Page 125 of Lion’s Den

“If you take one more step, you’ll fall over the cliff!”

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

CAM RACED THROUGH the woods, shoving aside low-hanging branches, leaping over fallen logs, and ignoring the need to move without sound. His heart pounded against his chest as he sprinted through the night.

Faster. He had to move faster. “She’s out here alone against a professional assassin and who knows how many of his cronies. Move it.”

“Cam.” David glanced at him as they ran side-by-side. “Get your head in the game or you’ll end up on the ME’s steel table.”

“You wouldn’t say that if Emma were the one out there against these odds.” He knew the minute he said it he was out of line. Cam held up a hand. “Sorry.”

His boss snorted. “No, you’re not.”

On his other side, Elliot said, “Look, man, we get it. At least once while we were dating our future wives, each of us was in a dangerous situation much like this one. We were called out by the others, and that yanked us back in line before something tragic happened.”

“Consider this a calling out,” David said. “So, back to business. Do you trust this Eddie kid?”

“Yes, sir.”

“I hope you’re right, Cam. If you’re wrong, Sedona’s life is forfeit because we won’t have time to regroup. She’ll either be gone or dead.”

Cam wanted to hurl. He knew the kid wasn’t lying to him. However, that didn’t banish the tiny seed of doubt that Eddie was playing him for a fool.

But he trusted his gut. He and The Thunderhawks were alive today because he’d gone against logic and trusted his intuition. This time was the same. Logic said the kid was in this for himself. Cam believed the teenager told him the truth. The markers had been in his voice and eyes, the earnestness of his expression. Eddie hadn’t been lying or blowing smoke. He’d bared his soul in terse sentences, giving the information to Cam as fast as possible, including Sedona’s last message.

He didn’t know what he did to deserve her love, but he’d take it and shelter her and her heart for the rest of their lives. The first step was to rescue his girlfriend. “I’m sure, sir.”

“Then let’s do it. We have an assassin to catch and a woman to save.”

Five minutes later, Cam and the others shoved their way through the thicket and stepped out into a clearing. Three hundred feet ahead of them, two men were closing in on Sedona, who stood with her back to the edge of a cliff.

Cam broke into a silent run, David step-in-step with him. Together, they sprinted, hoping, praying they reached her before it was too late.

“Lady, stop,” shouted one man, who reached out to grasp her arm.

Sedona stepped back into nothing. She gasped and attempted to shift her balance, and failed.

“No!” Cam poured every ounce of speed into his run, shoved the men aside, and dropped to his knees at the edge of the cliff. His teammates automatically spread out. Rhys took comms. Isaac scanned the terrain. Dario checked for secondary hazards, while Spencer marked the fall point and the safest descent line. All normal and familiar, but this situation was anything but normal. The stakes were too high to lose.

He peered over the side and couldn’t see anything. This was the darkest part of the morning hours, just before the sun moved toward the horizon. Didn’t matter. He was going after Sedona. “Anchor team, set. Medical, prep. I’m going over.” No one would stop him.

Cam shrugged off his Go bag and retrieved his powerful flashlight. As he searched the side of the cliff and prayed for a miracle, he ignored David and Elliot reading the Miranda rights to the two thugs. He didn’t care what happened to those two men. As far as he was concerned, they had forced Sedona over the cliff. They deserved whatever happened to them.

He turned on the powerful flashlight and trained the beam on the side of the cliff where she’d fallen.

Spencer knelt beside him. “Where?”

“About where you are. You look right. I’ll look left. Look for drag marks, broken branches, indications that she slid down the steep slope.” Cam refocused his beam along the cliff to the left of where he was and searched the area in a grid pattern. Panic reared its ugly head when he saw no sign of her. Where could she be? If she was injured in the fall, every second could mean life or death. He refused to consider that she might not have survived the fall.

“There.” Spencer pointed to a small tree growing from the cliff about one hundred feet down.

Oh, man. The tree looked as though it might give way any minute. “Sedona,” he called out. Why was she holding on with only one hand?

“Cam?”

“Yeah, Tiger, it’s me.”

“I could use a little help right now.”