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As the thug descended on her, Ace glimpsed Sierra’s face go pale with terror in the moonlight. Trust me, he wanted more than anything to tell her, even as sickening fear crawled up the back of his throat.
With no choice but to play out his ruse, Ace turned his attention to the loan shark. “Just make sure my merchandise stays in good condition,” he told Ice Veins as he pulled the cell phone from his pocket. “I’ve got big plans for her later.”
Ice Veins frowned, discomfort playing over his pinched face, before chuckling and slapping Ace’s shoulder. “Soon as that money hits my account, you can have yourself as big a night as you want. Bought and paid for.”
“I’ll need your account and routing numbers,” Ace said as he opened up his banking app. As he began punching in digits, he kept wondering how long he could string this all out—and if he’d bet tragically wrong to rely on Spencer Colton’s ability to gather reinforcements and make it here in time.
How could he be certain that Spencer had even gotten his text? Mentally, Ace kicked himself, wishing he had copied the message to Ainsley and maybe another of their siblings, too, asking them to call 911 immediately just to be certain.
“Where is it? Where’s the money?” Ice Veins demanded, staring at his own phone. “Has it left your account yet? I’m not seeing it.”
“Let me double-check,” Ace said. “What was that routing number again?”
Clearly impatient, Ice Veins once more ran through the coding until finally, Ace had no choice but to show the man what he was doing and hit the send button, transferring a very real sum of money into the account of a lowlife loan shark.
But with his and Sierra’s lives on the line, Ace told himself the money was the least of his issues.
Or so he thought until he clicked, and a new message splashed across his screen.
Accounts Frozen. Please Contact Customer Support.
His mouth going dry as ash at what he presumed to have been a law enforcement action, Ace turned the screen away, praying Ice Veins hadn’t seen it.
“There it goes,” he said, trying to disguise his rapidly escalating stress level. “It shouldn’t take more than five, ten minutes, tops, depending on how fast your institution is at processing this sort of transfer, and—isn’t it one of those weird bank holidays? So it could be a little slower than a normal—”
“Hand me over that phone,” Ice Veins demanded, his small eyes glittering like the knife’s edge. “I need to see where you sent it. And I need to see what you’re playin’ at right freakin’ now.”
Chapter 5
With the bald goon looming over her, holding a filthy-looking gag in his ham-size fist, Sierra managed to look past him, to cut a look in Ace’s direction. In that moment she saw everything in his face. Regret. Sorrow. A wish that they had had more time to explore the astonishing but undeniable connection that had flared to life like a struck match between them. Or maybe it was the unspoken apology for what his roll of the dice was about to cost them both.
It was enough for her to take her own gamble that a distraction might save at least one of them. With a determined yell, she summoned every bit of strength she had to push upward off her bent legs and catapult her bowed head up and forward—
Spearing herself straight into Bald Thug’s crotch.
Bellowing at the direct hit, he keeled over, reflexively squeezing off a round.
With the whine of a bullet passing her ear, Sierra rolled away and clumsily struggled to get her cramped legs underneath her and working once again. To her right, Ace and Ice Veins were both shouting at once—the two men blurs of motion.
“Freeze, police!” boomed a loud voice as a blinding spotlight forced her to raise an arm to shield her eyes.
An instant later the beam was eclipsed by the huge shape of the bald goon, coming at her with a roar. With no time to evade him and no doubt he was about to kill her, Sierra could only shriek before the crack-crack of gunfire brought him crashing down, bloody blooms erupting on his upper chest from the officers’ bullets.
Still panting on the ground only inches away, her gaze glued to the fish-eyed dead man, Sierra heard an officer order, “Drop the weapon! Drop the weapon now!”
Ace yelped in pain, a sound followed by deep, aggressive barking moments before a police dog, a big chocolate Lab, charged past him, leaping toward the man in the long purple coat.
A vicious sneer on his face, Ice Veins raised the knife and swung it downward, clearly intent on stabbing the K-9. Instead, Ace, blood plastering his shirt to his chest, slammed into him with one broad shoulder, taking both to the ground.
Sierra struggled to get up, desperate to help Ace and find out how badly he’d been injured. But figures emerged from the darkness, uniformed and plainclothes, obscuring her view and shouting at her, “Stay down! Don’t try to move and keep your hands in sight!”
* * *
The next few hours passed in a blur of pain, stress, and exhaustion as she and Ace were both transported to the hospital in separate ambulances. While he was whisked off to surgery to close his wound, she did her best to explain to Sergeant Spencer Colton what had happened—and convince him that the “evidence” against Ace deserved a second look.
Before she could make much headway, however, a technician rolled her from the exam room for X-rays. Eventually, she was released, and an officer drove her back to her lodging outside of town before asking her to remain available for follow-up interviews.
“I’ll be happy to answer more questions,” she told him, “but I can promise you my answers will make a lot more sense once I’ve had a chance to sleep off the pain meds they gave me in the ER.”
