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But why? What in the world would he . . . My thoughts died the second I connected the dots. “You know.” I stepped back, and Jack’s eyes went wide, but this time he wasn’t looking at me.
“Get behind me,” he whispered, then snatched my waist, not giving me much of a choice but to move into the position he suddenly deemed necessary. “We’re not alone.”
I tipped my head, trying to look around him, unsure what had his attention. Animal? Person? Three-headed snake?
“I don’t see anything,” I said, my words nearly dying in his shoulder where I was smooshed against him.
“They don’t see us yet,” Jack warned. “Don’t. Fucking. Move.” The words were low, yet their gravity could puncture a hole right through a person.
Jack knew I was wanted for murder, but he was still willing to use his body as a shield from whatever was out there watching us.
He lowered the canteen to the ground, then stood tall, reaching back to find my waist again. He stepped forward, urging me to walk with him, and then he spun me around, so I was up against a tree twice my width. He pinned himself flat against me, and I felt every ridge of his body press into mine as he held me in that position. “I think we stumbled upon a narcotrafficking route.” That was not the answer I expected or wanted to hear. “Carter,” Jack called out, the name more like a crackle in the air, nearly blending with the sounds of nature.
“I see them, and they see us. I’m approaching,” Carter responded, taking the chance to answer regardless of our shit situation, which meant he must’ve realized we’d already been made.
I twisted my head to the side to get a better look at him and the others. Carter raised one hand in the air as he left the trail to go into the thick of the woods. He placed his other hand behind his back and flicked his wrist, gesturing to someone.
Mason tossed him a pocketknife, and how in the hell Carter caught it without looking was beyond me, but they both made everything look so effortless. And Mason, without missing a beat, went back to shielding Lucy the same as Jack was for me.
Carter began directly addressing the traffickers, speaking in another language, presumably Portuguese. He held up his other hand now, keeping both as fists to hide the pocketknife.
“What’s he saying?” I tried to look around the tree for a better view of where Carter was heading, but Jack buried his fingertips into my side, practically forcing me to hold still.
“I said not to move, and I meant it,” he hissed into my ear, anger still clinging to his words. I had a feeling his clipped tone was partly for me, but also a result of his hyperawareness of the danger.
“How many people? How do you know they’re traffickers?” I whispered, my lips almost catching the bark of the tree. “What if they’re here for us? For me?” Now that he knew the truth, no sense in trying to paint a different picture than the very ugly one which was my life.
“Three armed tangos in camo. They’re protecting territory. Guards,” he quickly explained. “I doubt for us. But that doesn’t mean they’ll just let us go. Not since we found a smuggling route.”
It was an awful time to freeze up with fear as memories from my last day in California tried to catapult to mind, but the second I heard the pop of gunfire, my head went there. Right to the past. To the day I took a life. To the day I watched blood spill everywhere inside that bastard’s five-car garage.
“Charley.” There was a voice in my head. Or was it in my ear? Hands sliding around my body, spinning me around. Palms on my face. Eyes on my eyes.
It was Jack. Not the him I feared. But we weren’t safe. Not yet. We were in danger.
“We need to run.” Jack held my cheeks, searching for confirmation I understood him. “The three men are down. Carter handled one. Gray or maybe Jesse took two kill shots from wherever they’re hiding in the woods watching us. But more will most likely come.”
Gray? Jesse? Kill shots? There’d been more shots while I’d been lost in the past? How long had I been walking down the memory lane of Hell?
“The cameraman took off, so we don’t have eyes on us, and my guys will have our six, but we can’t stay here. We need to move,” Jack continued when I’d yet to get my voice or my feet to work.
He must’ve realized I was still stuck in my head. Stepping back, he hoisted me up and tossed me over his shoulder, carrying me away from the chaos. He moved fast, pinning my legs to his chest as my ass bounced on his shoulder, and I flattened my palms on his back.
“Lucy,” I cried out when I saw her. She wasn’t being carried like me. She was on her own two feet, hand in Mason’s while running alongside him.
“Put me down. I’m okay,” I told Jack as we came up alongside a dead body. The man was in camo, and his face was painted green. He had a knife in the side of his throat, eyes open.
Carter stabbed him?
As Jack lowered me to the ground, I searched for the other bodies, finding Oliver and Carter taking the dead men’s weapons.
“There’ll be more,” Carter announced as he handed Jack a handgun. “They had radios on them.” He turned the knob, killing the staticky noise over the line, cutting off contact with whoever the men had been trying to talk to before their lives had ended. “We need to keep moving until I can get a signal to Gray.”
“But didn’t your friends shoot these two guys? Where are they?” Lucy asked, doing a three-sixty, as confused as me.
“Close enough for kill shots with a long gun,” Oliver told her. “Far enough away they’re not already here for an immediate assist.”
“Oh.” Lucy frowned, then looked at me for what to do, but I was as clueless as she was. And that didn’t sit well with me.
