The growl that came out of Ryder was inhuman and deadly lethal, but he stooped at her side and scooped her carefully up.
“Don’t watch, Ryder,” she pleaded. Then she whispered so no one else would hear, “Ryder, there’s a secret tunnel that leads out into the jungle and up into the house into one of the bedrooms.”
His blue eyes widened. “You sure?”
“I remember it, this is where he had me when he first brought me here, and I remember going out the tunnel to the cell you found me in. When he was … touching me … we came in through the tunnel and up to one of the bedrooms.”
“That’s perfect, sweetheart, you’re amazing.” Pride shone from his eyes and hers misted.
“I didn’t cry,” she told him. “When he was beating me I didn’t scream.”
“You cry if you need to, baby, I already know how strong you are, you don’t have anything to prove.”
“Come on, hurry up,” Alex snapped.
“Just hold on a little longer,” Ryder said, then touched his lips to her forehead.
With heavy steps Ryder crossed the cell. Alex had opened the door and held his arms out ready to take her while his men kept their weapons trained on them.
Abigail knew how hard it was for Ryder to hand her over to a monster, but he had no choice, and carefully placed her in Alex’s outstretched arms. His fingers lingered on her arm as he let her go and took a step back.
The look Ryder gave Alex was beyond menacing. “I’m going to kill you, Alex. You have to know that.”
Alex just laughed. “You’re in no position to be threatening me. Open the cell opposite this one,” he ordered one of his men. “And go bring me a mattress, I am a gentleman after all, I’m not going to do her on the floor.”
He threw a mocking smile over his shoulder, and even though he had turned and she couldn’t see their faces she knew Ryder, Grayson, and Charlie were shooting Alex death stares.
Her resolve was cracking, her heart breaking, of everything that Alex had done to her this was the worst. Raping her in front of Ryder would crush him, and even if they did make it out of this alive she wasn’t sure how they would be able to recover from it.
It would change how he saw her.
Irreversibly.
Two men came down carrying a mattress between them, and they laid it down in the cell opposite the one he had just removed her from.
Alex carried her to it, and then an explosion shattered the world.
12:47 A.M.
Spider had told the others about the tunnels, and the explosion came at the perfect time. Right before Alex was able to do something to Abigail from which there might be no coming back.
He had been prepared for the explosion, he knew his men were upstairs because the two men who had been sent up to retrieve a mattress weren’t the same men who brought it back down to the basement. Shark and Fox had brought the mattress down, and the second it was on the floor he saw Fox whisper something into his comms.
A second later the explosion boomed above them.
Unprepared, Alex’s men startled, and that moment of distraction was all it took for him and his team to take control.
Alex had made a mistake not asking them to remove their comms so he could relate what Abigail had told him to the others, and he had made a mistake in not collecting up their discarded weapons.
While Alex’s men scrambled to figure out what was going on, King and Chaos lunged for their weapons as Shark and Fox began to fire, and Night came running down the stairs, also firing.
Spider threw himself at Abigail who was now on the mattress, covering her body with his own, protecting her from the bullets that were flying. She wasn’t moving, but he didn’t think she’d been hit.
Finally, silence filled the basement.
Cautiously he lifted his head, all of his men were standing, none of Alex’s were.
“A head’s up on the explosion would have been nice,” said Abigail’s weary voice from beneath him. “You’re squishing me.”
A relieved smile curled his lips up. “Better squished than dead, sweetheart.”
“Can’t argue with that,” she said.
“I would have filled you in on the explosion if I’d had a chance,” he told her as he maneuvered his body off hers. Running his hands over her body again to check for any new injuries, his team began checking the bodies, making sure that no one was left alive.
“I’m okay, Ryder,” Abigail said.
“Untrue,” he muttered. Her body was a mass of bruises, she had broken bones, was exhausted, and needed medical treatment, but at least she was alive. That was something to rejoice about.
“Uh, Spider, we got bad news,” Fox said, positioning himself between him and Abigail and the corridor. From Fox’s stance, he knew that whatever the problem was it was a safety issue.
“What’s wrong?” he asked, propping Abigail against his bent knee when she tried to struggle into a sitting position.
“Alex’s body isn’t here,” Fox replied.
“What?” Abigail said, her voice wobbling. She’d held it together so well up until now, and he needed her to keep it together just a little longer.
“He won’t get to you, Abby,” he assured her, then to his team, “how did that happen?”
“He must have thrown Abby to the floor when the blast went off then hightailed it out of here leaving his team to distract us,” Fox said.
“So it’s not over.” Abigail had tears shimmering in her eyes, and she looked like she had about reached the end of her rope.
“It will be, there’s no way he’s letting us leave without trying to take us out. So his plan to torture us by watching him rape and torture you is out the window. My guess is he’s waiting out in the jungle for us, he’ll try to pick us off one by one as we head for the evacuation point,” he explained, already passing Abigail off to Fox so he could grab his weapons.
“Could also be waiting for us in the tunnel,” Shark suggested.
“He’d do whatever he thinks we would least likely expect him to do,” Chaos added.
“Options are he waits to pick us off in the tunnel which would leave us virtually trapped in here since we blew up the house. Or he waits to pick us off as we exit the tunnel, again leaving us virtually trapped in here. Or he waits until we’re all in the jungle and goes after us there,” Night said.
“We’d go with option A or B,” Fox said.
“So Alex is going to go with option C then, wait until we’re all in the jungle and then start shooting,” Spider said as he reached out to take Abigail back from Fox.
“He knows the land better than we do,” Shark said as they prepared their weapons and started down the corridor to where Abigail had said the entrance to the secret tunnels were.
“But we have him outnumbered,” Chaos said, a grin on his face.
“But he wants you all dead,” Abigail said, her cheek resting against his shoulder as though she were too tired to lift her head.
“Yeah, but we have an ace up our sleeve.” He smiled down at her.
“An ace?” she asked, brow furrowed.
“We didn’t come alone,” he explained. “Wolf’s team is here with us only Alex doesn’t know that. They’re going to be tracking us as we make our way through the tunnel and we’ll let them know when we reach the end of it. They’ll be watching as we come out, keeping an eye out for Alex, and following us to the helo. Alex will be focused on us, he won’t even be thinking that we didn’t come alone. He thinks that being a SEAL is all about having a massive ego because that’s all it was to him. But that’s not us, we came here to rescue you and to eliminate a threat. We came with backup because it was the smart thing to do. We’re all going home, Abigail, all of us, alive and in one piece. Well, all of us but Alex,” he finished darkly.