked herself up to the window frame and shimmied through the narrow gap as more bullets tore through the door. If Gage and the Pack were anywhere nearby, they had to have heard the gunshots, right?

Mac didn’t exactly climb through the window as much as she fell through it. She tried to hold on to the edge of the frame so she could hang down then drop to the ground, but she ended up tumbling out the window in a nearly horizontal position. The asphalt came up to smack her faster than she expected, and for a moment, everything sparked, then went dark as pain engulfed the entire right side of her body.

But the sound of shooting coupled with Hardy’s furious shouts jarred her out of the blackness. She winced and crawled to her feet. Crap, it felt like she’d broken everything important in her body.

“Get outside and find that bitch!” Hardy ordered.

Damn it. They were already in the room. It wouldn’t take them long to figure out where she went.

In the darkness, Mac looked from the open runways and planes on her right to the long continuous row of hangars on her left. She’d never make it very far if she tried to run in a straight line across the open airfield. Hardy’s men would see her and shoot her down before she went a hundred feet. So she turned left and stumbled along the hangars as fast as her beat-up body would allow. She needed to find someplace to hide until Gage and his pack could find her.

Hurry up, Gage. If you were planning to make a dramatic entrance, please do it now.

***

“South Salinas Air,” Becker called out from the backseat of Xander’s SUV. “North Twenty-Fourth Avenue.”

“Are you sure?” Gage had to fight to keep from snarling as he glanced over his shoulder. Finding Hardy’s hangar had turned out to be harder than the IT guru had thought.

They were all parked on the side of the expressway waiting on Becker to give them a location. For about the thousandth time, Gage questioned the intelligence of putting all his eggs in one basket and bringing the whole team out here based on a muffled conversation a beaten man had heard while locked in a trunk. He glanced at his watch again and this time, he didn’t even try to hold in the growl that escaped his lips. It was after midnight already. Hardy’s men had taken Mackenzie over an hour ago. This was taking too damn long.