“What’s that crazy redheaded idiot doing?” I asked.
We checked the camera to see that Hud was on the second-floor balcony, two rifles in his hands as he opened fire down at the remaining intruders.
Ajax and I watched for a few moments before turning to one another.
“Not a chance we’re going to let him have all the fun, are we?” I asked.
“Not a chance.”
We reloaded, then stepped out of the panic room and into the morning air. Hud was still going wild with his rifles, firing round after round at the men. Two remained, and with a pair of controlled bursts from me and Ajax, we laid them down.
That was it. The fight was over.
I took a deep breath, the smell of gunpowder thick in the air as we watched the trees for any sign of life. There wasn’t one.
Ajax turned to me. “Where’s the kid?”
I opened my mouth to speak, but a groan cut me off. We turned to see Kid slouched against the side of the panic room.
His hand was covered in red.
“Guys?” he asked, a confused expression on his face. “I…I think they got me.”
21
VICTORIA
There was so much blood.
Everything that happened that morning had felt like something out of a nightmare. One moment I was in my bed, dreaming of the guys, waking up with a smile on my face. The next I was being led downstairs, gunfire breaking out as Hud pulled me down to the basement to take cover in a storeroom.
Now we were in the back of the SUV that we’d arrived in, Ajax at the wheel, Hud, Pyke, and me in the backseat with Kid laying across the seat in front of us, his shoulder saturated with blood.
“What’s the story?” Ajax shouted back at us.
“Shoulder wound,” Hud said. “Can’t tell how bad it is.”
“Where the hell are we even going?” Pyke asked. “Why aren’t we taking care of this in the chalet?”
“Because we don’t know if that was all of the assassin team or just the first wave. Jurgen bought some low-rent operatives, but what they might lack in skill, they could make up for in number.”
Pyke said nothing as if he understood that Ajax had made a damn good point.
I was scared. I didn’t want to say anything, knowing the guys already had enough on their minds—least of which was getting us all to safety and saving Kid’s life. But I was terrified. My hands shook, and my heart beat a million times a second.
I couldn’t believe that people had actually tried to kill me. It was all so surreal. Never in my life had I ever lived through anything like that before. The men were high-energy, but all the same, they were keeping it cool and in control.
“Where we going, then?” Hud asked. “We need to take a look at this lad and soon unless you want him to bleed out back here!”
“Is that going to happen?” I asked. I felt silly as soon as the question was out of my mouth. I didn’t know much about combat, but I did know that when you had one of your friends shot in front of you, the last thing anyone wanted to deal with was someone asking stupid questions.
Hud regarded me with a grim expression. “Not going to know until I’ve got the lad on a table in front of me.”
“Farm!” Ajax called out from the front. “We’re going to one of the nearby farms.”
Pyke was confused. “You serious? You want to just crash there and hope for the best?”
“If they turn us away, they turn us away. But I don’t know if we’ve got time to drive thirty minutes to the nearest hospital!”