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The man froze, then let out a string of curse words. Nick raised his weapon and fired at the man’s head. He was out of the bathroom before the body hit the floor.
He rushed down the hall. Gunfire bounced off the walls, freezing the blood in his veins now that he knew Alexa might be somewhere in the house. He ran toward it.
Toward her.
Please let her be alive.
Alexa spilled out into a living room and dropped to a crouch as gunfire erupted around her. It was dark except for the street lights outside the smudged, dirty windows, and she couldn’t make out the details of the men shooting around her. There was someone blocking the front door, two more men across the room, crouched behind a sofa that had already been hit, stuffing spilling out of the worn plaid upholstery.
“Stay down, Alexa.” It was the man near the front door. Not Nick, but Ronan.
She crouched against the wall as Ronan fired on the sofa, more stuffing exploding into the room,glass shattering as the remnants of an end table was blown to bits.
She shielded her face from the exploding glass, then jumped as someone’s arms came around her. She thrashed and kicked. There was no way she was going to let them take her again now that she was finally free of the bathroom.
“Shhh… It’s me, Lex. It’s me.”
She’d been longing to hear his voice in her ear, could hardly believe it was real.
She turned to face him, trying to reconcile the man dressed in black tactical gear, his face hard and unyielding, with the man she loved. “Nick?”
He pulled her against him, then ran his hands over her shoulders and arms as if to make sure she was still in one piece. His face hardened when he saw her bloody arm.
He set her against the wall just inside the hall. “Stay here.”
He moved away from her, into the room where Ronan was holding his position near the door.
Nick could hardly see through his rage. There was only man left, one man who had kept Alexaprisoner, who had hurt her, who had kept her from Nick and from her parents.
That man would pay like the others had paid.
He advanced on the sofa, vaguely aware that Ronan’s gunfire had stopped, that he was letting Nick have this one. Neither of the men he’d killed on the way to the living room had been Matis Juska, but he couldn’t afford to think about that right now.
The remaining man rose to his feet, lifted his gun, and fired a split second before Nick fired his own weapon. He felt the bite of a bullet in his thigh as the man dropped behind the sofa, blood spraying the wall behind him.
He turned toward Alexa with relief — right up until he saw the figure looming behind her, holding her tight against his body, a gun to her head.
Juska.
Alexa hadn’t even had time to scream. One second she was watching Nick shoot the man behind the sofa, the next she was being lifted off her feet from behind, an iron grip closing around her rib cage.
“Let her go,” Nick said. “And maybe I’ll let you live.”
Laughter, cold and hard, erupted near Alexa’s ear. “This has been your mistake,” Juska said. “Thinking you are in control.”
“There are two of us,” Nick said. Alexa’s eyes skimmed to Ronan, standing by the door, his weapon aimed in their direction. “You won’t make it out of here alive unless we allow it.”
“I think you will allow it,” Juska said. “But I’ll take the woman just to be sure.”
Alexa’s feet were lifted off the ground as he backed down the hallway. She was being dragged with him, his arm around her rib cage making it hard to breathe as Nick and Ronan receded.
Panic welled inside her as they passed the bathroom where she’d been kept prisoner. She caught a glimpse of the man who’d brought her food, splayed out and bloody in the tub. They’d just passed a bedroom, the door open, another body lying on the floor inside when she felt a painful tug on her arm.
She didn’t know what was happening, only that she was suddenly free of Juska, two short gunshots ringing through the apartment, Juska dropping to his knees and falling forward with a thud.
She pressed her back against the wall and glanced frantically at the scene around her, trying to make sense of what she was seeing.
Declan stood behind Juska, his gun pointed at Juska, who lay on his stomach at Declan’s feet. He was still alive, but it wasn’t until he started crawling toward his gun, a few feet in front of him, that Alexa saw the blood seeping from both knees.
