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Tensing my body in preparation for what was to come, I closed my eyes and tried to keep her face in my mind, but the business end of Arden’s Beretta was too much to ignore.
Fucker.
“Aren’t you supposed to give me some kind of ‘ha-ha-I-knew-I-was-going-to-win-the whole-time’ kind of speech first?” I asked with a snarl.
I heard him snort a little laugh behind me.
“Not really my style,” he said.
The barrel of the Beretta pressed a little harder against my skull, and without another word, Evan Arden pulled back on the trigger.
There was a click—louder than the one from the hammer—but that was it.
No gunshot. No continued avalanche. No bullet in my brain.
“Fuck,” Arden muttered.
I relaxed my muscles.
“Run out of ammo?” I asked. I chuckled softly because the fucking irony was perfect and because I figured it would piss him off.
“No,” he said in a deadpan voice. “Jammed. Probably from the ice or a rock or something.”
I felt my insides churn. Arden was way too good to be stopped by a jammed gun. He would have it working again in a few seconds, which wasn’t nearly enough time for me to get myself dug out enough to turn around, take the gun, and beat him to death with the blunt end. It was only a delay of the inevitable.
Raine.
I closed my eyes again and tried to be grateful that I had a little time to picture her face, think about the way she smelled, and remember how her skin felt in my hands. I hoped and prayed that Landon would just let her and Alex go, now that he had no use for them.
I took a long, shuddering breath and waited for the inevitable.
But it didn’t come.
“Motherfucker,” Arden mumbled, and I realized I’d been thinking about Raine for quite some time now, and I still wasn
’t dead.
“Having a problem?” I hoped my smirk was evident in my voice.
“A bit,” he said bluntly but didn’t elaborate.
I had the feeling talking wasn’t one of Evan Arden’s strong points.
“Something I can help you with?”
Arden took a deep breath, and when he exhaled, the water vapor wafted over me. I heard and felt him shift in the snow, and I realized just how close to me he was. We had both been stopped by the rock ledge directly below us. If I could get myself turned around enough to reach back behind me, I might be able to snap his neck.
Why isn’t he just beating me to death?
Before I could act on one thought or consider the other, he bashed me in the side of the head with the blunt end of his weapon.
“Ow! Motherfucker!”
The angle was bad, or he would have knocked me unconscious. He smacked me again, but I managed to move my head a bit to the side at the last moment. Gritting my teeth, I listened to the scraping sound as he moved his arm. Concentrating, I waited for the sound of the crunching snow to enter my ears, reached up behind my head, and grabbed for his wrist.
I ended up with two fingers and part of the gun, which I twisted backwards in an effort to break his fingers. My wrist scratched against a rock, but my thick clothing preventing it from scraping off my skin. He tightened up, prepared for the move, and I waited for him to grab me with his other hand, but he didn’t. He tried to pull away, but I wasn’t having any of that. As painful as it was, I held onto his fingers and slammed my hand at an awkward, backward angle against the rock behind my head.
Arden grunted, our hands parted, and the gun fell from his grip, cascading down the cliff and bouncing high in the air as it hit a rock. Spinning silently, it dropped out of sight, no longer a part of Arden’s arsenal.
