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“I found some!” I cried to the woman in the back in case she could hear me and then I dragged myself and my stuff through the tiny shop to the cash register that was in the back of the store.
The woman wasn’t in the storeroom. She stood stone still behind the register. Eyes closed with tears streaming down her face. A man beside her held a gun to her head.
I stumbled backward only to run into someone.
Ronan!
But it wasn’t Ronan. It was a dark-haired man with olive skin and a nose that had been smashed more than once.
“You’re not an easy woman to find, Poppy Maywell,” he said with a thick New York accent.
“I’m B-Beth,” I stammered. “Soeterick.”
His smile was a mockery. “You’re mine, is what you are. Let’s go.” He grabbed the elbow of my bad shoulder so hard I whimpered, and at the sound of my whimper, the girl behind the counter, hardly older than a teenager, started to cry in earnest.
“Please,” she begged. “Please, just let me go. Don’t—”
“Shut her the fuck up!” the man holding my elbow said to the man with the gun.
“Don’t hurt her!” I cried. “Don’t—!” A muffled gunshot pierced in the air around me, and the girl went ominously silent. I screamed in my throat even as the guy grabbed me around the head, his hand over my mouth.
“You, they want alive, but loose ends are nothing but trouble.” He started to pull me through the back, around the counter, to a shadowy doorway that must lead to a back entrance. We had to walk past the body of the shop girl who lay in a heap, her pretty red hair covering her face.
I’m sorry, I thought. I’m so sorry.
I tripped on a step and the guy carrying me cursed. In my panic, I somehow realized if they planned on taking me alive, then I could fight. I had to fight.
I grabbed onto the doorway with both hands, my shoulder screaming in pain, stitches popping as I tried to pull myself free. I yanked him off balance, but all he did was wrench me backward off my feet.
I was a barrage of elbows and kicks. If he was going to take me, I wasn’t going to make it easy.
We made it out into the back alley, bleak and gray where there was a dark van waiting for me. There was no way I was getting into that van. No way.
I bit him so hard I tasted blood.
“You fucking bitch!” he muttered and turned me by my shoulders, his hand off my mouth. I got just enough breath to scream “Ronan!” before he hauled off and punched me in the stomach so hard, I buckled forward, all the air knocked out of me. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t get my body to work. My vision went sparkly and black. I fell onto the slick stones of the alley.
“Dead or alive, bitch!” Smash Nose said to me. “That’s the hit order, and you keep up with that shit, they can get you dead.” He picked me up under my arms and I was sipping at air, my head swimming.
Distantly, there was a scuffle. Or perhaps it was just my feet dragging across the stones as he pulled me toward the van. The side door open.
“No,” I wheezed, trying still to fight.
There was a pop and then a thud, and I collapsed back onto the ground.
“What?” Smash Nose said, turning toward the front of the van. Ronan stood there, like some angel of death. A spray of blood was across his face.
“Hey!” Smash Nose said. “We found her first. This is our bounty—”
Ronan lifted his gun and shot Smash Nose in the head. The hit man toppled backward and fell over my leg, cracking open what was left of his skull. I kicked him off me, crawling across the stones to get away from the growing pool of blood, and then Ronan was there, lifting me to my feet.
“Can you breathe?” he asked, holding my head, staring me right in the eyes. Shock and a cramped diaphragm made the answer a solid no. I shook my head.
“With me, Poppy.” He took a deep breath and I gasped. “Breathe with me.”
Another deep breath from him, his eyes on mine. His hands holding me. His chest as it rose touched mine, and I took a breath deeper than a gasp. Again, and then again.
Once I could properly breathe, he stepped away from me. “You all right? Your shoulder?”
There was blood trickling down my arm, but not much I could do about it.
“Fine,” I said and without another word, he grabbed me by the hand, pulling me toward the end of the alley. “But I dropped the money. The ID.”
He shook his head. “Doesn’t matter now. They’ve found us.”
