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“Fuck you, man!” Bobby shouted and Kimberly’s cheek was sprayed by spittle and blood. “I got yer lady. I got a gun! You got nothin’ but yer dicks! We’re walkin’ outta here and if ye’re lucky, I’mma let her go and not keep her so I have a little toy ta play with later once I git ta where I’m goin’.”
Kimberly wasn’t any more fooled than her men were. Bobby Sneed was scared shitless. Literally, she sneered inwardly as another noxious waft of his stench offended her nose. As he shouted his bravado, Kimberly felt him tremble against her back. The sniveling coward was hiding behind her.
“You let her go, Bobby, you piece of worthless, limp dicked shit!” This was from Ria. She’d regained her feet. Sam had his arms around her waist, trying with extreme difficulty to restrain the naked and injured woman without hurting her or touching her inappropriately. Her continued struggles made heavy work of the job.
Bobby Sneed neither looked her way nor answered her. His attention was all on the man who’d just promised him death. He started to drag Kimberly back into the woods.
Kimberly wasn’t going anywhere; she dug in her heels, and the asshole hit her in the temple with the side of his gun. Starbursts of pain exploded in her head.
“Kimberly, darling,” Dean told her in his bedroom voice, “kneel.”
Kimberly was a brat. She’d never obeyed Dean bedroom-wise without a squabble in all their time together. And out of the bedroom, well, she ran that man in circles and God help him if he ever tried to give her an order while she was dressed.
This time, however, this one time, Kimberly obeyed without question or delay, hitting her knees like a supplicant.
Bobby wasn’t prepared for that. He didn’t have the strength to pick her up and carry her, either. Nor did he have the balls to shoot her, so the weasel did what weasels did. The spineless bastard lifted his firearm, shot wildly, and ran for the trees. His shit-stained ass bounced as Dean tore off after him.
Dean caught him in less than a handful of strides. The scuffle was laughable. How could this crying, weak animal have managed to overcome and terrorize these women for so long, Kimberly thought.
The gun went off again. A branch splintered then fell right onto Shawna and Sierra, the girl who’d been shot. Kimberly heard Dean curse, saw renewed fury tighten his features. He reared back and clocked Bobby under the jaw with a balled-up fist he’d drawn all the way from L.A.
Bobby’s teeth clacked with a snap that suggested some had broken. He staggered back and tripped as his cheap, crap-filled shoes caught in a root. When he went down, he landed on another root, this one jagged and upstanding. Kimberly turned away as the trunk sized protrusion pierced through the center of Bobby Sneed’s neck. He lay dead in the dirt like a dog.
It was finished.
Chapter Nine
It washours before they were home again. Shawna had stayed at the hospital with the other women, refusing to leave their sides, and no one could blame her. The doctors or nursing staff weren’t interested in trying to separate the women. Thank God for small mercies, Kimberly thought. Those women had trudged through the seven levels of hell together, and there wasn’t a person on staff who would see them divided. The women had clung together like shipwreck survivors or worse. They had to endure yet more invasive trauma at the hands of medical staff, their bodies treated like evidence and harvested for clues.
The procedures to collect forensic evidence were almost as intrusive and painful, as dehumanizing as the rapes themselves had been, in Kimberly’s opinion. It was still enduring strangers’ hands on their bodies, strangers plunging foreign implements into their flesh and hurting them. Sure, these people’s intentions were pure, and their voices were gentle and kind—the nurses’ eyes might have been filled with tears—but to Kimberly’s mind, it was just one more level of hell Shawna and the others had to live through in order to get to the other side.
“Sweetheart.” Sam, of course it was her Samuel. His big, warm hand was on her cheek and his soft wide lips were on her forehead. Kimberly closed her eyes and allowed herself to accept the comfort he poured into her. “Shhhh. They’re safe now. That part is over. Let it go for now. You need rest.”
“Michiko—” Kimberly started but Dean who cut her off.
“We’ve been up for almost twenty hours, Kimberly.”
She heard the aching weariness in his voice; it clenched something in her heart. He’d killed two men today with his bare hands.
“Cas has eighteen agents and three police counties on the hunt for her, himself included. We’re taking five hours down time. We’re sloppy and stupid tired. Let’s sleep.”
The worry for her new friend was thick in her throat, but the worry for the man in front of her was thick in her heart. He looked worn down by the world and what he’d been driven to this afternoon. For the millionth time, Kimberly told herself this wasn’t the movies; real lives had been ended, and others had been irreparably damaged. The man standing before her was so weary and sore of heart it made her feel as though hers was bleeding out. Dean stood in the middle of his glorious kitchen barely holding it together.
Kimberly rounded the island and wrapped her arms around him. It spoke to the weariness of his soul that his arms didn’t immediately come around her. He dropped his head to her shoulder; Kimberly’s heart dropped to the floor.
Sam abandoned whatever he’d been about to fix them to eat in the kitchen, and her Samuel, her intuitive and tender Samuel, came to join the embrace. He wrapped his arms around Dean, and when he reached all the way to Kimberly’s back he pulled them all tight. Dean made a sound of such anguish, Kimberly shed the tears his eyes refused to.
Food could wait. Dean was right. Healing sleep first, food later. They headed for Dean’s bed, stripped, slid between cool sheets with Kimberly in the middle. And the three of them slept like the dead for three and a half of the five hours they’d allowed themselves.
Chapter Ten
Michiko woke up in a hatchback.She was short enough that she lay flat on her back under the dome, watching power lines and clouds go by overhead through the slits of her eyes. She was encased from head to foot in some sort of rubber suit. Even her face was covered. For two mind-freezing seconds, she panicked, tried to scream, tried to flail. She couldn’t do either. In fact, Michiko could hardly breathe. The suit she was stuffed into like a frozen turkey covered her face so tightly breathing only worked when she was still. Michiko strove for her training, told herself to breathe shallow and slow. It wasn’t easy work.
“Robby boy,” a voice Michiko didn’t recognize said jovially, “You hear anything we need to know ‘bout on that scanner? Robby!” Another voice she hadn’t heard before responded after a brief hesitation. Michiko assumed he had headphones in.
“Uh, no, Uncle Nick,” came the soft reply. “They’re looking in all the wrong places. Our houses and shit. Family. Basic standard procedure.”
The others in the car cackled, and the sound made sweat break out all over Michiko’s encased body. They had a police scanner and knew every move the cops were making.
