I raised my head slowly and spoke softly. “Devlin.”
He jumped six inches and fumbled as he unhooked theshoulder strap of an AR-15 and held it. He didn’t point it at me, which was a good start. From our background research and Savannah’s accounts, Devlin wasn’t a gun person, so I didn’t know whether he could really handle that rifle or if it was just for show. But an unskilled gunman can still do damage, so I didn’t plan to test his proficiency by drawing fire.
Worse, he looked like he’d deteriorated. Last night, he’d been grizzled, gaunt, unkempt. Now he appeared to be ten times worse. I wondered when he’d last eaten or slept.
“I was hoping I’d find you,” I said, spinning the story I thought would work best. “Savannah said you might be in danger.”
He glanced at the closed door. He was definitely paranoid.
“We’re alone,” I assured him, because his brain was probably lying to him in ten different ways, and he didn’t know what to believe. “But you can check. Go ahead.” I smiled, hoping to look nonthreatening. “I’m not going anywhere.”
He stepped into the other room. He left the door open, but he moved out of my sightline. When he didn’t return right away, I started to worry.
“Dev?” I called. “Buddy?”
He came back, gun still pointed toward the floor.
“We’re alone, right?”
He nodded. “But I think there’s a problem.”
Well, there were about a hundred of them. I blinked more blood out of my eye. There was too much of it for my liking, so my head wound was in the top ten of my concerns. I hoped whatever had upset Devlin was a threat I’d already identified.
“I think it’s armed.”
Fuck me.
I had no idea what “it” was, but when followed by “armed”, whatever it was slid right into the number one spot on my problem list. “What isit, Devlin?”
“The thing Taylor was building. He said it was a dummy, but there’s a timer running.”
Fuck me sideways.
“I think you’d better show me.” I wasn’t attached to my chair, but between my head wound and my constraints, I didn’t trust my ability to stand without help. “I’m going to need you to cut my zip ties.”
He shook his head. No doubt, one of Anson’s orders had been to keep me trussed up while waiting for the additional “help,” which by now I knew was never coming. Devlin had been set up, although he didn’t seem to know it yet. I didn’t know why he’d been designated cannon fodder, and in that moment I didn’t care, because it was incumbent upon me to save both our asses.
“Devlin, listen carefully. Circumstances have changed. At least cut my ankles loose. My hands will still be behind my back, and you’ll still be holding the gun.”
Under normal circumstances, those minor issues wouldn’t matter, but my dizziness, which was becoming more frequent, meant he probably was safe from me, at least for now. Maybe his lizard brain picked up on my weakened state because he walked into the next room and returned with a small pocket knife, which he used to hack through the zip tie at my ankles. He stepped back, not willing to help me stand, but still not pointing his weapon at me, so I was taking it as a very big win.
Until I walked into the next room.
The bomb sitting on the table in the middle of the sparsely furnished cabin was no amateur contraption. I wasn’t an explosives expert, but because my previous—and, apparently, current—profession required me to be a jack of all trades, I’d disarmed some simple devices. But there was no fucking way I was taking this one apart and living to tell the tale. Worse, there were two wires leading away from it. One led to thefront door. The other led to the only window in this larger room of the two-room structure.
Fuck me sideways with a rusty fork.
Now I understood why they’d left him behind. They could blow up both of us and blame him for it. I still didn’t know why I’d been chosen to join him. Might just be my lucky day.
I headed back to the other room to check the small window there. Small wasn’t the right word for it, though. More like tiny. I wasn’t getting through that. Even Devlin, down twenty pounds too many to be healthy, wouldn’t fit. Maybe a kid, say a three-year-old, could squeeze through it, but we were fresh out of those, so we were shit out of luck.
The only way we were getting out of this was by getting help to disarm the bomb or… Yeah, there was no other choice.
I took a calming breath, blinked away more blood from my eye, and waited for another dizzy spell to pass. I considered risking an attack and taking the gun off Devlin, but my original assessment that the head wound was making me slow still stood. He might have enough adrenaline to squeeze the trigger before I could get him contained. If I was lucky, it would be a kill shot, but odds were it would only render me useless. So Devlin and I were going to have to work as a team. Or at least I was going to have to work, and he was going to have to be convinced to not do anything stupid.
“Did they leave you with a cell phone?” I asked.
He hesitated. Licked his dry lips. They had, but he didn’t want to tell me. Or maybe they hadn’t, but he’d sneaked in a burner. The poor guy didn’t know who was friend and who was foe, but he had to trust me, or we’d both die. And while I’d made Savannah promise me she’d eventually recover if I ever left her for good, this was not going to be the day I put her to the test.
