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“Let me by!” I snap, reaching for my weapon, but Leonard crashes into my side, grabbing my hand before I can.
“What the fuck are you doing?” he snaps.
“They’re going to fucking kill her!”
He jerks me back, dragging me toward Craig’s office again. His face pales when he sees our private monitor.
“They’ll lock you up. There’s no way you’ll even get there in time,” he hisses, slamming the door as his eyes turn back to the monitor.
Johnson emerges from the sheriff’s office for the first time since Lana showed up. He comes up behind her, firing rapidly as she drags herself in between two desks.
I see the fear in her eyes turn to anger as she loads her guns again. She pulls out a knife, and I watch as she jumps to stand on her one good leg and throws the knife. Johnson’s eyes widen seconds before the knife sticks into his forehead, but the gunshots ring out faster, and I watch as her body jerks and drops, the bullets hitting her.
“No!” I shout again, slamming my fist into the wall as my heart caves in on itself.
Then I look at Leonard.
“The chopper. Get me to the fucking chopper now!”
He shakes his head slowly. “Even if we could get to it, it’d be too late, Logan.”
My stomach rolls and my heart implodes in my chest as I slide down the wall, gripping my head as everything in me turns to stone, weighing too much to move. Tears burn against my eyes as I watch Lana weakly climb across the floor, firing again at the deputies.
I can’t watch.
I can’t watch her die.
Chapter 15
I should like to lie at your feet and die in your arms.
—Voltaire
LANA
Pain shoots through my body, and my hearing is nothing more than a constant roar of never-ending gunfire.
I cry out as I tie off my leg to help stop the bleeding. My chest and back ache with the amount of bullets that have pounded into the vest, but they didn’t break through. My shoulder burns from the graze, but it’s overshadowed by the bullet that passed through my hand earlier.
I wrap my hand next, struggling with shaking hands as I fight through the pain. Jake’s voice comes through my earpiece, and I take a breath, firing back at the men behind me.
“You have to get the fuck out of there, Lana! They know about the basement!”
“I can’t,” I say through strain, shooting around the corner and clipping a guy in the knee. He falls, his MK 47 spraying bullets wildly as he collapses. A stray bullet hits one of the other deputies, but not enough to kill the fucker.
“You have to!” Jake barks. “You didn’t come this far to fucking die!”
I refuse to let the tears fall as I jerk my head back in time to avoid a new onslaught of bullets. The desk barrier I’ve built won’t continue to hold back the bullets. The three pushed together will only stop them for a little while longer.
“I need to talk to him,” I say quietly, choking back a sob as I try to stand up, only to fall back down again when my leg hurts too much to cooperate.
“No! You’re not fucking saying goodbye, Lana. I’m not letting you talk to him. Get out of there! The charge can’t be stopped and you know it. It’s a fail-safe. You have nine minutes and fifty-four seconds.”
I bang the back of my head on the desk, my vision clouded by the tears teeming in my eyes. I stare at the door in dismay. Those twenty feet seem so much farther with the never-ending spray of unrelenting fire.
They’re harder to kill than I was expecting. Not as cowardly as we’d predicted.
We’ve been so right about everything else.
