One man. One weapon. And they’d known it. They’d counted on him choosing the fight.
He was already running.
42
Jen snicked the lock.The sound was so small and final, her breath snagged in her throat. She lifted her hand and pressed it flat against the door. She stayed there a moment, her forehead tipped toward the wood, breathing in the dark.
Wyatt’s footsteps moved down the hall. Fast and purposeful. Already someone else.
She dropped her hand and stepped back.
The lights died. The room went black.
Her pulse exploded.
What the hell?
She tightened her hold on the Glock, the metal still warm where his fingers had guided hers. She was holding it wrong—one-handed and awkward, like something passed to her she didn’t know how to refuse.
Two hands. Always two hands.
She adjusted. Left hand firm on the grip, right hand bracing beneath the trigger guard the way he’d shown her.
She waited for her eyes to adjust, taking comfort from a thin line of moonlight where the shutter met the wall. She inhaled the faint smell of his soap. The edge of the bathtub pressed behindher calves, the sink to her right. Glass bottles gleamed softly on the shelf—aftershave, something medicinal.
Her breathing echoed off the walls.
Slow down. Slow it down.
She tried. Drew the air in through her nose, held it, let it out through her mouth the way she’d been taught in a stress management course she’d taken in another lifetime. A lifetime where stress meant reports and failing components, not standing in the dark holding a loaded weapon.
It didn’t work. Her breath stuttered out of rhythm, and her heart thudded so hard she could feel it in her teeth.
She counted the beats. Because it was something to count. Because her brain needed a task, or it was going to eat itself alive.
One. Two. Three. Four.
The house was silent.
Five. Six. Seven.
She strained to hear past her own pulse. Past the blood rushing in her ears. There was nothing. Just the deep, thick quiet of a building holding its breath.
Eight. Nine.
A crash. Distant.
Muffled but unmistakable. Something heavy hitting something solid. Then a man’s yell, short and sharp and cut off.
Wyatt.
Her hands jerked on the Glock.
She didn’t know whose voice that was or what had broken. She didn’t know who was still standing on the other side of the walls that separated her from the man she?—
She couldn’t finish the thought. Not now. Not when finishing it meant admitting what losing him would cost.
Silence.
