Despite my body’s protests and a few unsuccessful attempts, I manage to roll onto my stomach and drag myself to the house. When I finally reach the steps and crawl most of the way up, my feet catch the ice, and I roll back down, unable to gain traction or grab onto anything in my weakened state. I hit the concrete hard, landing on my back, bouncing my already concussed head off the hard surface with a grunt. If it weren’t for Malia being taken, I’d be happy to just allow myself to die here.
But, if I’ve learned anything from the woman who has become my world, it’s that giving up isn’t an option. Not when we’ve fought so hard to get where we are. Life with Malia is a war zone and I will gladly stand on the front line with a smile on my face.
My head drops to the side, my eyes catching on the fire while I continue to will my body to get its shit together. I have never felt so weak, so useless as I do right now. How did they find us? And how were they able to incapacitate her?
I float in and out of consciousness throughout the night, finally jolting awake as fear begins to claw its way through me. The sky is pink as dawn breaks, and the car is no longer burning. Charred metal and small embers are all that remains of my only hope. I’ve wasted so much time; I didn’t mean to fall asleep. Malia could be anywhere now.
As I register my body’s numbness from the cold, I realize I’ve managed to work through most of what was hindering me before. I’m able to shift to my knees and slowly stand on my feet. The world begins to spin once again, and I grab onto the railing to force it to steady. I can’t go down again. I’m Malia’s only chance.
There’s only one way to get the attention of the outside world, and it’s going to take something bigger than a car explosion in the middle of nowhere to do it. I take one last long look at the cabin Malia loves. The place where we both put aside our stubbornness and found peace within each other. This cabin was the Hail Mary to the start of our forever, and I will have to watch it burn.
I blow out a breath of regret and make sure my feet are stable before heading up the steps, avoiding the icy spots that took me down earlier in the night. Going straight to the windows, I open every last one to let in as much oxygen as possible to feed the flames the way I need it to.
Grabbing both my and Malia’s pistols, I tuck them in the back of my pants and start dousing the house in any accelerants I can find—from cleaning products, to Malia’s nail polish remover, to the little bit of kerosene I had left to build the fires in the hearth, it was enough to get something going. The flames will eat up the old wood of the house in no time.
I grab a blanket, fighting against the pain in my head, which is once again threatening to take me down again. Pulling a pack of matches from my pocket, I take one last look around the small living room, my gaze stopping on the floor in front of the fireplace. Malia loved the fires and we spent many nights wrapped in each other in front of it.
“I’ll set this forest on fire if I have to, baby,” I tell her. “And I’ll build you a fucking cabin with my bare hands to give this back to you. I’m sorry.”
With that, I light the match and drop it into a line of kerosene. The flames grow quickly, as I knew they would. I stumble as far away from the house as I can before exhaustion takes over. I give into the fatigue, hoping the fire is big enough to gain some sort of attention, and fall to the gravel driveway. Everything goes black before I even hit the ground.
“Sir, can you hear me?” an unfamiliar female voice, full of concern, calls to me.
I groan, trying to find the voice that sounds so far away. I’m forgetting something important. I blink my eyes open; everything is blurry, and it takes a few moments to become clearer.
“We need to get him moved to get the trucks in before we have a forest fire on our hands,” the woman says.
She’s talking to a man who towers over us. From what I can see, they look like paramedics, and their voices no longer sound so far away. The recesses of my brain prickle with urgency.
Malia.
I scrambled to my feet, and the woman who was crouched next to me falls backward at my sudden movement. I spin on the man, pulling one of the pistols from my jeans and settling the barrel between his eyes. His hands go up as shouts and guns are drawn around me.
“Weapon down!” a man, most likely a cop, yells out to me, but I focus on the man in front of me.
“I’m not going to do that,” I yell back, my voice gravelly from smoke inhalation and the torment my body has endured.
I’m not one to drop names for the sake of gaining leverage but desperate times call for desperate measures. I sway slightly, breathing through another moment of near collapse, spreading my legs to broaden my stance and re-steadying my grip on the gun. We’re about to find out how much pull The Omen has.
The man is known throughout the country, but I don’t know how heavy his name weighs outside D.C.
“This cabin is owned by my father-in-law,”—that’s a bit of a stretch—“Nathaniel Olin, or as you might know him—The Omen. His daughter was taken, and I would be willing to guess it wouldn’t bode well for any of you to keep me from getting to him.”
I’m met with silence and let my eyes wander around me as I’m surrounded by several uniformed cops with their weapons trained on me. My hand doesn’t waver even though my world feels like it’s rattled to hell.
“I-I have a phone,” the paramedic stutters. “It’s in my front left pocket.”
Before I dive for the man’s phone, I meet everyone’s eyes with a gun on me to drive my threat deeper.
“Should I tell him how you all have been exceptionally helpful, or how you’ve stood in the way of finding his daughter?” I sneer as the men look at each other in conflict.
I shrug one shoulder. “It’s your death then.”
“We could kill you right now, and he’d be none the wiser,” a man from behind me spits out.
I smirk. “The fire was called in, which brought you here, I’m a federal agent, and he knows I’m here. You won’t be so lucky. One last chance, dickhead.”
Pulling back the safety on the gun, I dig the barrel deeper into the paramedic’s forehead. The sound of safeties being released has me dropping my own weapon to the ground. My hand immediately goes to the man’s pocket and fishes out the phone.