ADRIAN
Our destination is the cabin bedroom, where I yank up the rug by the bed and pull open a hidden door. All the while my mind is processing the situation at hand. Only a handful of close people knew about this cabin. Those people include family, and the Walker team, who I just told, and yet somehow, Deleon and Pitt knew. That doesn’t make me feel good about the tunnel we’re about to enter, but we really have no options.
There’s a crash at the front of the cabin, and Pri gasps and flattens against me. Certain that blast was the door being blown off, I pull her toward the steps leading into the tunnel. “Go! Go! Go!” I order.
She rushes into the darkness and I follow. With a practiced effort, I shut the door and flip the rug so that it falls back into place. Pausing at the top of the wooden steps, I grab the flashlight lodged on a piece of wood in the dirt wall and turn it on. Pri is at the bottom of the steps and I join her, eager to get moving down the narrow path. The less time we’re in this hole, the better.
She grabs my arms. “I’m claustrophobic, very claustrophobic. I’m—bad. It’s bad.” She sways.
I catch her around the waist and mold her close. “Easy, sweetheart. Don’t go down on me now. We have to move.”
“I’m trying.” She buries her face in my chest. “I’m trying. I just—” She looks up at me. “I fell in a hole as a kid. I have triggers. They’re rare but—apparently,” she makes a choked sound, “another hole is one of them. I’m sorry. I hate that I’m this weak.”
I cup her face. “You are not weak and I understand, I do. But Pri—”
“I know,” she says. “We’re in a hole. We have to get out of the hole. I need to shake it off.”
And there she goes, proving me right: she’s not weak. “A half-mile,” I say. “That’s all you have to make it, but we have to go now. I don’t know how Deleon found us, but if he knew about the cabin, he could have known about the tunnel. Outside of me, and until I told Walker, Rafael was the only living person who knows about it.
“How did Deleon know?”
“That’s a question for later,” I say, when the truth is that I feel certain it was my older brother, the one Pri doesn’t know about. The one who is now dead. Alex, who was not only a dirty Fed, he became a Devil. “A half-mile,” I repeat. “You walk further to work every day.”
“I know,” she breathes out. “I know.” Without further ado, warrior princess that she is, she rotates forward.
One of my hand settles on the low ceiling and the other at her waist, letting her know I’m here, I’m at her back. I shine the flashlight over her shoulder, lighting our path and she starts walking.
I’m calm, my pace even with hers, but adrenaline pulses through me, and because Pri matters to me, I’m focused on how we get out of this alive. Even if Deleon knows about the tunnel, Walker is protecting us, and the exit isn’t easy to find.
Pri and I fall into silence, walking forward, but Pri’s breathing is raspy and too shallow. We’re about halfway to the exit when I halt her and lean into her. “You’ve got this. We’ve got this.”
“I can’t seem to catch my breath.”
“Just breathe in, sweetheart, long and full. Remind yourself you can do it.”
She inhales, pulling in the breath, and my hand slides to her belly. “Now breathe out.”
Her breath gushes from her lips. “I’m good,” she hisses. “I’m fine. Let’s go. Let’s get out of here.”
My lips curve with approval. “Let’s go.”
She steps forward, and I have no idea how she just defeated her demons, but I need lessons because she’s in full charge, now in control of her baggage. With our new pace, we’re at the exit quickly and I catch her hand, pulling her around to face me. “I need you to stay here while I clear the path. You have your gun?”
“In my purse.” She pats it at her hip. “I grabbed it when I grabbed my gun.”
“Pull it out and use it if you have to, but take my lead. Got it?”
“Yes.”
I rotate us in the small space, pressing our bodies close as I take the lead. When I’m in front, she grabs my arm. “Do not get killed. We have things to discuss, you and me.”
She’s right. We do. Things like those times when I’m bad. And it happens far more often than she wants to know.Chapter ThreeADRIAN
I head up the steel steps implanted in the tunnel wall, but pause at the top, just beneath the door. Smart man that my father was, he’d placed our exit location in the center of a circle of bushes, but that coverage does me no good if someone’s waiting on us above.