Page 24 of Jonas

“Yeah.”

“Three months. I ran her, she’s clean. Doesn’t make her not what she is, a stuck-up kiss-ass, but she’s harmless.”

I didn’t know about harmless. Stuck-up bitches had claws. But as long as she wasn’t a threat that was good enough for me.

“Did you run her prints?” Coop asked from in front of us.

“It’s like you think this is amateur hour,” Derrika muttered then raised her voice to answer Coop. “Of course I ran her prints.”

“There a reason you ran her prints?” Coop pushed.

I didn’t understand Cooper’s question, especially as a follow up to “did you run her prints.” Apparently neither did Derrika and she made that known first by squeezing my hand and then verbally, “I don’t know how to answer that.”

“Do you run everyone’s prints as a matter of course? Or was there a specific reason you ran hers?”

Derrika’s steps slowed, and I felt her string tight.

“Is there a reason you’re questioning how I do my job?”

“Yup,” Coop readily answered. “First, I need to know if I can trust you. Not with my life but with my wife’s. Second, I’m interested in why you felt the need to run her prints. If you were being cautious as a matter of course because that’s how you always do things, or if it was specifically something about that woman that made you go the extra mile.”

Unlike the rest of my team, Cooper Cain wasn’t former military, he was former law enforcement who’d ended his career as SWAT. Not that Coop or Kira were technically on Silver team—they were Blue Team. But with a well-designed terror plot in the hands of the Chinese, it was all hands on deck.

“You’d be crazy to trust anyone with your life and double extra stupid to trust anyone with your wife’s.” My head shot to the side and I stared down at Derrika as she continued, “But I’m always cautious, always thorough, and always go the extra mile.” She paused, glanced up at me with a look I couldn’t read. Her eyes flicked to the side and everything changed. “Move!” she shouted, and yanked my hand with such force I had no choice but to move with her or court my shoulder being dislocated.

Out of the corner of my eye I saw Cooper turn, his face a mask of fury before he lifted his wife clean off her feet and darted between two parked cars. That was all the notice I had before I heard the first crack of a gun. The sound was mixed with glass from a nearby car window shattering. My thigh grazed the bumper of an SUV as Derrika darted between the parked vehicles with our hands still tightly clasped.

As soon as we cleared the cars, with a mighty jerk of my hand, she ducked low.

I didn’t miss the hopefulness in her voice when she asked, “Are you strapped?”

Wordlessly, I reached around and pulled my HK from my holster clipped into the inside of my jeans.

“Escalade’s a block up,” I heard Coop yell over the traffic.

“Get Kira and go,” I yelled back. “You, too, I’ll cover⁠—”

“No way am I leaving you.”

I didn’t have a chance to respond before a burst of bullets slammed into the car we were ducking behind. And that did it—all-out pandemonium broke out from the pedestrians.

One gunshot had people looking around, curiously wondering if they’d heard what they thought they’d heard. A hail of gunfire made them run screaming for cover.

I didn’t want to use innocent bystanders as cover, but I had no choice. Using the chaos to move before we were hit, I grabbed Derrika’s hand and took off across the street, dodging moving vehicles in the process.

Derrika easily kept up. When my feet hit the sidewalk on the other side, I started to go right. She had other ideas and pulled left.

“Around the corner is a parking garage.”

I let her hand go, allowing her to lead. Around the corner we went. Down half a block, I saw the parking sign at the same time I heard the screeching of tires. The next few seconds happened in a blur—a literal blur. I felt a sharp pain hit my back. Immediately, my legs felt like lead weights, my arms the same. I tightened my grip on my HK but even that felt like an enormous task. Darkness danced in the corners of my vision until Derrika’s running form tunneled.

Fuck.

“Keep…going.” The words felt like they’d taken a million years to get out and worse they sounded slurred.

I vaguely saw Derrika look back. I distantly heard her shout, “Down.”

I didn’t get down.