“We need to go,” Freddie said, tossing a look over his shoulder to where Liam and Jasper were. “Still got on flats?” He looked at my feet.
“I can run,” I promised. Even in the dress, I could run. I could tear it if I needed…
“Stay with me,” he said, his expression fierce in the shadows as he cut a look behind us and then we were going. Hand in hand, he led me across the street and passed wrecked cars.
I made the mistake of glancing inside one. The blood all over the steering wheel and windshield promised if they weren’t dead, they would be. The car had impacted other vehicles on the street. But it was the cracked glass radiating out from a single hole that said why the car crashed.
“Don’t look, Boo-Boo,” Freddie ordered, even though it was hard not to trace the path of destruction around us. There were more wrecked cars and shattered glass as a figure loomed up out of the darkness, and I had to swallow a scream as Freddie shoved the guy into a wall.
A gurgle escaped the figure as air whistled out and he clasped a hand to his throat. The arc of blood splashed across the damp concrete, and it wasn’t until a gun slid out of the guy’s hand and skittered across the alley that I recognized the threat.
“Don’t look,” Freddie repeated, tugging my hand to urge me along. I cut my gaze past the soon-to-be-dead man and down the alley.
“We need to get the gun,” I told him, and he let out a breath as I pulled free to snag it.
“Yeah, yeah,” Freddie said. “C’mon, Lara Croft, stay with me.”
I glanced at my pair of guns then at Freddie. A laugh bubbled up from me, and his grin was a slash of light in the darkness. It was ridiculous and delightful—a morbid kind of levity. Something I needed desperately, even as adrenaline pounded through my veins with every squeeze of my too-rapid pulse.
Freddie navigated the network of alleys like an expert. The sound of running feet would echo behind us. We took shelter in recessed doorways more than once, trusting the shadows to shield us.
The further we went, the quieter and steadier our steps were. Liam wanted us out of the line of fire. Even understanding the desire, I hated leaving them behind. At the same time, I stayed close to Freddie. Because the guys were safer if they could fight without worrying about us.
Freddie lifting up his hand to motion for me to wait, stopped me in place. He wasn’t moving either, just—listening, I thought. His head tilted like he could track a sound I wasn’t hearing.
Not arguing, I gave him the time he requested. Two fingers. He wanted two minutes. I nodded even if he wasn’t glancing at me. He made it five steps. Five. Before a shadow loomed up out of the darkness and caught him in the chest.
The blow knocked him into the wall. He crashed into the brick, hitting it with a kind of meaty thump. I raised the gun Liam had given me, sighted the guy as he turned toward me and rushed forward.
Breathe. Wait for the beat of my pulse. Squeeze the trigger on the exhale. The gun had a kick, but I was ready for it, and I squeezed off two shots in rapid succession. He jerked with the first bullet, but the second halted him entirely.
The shock on his face burned an imprint into my brain as he stared at me, slack-jawed. Then he collapsed. There was no time to enjoy the victory because a blow caught me right in the crook of my elbow. The sharp jab sent pain skittering down to my fingertips.
The gun fell from my nerveless fingers, even as my new assailant gripped my left wrist, jerking it up and back to twist my arm behind me. Tears sparked in my eyes at the pain radiating up to my shoulder. I never got a shot off with that gun as he took it from my hand and shoved me against the brick.
It scraped at the lace of my dress, tearing it. Worse was the hot breath on my cheek and a very hard erection pressed against my spine. He gripped my ass with his free hand.
“I like a little fight in my whores,” he whispered against my cheek then he licked me. Disgusted didn’t cover it as I slammed my head back against him.
The bite of his fingers tearing at my clothes couldn’t compete with the meaty crunch of his nose or his howl of pain.
“You fucking—” The next words died unspoken as he let out a strangled sound. The weight on my arm slacked off, and I yanked away. I met Freddie’s gaze over the guy’s shoulder as Freddie plunged a knife into him over and over.
He wasn’t dead yet—so I slammed my knee into his nuts. All the air seemed to leave him as he collapsed. When Freddie would have followed him down, I gripped his blood-soaked hand.
“We can go…”
“He hurt you.” He was incensed, and the pain radiating from my shoulder and sending fire shooting down my arms was a testament to that.
“He can’t touch me.” It wasn’t a lie. The guy was dead. His brutal contact already forgotten. If I had bruises—I didn’t care. I was safe, and so was Freddie.
Gaze locked on mine, Freddie dipped his eyes from where my dress had torn, then down to the man below. He was still alive—barely.
“He’s losing those fingers.” It wasn’t a request. I squeezed Freddie’s hand then dropped to my knees to grip the guy’s arm and yank it straight.
Flattening the offending palm to the ground, I cast my stare up to lock with Freddie’s again. His lips pulled back from his teeth in a snarl of a grin. “You got him, Boo-Boo?”
“I got him.”
“Which fingers?”
Three sparks of pain radiated from my ass, so I chose three fingers. Freddie severed them with brutal efficiency. The first one barely registered with the guy. The second one made him howl. After the third, Freddie kicked him in the head to silence him.
Finished, I reclaimed my gun. Instead of leaving the mutilated digits there, Freddie scooped them up and carried them down the alley with us to toss them into a grate.
Yeah, I didn’t want to think about that anymore. Clasping our sticky hands together, we took off through the network of alleys. I could almost tell we were getting closer to the water. The scents changed, and the breeze shifted.
When we would have emerged from an alley right on the road, Freddie drew me back into the shadows. “We wait here,” he said.
“In the open?” It wasn’t so much a question as a confirmation. Freddie nodded once.
“This is where we wait. The guys will come for us.” Absolute certainty. There were zero reasons to expect anything different. Jasper and Liam would come for us.
Or they would send Rome or Kellan or Vaughn. I shuddered as I tried to catch my breath. Freddie tugged me to him.
“Are you cold?”
Head tilting back, I studied him. This close, there was no mistaking the blood spatter on his face or hair. Another reason to not go any closer to the streetlamps. We were a bloody mess—literally.
The shivering wasn’t from the cold but the reaction. I got that, and still, I didn’t want to put too much pressure on Freddie. “I’ll be okay.”
“C’mere, Boo-Boo,” he murmured, tightening an arm around me and inviting me right up next to him as he turned his back to the wind and shielded me from the worst of the draft.
“I don’t want to scare you,” I whispered.
“Not scared,” he said, almost like a prayer. “Only scared when I saw that guy trying to hurt you.”
“You stopped him.”