Chapter 14

Chapter

Fourteen

GRACE

T he creak of the door had me torn between staying exactly where I was and peeking at who was here. I wasn’t sure what I was laying there listening for—what did I hope to hear? Voodoo said he would take care of it. He was also armed…

Something fell below, it sounded like a bag got dumped. There was just a thud, followed by the bounce of something else.

“Tobin,” a man yelled from outside. “Is it clear?”

Whoever Tobin was didn’t answer. I blew dust away from me as sweat began to trickle down my face. It wasn’t hot out here but my shirt clung uncomfortably to me. My heart beat out a rhythm against the wood where I lay. I was surprised the sound didn’t carry.

A gunshot split through the silence and I let out a scream before I could stop myself. Shoving my hand against my mouth, I tried to stuff the sound back inside.

Nothing moved below. At least nothing I could hear. Lifting my gaze to where the ladder peeked over the edge of the loft, I waited. If someone heard me, that was where they would come up—right?

“Get back here,” a third man shouted. He wasn’t the one who said to send me out or the other who called for Tobin.

Was this another five man team?

“There’s only one of him,” a fourth man said, his voice heavily accented. There was a definite Eastern European edge to his voice. Czech maybe? Hungarian? I wasn’t sure. Not western Europe. Not quite Russian. Somewhere firmly in between.

“That’s why Tobin is missing and now Karl. The car is here, the girl must be here. If we can eliminate him, do it. But our orders are specific.” The third man was quite firm in his command.

“I don’t see her in the car.” Apparently the fourth man hadn’t left. They were right below. “Check the tracker?”

“Won’t work if we’re this close. It will just show her within the area. It’s better at a distance.”

Tracker.

They were tracking me .

The idea made my skin crawl.

“Down the full length, check each stall and above.” The third man sounded like he’d passed me and kept moving.

“You want to go up now?” the fourth man asked.

“I said check each stall.” The third man was not happy. “The stalls first, then up. But keep scanning… above just in case he tries to surprise us.”

“Who are these people?” The fourth man complained. He was also moving away from me. They were heading toward the Jeep and maybe passing it on their way to the other side of the barn.

Five men.

Tobin wasn’t answering—maybe that was the thump I heard?

The gunshot from outside—the second guy?

Did that mean that Voodoo was out there while I was in here with these two?

Where was the fifth man?

“Clear,” the fourth man said.

“Body,” was the third man’s response. “Tobin. Throat slit. He’s dead.”

I was glad I’d kept my hand over my mouth or I might have let out another cry. Voodoo had been in here. The man who came in went down without a sound. That was creepy and terrifying and utterly badass.

Badass only because Voodoo was on my side. A new set of captors or not, so far they hadn’t tried to hurt me. I also didn’t think someone planning to keep me prisoner would offer to let me use a gun.

“Karl is likely dead then as well.” Give the fourth man a cookie. Nothing got past him.

“Take the ladder,” the third man said. “I will cover you.”

“What if they are right up there?” The fourth man made a disgusting sound to clear his throat before he spit. “You climb up the ladder. I’ll cover you.”

“Climb, or I will shoot you.”

Silence followed the threat. I suppressed the urge to cough as a violent tickle assaulted the back of my throat. I needed to be still. Now was not the time to shout, cry, cough, or draw any attention to myself.

I could hold position in a pose for an hour if necessary. Wouldn’t cough. I refused to cough. My eyes watered from the effort. Then the fourth man swore.

“I’m climbing.”

I moved the taser up closer to me. The heavy steps against the ladder seemed to vibrate. The feeling carried through the wood. It added another layer to the dread curling through me as my nose began to itch.

The desire to sneeze weighed heavily in my face. The watery film over my eyes made the world waver. I had a firm grip on the taser and I stared intently at the ladder.

“Hurry up,” the third man said. “We don’t have all day.”

“You want to go faster,” the fourth man snarled back. “Do it yourself.” Then he added something under his breath, but there he was, head clearing the top of the ladder.

Only he wasn’t looking at me at all.

On my knees I lunged forward and put the taser right against his arm. He snapped his head around and our gazes locked as I pressed the button.

His whole body convulsed. The shaking wracked him and his hand seemed locked on the ladder until I pulled the taser back. Then his eyes rolled back in his head and he fell backwards off the ladder.

A sneeze ripped out of me and I wanted to cry as the third man swore. He fired and a bullet slammed into one of the wooden cross beams overhead.

“I know you’re up there,” the third man called. “Come down, now.”

Did he really think that would work? I rubbed a hand against my face, trying to get the dust away from my nose. The watery eyes didn’t improve, but I continued to hug the loft floor. The scatter of straw up here seemed to suggest it had once been used for hay storage.

“Come down,” the third man snarled. Then a soft thud sounded. “I know you’re there.” Only he didn’t sound so certain this time.

His breathing grew harsher. More intense. Another couple of steps, then he hit something against the ladder.

“If you make me come up there—” He didn’t finish the sentence, instead he let out a hard grunting. Then something slammed into the ladder. A gun went off.

One shot.

Two.

Three.

One of the bullets smashed into the beam overhead again, but I didn’t see the other two. Lower grunting, then an agonized sound as bone snapped.

Bile surged up my throat. I’d heard a leg break before. It was not a sound you forgot. The echo of it lingering in the air before the pain hit.

“I’ll take that.” Voodoo’s voice was like a gift. “Good night.” Then another thump drifted up to me.

