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“What are you doing?” I hissed as she cut the last tie and I could finally grab and shake her.
She stared helplessly for a moment, as if she had no good answer, and then I fell to the ground as my legs collapsed.
A cry escaped Emily and she crumpled over me. Panting, I looked down where her hand pressed tight against my hip, and realized I’d been shot. Again.
“Help!” Emily yelled. “Logan! Brendan!” and then, as though she could think of no other name, “Eric!”
I took a deep breath, and then pressed my own hand over hers and leaned forward.
“Aern,” Logan said, suddenly crouched in front of us.
I nodded and Emily slid her hand from under mine, and then she and Logan each took a shoulder.
“The east wall,” Logan said, and we moved clumsily across the platform toward the steps. Two of Logan’s men met us there, covering fire and helping to block our escape from view. As we came to the east entrance, I glanced at Logan, who seemed to know more than anyone else about the new ins and outs of Council.
“I’d already done the recon,” he said, gesturing at Emily as he released my shoulder. She was on my good side, and slipped easily beneath my arm to prop me up while he pressed a code into the keypad. Emily glanced at the other entrance, the one currently blocked by thirty of Council’s men, at the shouting and fighting and gunfire, and then, with a sick expression, impatiently back at Logan.
The door slid open and we were shuffling down the hall in an attempt at running, the two other men splitting up to scout ahead and cover our backs. Three downed guards littered the floor of the corridor.
“We broke in earlier,” Logan explained. “Took out the ones Morgan had planned to surprise us with, disabled some of their security systems. I would have done more, but we didn’t have long before we had to meet up and enter with Brendan. Couldn’t leave them alone.” We turned a corner. Two more men lay prostrate along the walls. “Most of them were tranquilizer darts,” he said, glancing sidelong at me as we moved. “The men weren’t quite ready to kill their brothers.”
“Down!” the scout yelled from the corner to the hallway in front of us. We crouched, Logan releasing my arm to ready his pistol, and gunfire erupted ahead of us.
Emily flinched as a bullet ripped through the arm of our frontman’s jacket. Several more rounds were fired, and then he turned to signal our backup before waving us forward.
“How much farther?” Emily asked, and I realized I was weighing a little too heavily on her slender frame.
Logan pressed a finger against his ear, and said, “Not much, they’ve got clearance at the northeast corner.”
Gunfire and shouting echoed behind us, and Logan picked up the pace to nearly drag me with them. Three Division men appeared in the corridor in front of us, guns at the ready, and ushered us the last ten feet to a door. Sunlight burst into the foyer, and I squinted, snow-blind as they rushed me across the lawn. More gunfire, the chopping sound of helicopter blades, the barking of orders, torturous groans from the wounded, and then I was face down on leather and Emily was curled into the floorboard beneath me.
I reached for her, my hand clutching hers tightly, and promptly passed out from loss of blood.
