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I stand up and she shoves me backward. “I did it to help you!”
“This isn’t a game, Boxcar!” She pushes me again and I grab her wrists as my back touches the wall. “You could have been killed but you still ran in here…”
“Of course, I did.”
“Why?!”
There are a million different things I could say to answer her but there’s only one thing I want to do that will tell her everything. I hold her face, smearing the blood on her cheeks, and crush my lips against hers with a firm kiss. Her resolve shifts in my direction and she kisses me back, gripping my waist to push me against the wall.
We break away, each of us taking deep breaths to calm ourselves as our lips brush together. My fingers tingle from the heat rising off her face, blending with mine.
“I’d do it again,” I whisper, laying my forehead against hers.
She looks at me with more fear in her eyes than I’ve ever seen. They close and she shakes her head as she turns away from me.
Fox steps in from outside. He exhales at the display of red-covered bodies. “You guys okay?” he asks, calm and steady.
“Yeah,” Caleb says quickly.
He looks at me, sensing the tension between us, but I nod in agreement.
I lean back against the wall again as blood’s stench invades my senses. It brings me back to that moment in the warehouse when I watched these same men murder two other innocents before pointing their guns at me. That same metallic smell. I’d be covered with it already if it weren’t for Caleb and Fox. It’s best not to think about it, I suppose. I’m still here. I’m still breathing.
And so is she.
“We’ll take our men back with us,” Caleb says, gesturing at Fox to help her. “Grab his legs.”
He lays his gun down and walks over to Rhys’ corpse. Caleb scoops her hands beneath his shoulders and the two of them raise him off the floor as if he weighed nothing at all. As if he wasn’t living and breathing just five minutes ago. I bet he’s even still warm.
This is all my fault.
“Boxcar.”
Fox lays a hand on my shoulder. I blink out of it, realizing that they’ve already carried Rhys and West outside into the jeep.
“Yeah?” I ask.
“You in there?”
I clear my throat and exhale the stench out of my lungs. “Yeah.”
“I need you to look around,” he tells me. “See if you can find anything that’ll tell us what they were doing out here. Can you do that?”
I nod. “Yeah.”
He drops his hand and steps away.
“Fox, I’m sorry.” I look to the floor at our dead enemies and the pool of blood flowing beneath each of them — struck down by Fox’s bullets. “That… can’t be easy.”
Fox looks at their bodies. “It never is,” he says, “but you two are still here. That’s something.”
There’s a slight tremble in his tone but it’s not enough to bleed into his optimism. Honestly, I’m not sure how he’s managed not to break, given everything he’s been through. I push off the wall, clinging to what remains of my strength.
I get to work while Fox and Caleb gather Rogers off the floor.
There’s not much to look through. Not even a document or a note. A computer would be nice. Whatever they were doing out here, they made damn sure they weren’t going to leave a trail.
I pause above their bodies. The obvious place to look would be their pockets but the idea of rummaging through a dead man’s clothing gives me the chills. Still, I fight through the feeling and kneel to check them.
