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And then it was done.
No more movement. No more scrambling. The truck was at a cockeyed stop, brakes hissing, that pungent rubber smell stinging her sinuses, her body flopping over one last time so that she was staring up at the undercarriage of the semi’s cargo bed.
Turning her head, she wiped the grit out of her eyes and followed the axle to the set of four tires that were eighteen inches from her torso. She was so close to them, she could see their braided tread, and she coughed at the smell of hot metal and motor oil.
“Take this back.”
She had no idea who was addressing her under the goddamn death truck—
“Kane?” she breathed as she focused on his dirt-smudged face.
“Take this.” He pushed her gun at her. “You’re going to need it. Unless you can dematerialize?”
He was speaking softly and urgently, but her brain was just not working. She was pretty sure he was using English, right?
All the confusion got cleared up real fricking quick at the sound of the cab’s doors opening at the front of the semi. In the lee of the headlights that were streaming forward down the—wait, so they really were on a road? Like a proper road? And it was a three-laner.
“Where the hell are we?” she whispered as a pair of guards walked around and met each other at the truck’s front grille.
“There was nobody there,” one of them said as dust swirled around their dark shadows.
“I saw somebody in the headlights.”
“You’re out of your fucking mind.”
“You want to take the risk I’m right? After we blew the barricade into the roadway?”
“It was supposed to be removed by the prisoners. We had no fucking choice but to use explosives. The Command wants this shit out of here now, and we need two exits to get the trucks off the site—what was I supposed to do?”
Kane put his face right into Nyx’s and pressed the gun into her palm. “We’re going to have to fight our way out of this, and I have not discharged a gun before in all my life. You’re going to have to do the shooting.”
Blinking, she told her vision to get with the program as she gripped the weapon. And then she kicked her brain’s ass into gear. Like a newsreel on rerun, she caught up with Kane’s convo, and there was no need for a PowerPoint presentation on what he was suggesting.
She looked down toward the guards as they stood arguing with each other. She didn’t require an up-close-and-personal to know they were armed and had communicators.
“Stay behind me,” she ordered.
“Yes, m’lady.”
Nyx went belly down, but in a quiet way—and then she tripod’d her elbows and aimed the gun. Between the cab’s front tires, the guards were face-to-face, their knees and the tips of their boots close together as they talked back and forth.
She picked the one on the left and aimed. Just before she pulled the trigger, she had a passing image of herself at the farm, out by the lower paddock, picking soup cans and water jugs off the fence line at fifty yards.
This was a whole different ball game.
When she pulled the trigger, she didn’t wait to see if she had hit the target of that calf. She immediately discharged the weapon at the other guard’s lower leg. Then it was back to the first—but she’d always had good aim, and she’d nailed her mark: The first guard was hopping on one foot, and as he slumped against the truck’s hood, she aimed again— and popped him in the other knee. As he howled and went to ground, she picked off the one who was still standing by hitting the meat of his thigh, the spray of blood a graceful sprinkle that caught the headlights in a flush of red.
As both of them writhed and hollered for help into the communicators on their shoulders, she swallowed through a dry throat. Closing her eyes, she knew what should come next.
Her . . . or them. If she let them live, they were injured and armed. A bad combination—and she and Kane had to get out of wherever they were.
“Do it,” she said under her breath.
Bullet to the brain. Or the chest.
Bullet to the . . .
. . . brain. Or to the chest—
“Shit,” she hissed as she sagged and let her forearms relax.
Nyx just couldn’t murder two males in what felt like cold blood. It was one thing if she had a gun in her face, a direct threat to her life. But this? She wasn’t a killer. She wasn’t like Apex.
She wrenched around. “Where do we go from here?”
Kane looked to the guards, who were both rocking on their backs and alternating between holding one of their legs and then the other.
“Come on,” he said.
When he took her hand, she scurried out from under the truck bed with him, and then they tore off as fast as they could go—