“All clear, Firecracker.”

I poked my head over to see him standing over two downed men. One guy was flat on his back, his sightless gaze staring straight up at me.

That was the guy I tased.

He was dead.

The other was down, blood trickling down his face.

“You did good, now come on down. Let’s get you back in the car and on our way.”

“What about them?” Did I care about them? They wanted to capture me and kill Voodoo. These men were not my friends. “They said they were tracking me.”

The cold reality of that sliced through me.

“It’s going to be fine,” Voodoo said. He had put away his guns and he was working zip-ties around the downed man’s wrists and feet. “Trust me.”

I was still at the top of the ladder. What I’d just told him had not remotely been a surprise.

“You knew.” An ugly uncomfortable feeling unfolded inside of me.

“I suspected,” he said, glancing up at me. “Now I know. So do you.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?” My chest hurt. “And how are they tracking me?”

“Because why would I scare you if it was nothing?” Voodoo straightened. “You coming down or do you need me to come up there and carry you down.”

I blinked. “You’d do it, wouldn’t you?”

“Yes,” he said. “But I’d rather you came down on your own. We can’t stay here too long.”

“I’m not done arguing.”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” he said. Heart still in my throat, I climbed down the ladder. An arm locked around my middle before I could step off and Voodoo lifted me clean over the body laying at the base.

He set me down and then gave me a visual once over. “All good?”

“I think so.” I glanced at the dead man, but Voodoo stepped between us.

“Nothing for you to see there, Firecracker. Hang on to the taser and back in the car. I just want to pack up this guy and his gear.”

“Pack him up?” Did that mean we were taking them with us?

“Getting him ready for transpo.” He had a phone in his hand. “Car, go on. Eat some sugar from the bag and drink some water. I don’t want you getting shocky again.”

I didn’t think I was going into shock, but I was definitely off kilter. Not looking at the corpse, I studied the third man. He had a tattoo on the back of his neck. I couldn’t make out much of it. He also had tats on his hands.

At the Jeep, I opened the passenger door and glanced down the aisle to where Voodoo snapped pictures of the guys on the ground. That was?—

Weird.

The whole thing had completely blown past any normal metric I might have been familiar with. Voodoo was still armed. The shotgun was under one arm and the rifle across his back. The handgun was back in its holster. He was still wearing the bullet proof vest.

He also didn’t have a scratch on him that I could see. I didn’t even think his hair was messed up. He stripped a bag off the third man and went through it, then he pulled out a tablet and a phone.

Using the man’s face, he unlocked them. Then typed a few things before repeating the same process with the fourth man. He shoved all of the devices into a ruck I hadn’t even noticed and then he was striding toward me.

After stowing his gear, he slid into the driver’s seat and backed out of the garage. “Change of plans, Firecracker. We need to take you somewhere to see if we can find the tracker.”

“It’s inside of me.” Where else would it be?

“Probably,” Voodoo said. “But we’re going to make sure we get it out. Not taking you to base if you can compromise it. The point of base is to be a safe place.”

“What about the house in Pennsylvania?”

“It’s just a safe house. It’s set up like a faraday cage though, containing the signal while you were in it. We might be able to do that in a car, but I’d rather get the tag off you entirely.”

“Me too,” I admitted. I had my seatbelt on, the taser rested in my lap and I had my arms folded.

“Eat,” he ordered, leaning over to snag the bag of pastries from near my feet. The warmth of the back of his hand brushed down my calf. It was almost too much stimulation. He set the bag in my lap.

Not that I felt much like eating, but I still pulled out one of the croissants. It wasn’t warm anymore, but it smelled fine. I waited until I finished it and we were back on the highway to speak again. “Did you kill the other men?”

“Yes.” No hesitation. No soft balling it. “They would have killed me and taken you given the chance.”

“That’s what it sounded like.” I folded my arms again and rubbed at my biceps. I was so cold. “I killed that one guy.”

“You didn’t kill him,” Voodoo said. “The taser is non-lethal.”

“I shocked the shit out of him on the ladder.”

Voodoo shrugged. “If he hadn’t been trying to hurt you, he wouldn’t have been on the ladder. You might have facilitated his leaving the ladder swiftly, but you didn’t kill him.”

“How can you say that?” Had he done something when I couldn’t see what he was doing.

“Because how he landed killed him,” Voodoo deadpanned.

“Then I did kill him?—”

“No. You shocked him. He fell. He landed badly. How he landed killed him. It’s not your fault he didn’t know how to land it.”

I gaped at him. “Are you serious?”

“Yes,” Voodoo said, this time with a grin. “I’m very serious. You’re just going to tear yourself up about this. You’re a fighter. That’s important.”

After rubbing a hand over my face, I looked at my palm. There was still grit and dust on it from the loft. It was probably on my face too.

My nose burned. My eyes weren’t happy. “I hate this.”

“I get that,” he said, then bumped my knee with his fist. “Eat some more and drink some water. I’ve got people meeting us two hours away. They’ll find the tracker and we’ll get it out.”

Exhaustion draped me. I still hadn’t called Am’s place or checked to see if she was okay. This whole time, they kept telling me I had to wait. No wonder they found me so fast when I went home.

If I’d gone to Am, would I have been leading them right to her?

“It’s going to be fine, Firecracker. We’ll take care of this, then get you a phone and call your sister.”

Somehow, that just wasn’t the comfort it had been.