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I struggled to remain standing when the weight of my sorrow and dread were pressing harder on my shoulders, my entire being shuddering in revulsion and fear as he came closer with Jessica staggering along.
Clearly trying to maintain her fierce, unaffected composure, but her jaw was trembling and her cheeks were wet. The earlier blood speckled across her skin and clothes was nothing compared to the smears on her face and chest or the alarming streaks flowing down one of her arms.
“Don’t,” she cried out, eyes wide with terror and a silent message for me...except I hadn’t done anything.
“Unleash Hell?” Lachlan asked as he neared us, sending chills across my body at the first sound of his voice.
Deep. Gravely. Terrifying.
Lachlan drew in a deep breath and released it with an amused, “Well, now, that’s my favorite pastime.” With a hard jerk on Jessica’s neck, he waited for her to hold out her non-bloodied arm, phone hanging from her fingertips, before continuing. “This is how we’re gonna do this—”
“I’m gonna kill you first,” came from behind me. The vow low, lethal, and so unexpected that it took a few seconds too long to realize Kieran was standing directly behind us. That Jessica had been speaking to him.
If it surprised Detective Higgins, he didn’t show it. Just kept his hold on me tight, and the knife positioned in the same place as before.
At the threat, Lachlan’s head slanted in that subtle, menacing way that had my trembling body going so cold before his attention returned to Dare.
But Dare only looked at the screen of the phone for a second before his dark stare quickly shifted to where his family was now spread out. “They have Einstein too,” he muttered tightly.
“All I want is that one,” Lachlan said with a nod in my direction as if he were deciding on a piece of furniture. “Let me leave with her, and we’ll go back to being strained allies, or lose three of your women, and I’ll still leave with her.”
“Try, and your death will be slow and painful,” Diggs said on a rumbling growl.
Lachlan glanced in his direction, a cold warning radiating from him when he said, “I don’t plan on trying.” A strangled whimper left Jessica as he pulled her closer. “Lift the phone and say ‘thirty seconds.’”
Jessica’s body jerked as a sob tried to escape her. When her hand heavily fell before she could do what he demanded, she shook from the force of his harsh, “Lift the goddamn phone.”
“Thirty seconds,” Jessica cried before she even finished raising her hand, then repeated, “Thirty seconds,” just as Lachlan ripped the phone from her grasp.
“You have that long to give me what I want, Borello, or your women start dying,” Lachlan told Dare calmly just before a pained sound burst from him.
I barely had time to register the knives sticking out of Lachlan’s shoulder and arm before multiple shots pierced the thick veil of the night. The whizzing sound of some of them passing right past my head was something I could hardly comprehend before Higgins jerked and stumbled, taking me with him as we fell to the gravel driveway.
And then a scream...
Maybe mine.
Or maybe it was the animalistic roar from the assassin who’d been racing past me and was now stumbling. Swaying. Falling to his knees as an inhuman sound of agony and rage exploded from him while the scene unfolded in front of us as if in slow motion.
Lachlan Keane.
My nightmare.
My neon mask.
Dropping Jessica’s limp body to the ground—a gun still extended in his grasp. Blood spilling from the wound in her chest too fast and too substantial to be anything other than fatal.
“Kill the queen and hacker. Kill the kids,” Lachlan ordered into the phone.
I fought over the tears building faster than they could fall, and choked out, “N-no, I’ll go! Stop, I’ll—just stop.”
I squeezed my eyelids tightly shut against the heart-wrenching sight of Kieran desperately trying to get to his wife as Dare held him back. But nothing could block out his tortured yells for her or the weight of his grief, saturating the air.
A grief I felt so deep in my soul because I knew it. I’d lived it.
I shared his pain just as I shared his hatred for the man in the red neon mask.
A sob ripped from me at his next anguished Jessica and ended on a cry of unexpected, unfathomable pain.
