“What if she only wore that mask because she didn’t want anyone linking her to me?” I ask on a pained breath.
Hadley’s breath catches, but I fight back the emotions, refusing to give up hope that Lana plans to live.
She flips back from the corner, spinning as she fires her guns simultaneously again. By some miracle, not a single bullet connects with her, but her aim is almost dead on as she puts a bullet in four heads before diving behind another desk.
She flips the desk, and she kicks it into a deputy, who falls down in front of her. Then she grabs him, jerking him up to his feet, and using him as a human shield for a brief second as she fires at two others.
She’s pushing them back. For some reason, she’s advancing, and they keep getting closer and closer to the basement door.
One finally rushes into the basement, and she drops her shield when a bullet goes through the man and cuts into her shoulder. I blow out a breath of relief when I see it’s nothing more than a graze. Jake even zooms in on it, as though he’s freaking out as much as I am.
He zooms back out as Lana fires over the top of the desk, keeping them corralled toward the back.
“Call in the national guard! Call in every-fucking body you have!” someone is shouting into the phone from outside the office we’re in.
The one who ducked into the basement comes running back out, his eyes wide and panicked as he shouts something to the others I can’t understand amidst the gunfire.
Something changes. They start advancing, risking their lives in the open instead of staying shielded as they fire on her hard.
She ducks, covering her head as one grabs a MK 47 and fires rapidly.
She slides toward the front, crawling, but suddenly her head throws back and her mouth opens for a scream as blood spatters from her leg.
“No!” I shout, racing out of the room, rushing toward the exit.
I’m shoved at the chest, the man guarding the door who has been eyeing me.
“You’re to stay put,” he growls.
“Let me by!” I snap, reaching for my weapon, but Leonard crashes into my side, grabbing my hand before I can.
“What the fuck are you doing?” he snaps.
“They’re going to fucking kill her!”
He jerks me back, dragging me toward Craig’s office again. His face pales when he sees our private monitor.
“They’ll lock you up. There’s no way you’ll even get there in time,” he hisses, slamming the door as his eyes turn back to the monitor.
Johnson emerges from the sheriff’s office for the first time since Lana showed up. He comes up behind her, firing rapidly as she drags herself in between two desks.
I see the fear in her eyes turn to anger as she loads her guns again. She pulls out a knife, and I watch as she jumps to stand on her one good leg and throws the knife. Johnson’s eyes widen seconds before the knife sticks into his forehead, but the gunshots ring out faster, and I watch as her body jerks and drops, the bullets hitting her.
“No!” I shout again, slamming my fist into the wall as my heart caves in on itself.
Then I look at Leonard.
“The chopper. Get me to the fucking chopper now!”
He shakes his head slowly. “Even if we could get to it, it’d be too late, Logan.”
My stomach rolls and my heart implodes in my chest as I slide down the wall, gripping my head as everything in me turns to stone, weighing too much to move. Tears burn against my eyes as I watch Lana weakly climb across the floor, firing again at the deputies.
I can’t watch.
I can’t watch her die.
Chapter 15
I should like to lie at your feet and die in your arms.
—Voltaire
LANA
Pain shoots through my body, and my hearing is nothing more than a constant roar of never-ending gunfire.
I cry out as I tie off my leg to help stop the bleeding. My chest and back ache with the amount of bullets that have pounded into the vest, but they didn’t break through. My shoulder burns from the graze, but it’s overshadowed by the bullet that passed through my hand earlier.
I wrap my hand next, struggling with shaking hands as I fight through the pain. Jake’s voice comes through my earpiece, and I take a breath, firing back at the men behind me.
“You have to get the fuck out of there, Lana! They know about the basement!”
“I can’t,” I say through strain, shooting around the corner and clipping a guy in the knee. He falls, his MK 47 spraying bullets wildly as he collapses. A stray bullet hits one of the other deputies, but not enough to kill the fucker.
“You have to!” Jake barks. “You didn’t come this far to fucking die!”
I refuse to let the tears fall as I jerk my head back in time to avoid a new onslaught of bullets. The desk barrier I’ve built won’t continue to hold back the bullets. The three pushed together will only stop them for a little while longer.
“I need to talk to him,” I say quietly, choking back a sob as I try to stand up, only to fall back down again when my leg hurts too much to cooperate.
“No! You’re not fucking saying goodbye, Lana. I’m not letting you talk to him. Get out of there! The charge can’t be stopped and you know it. It’s a fail-safe. You have nine minutes and fifty-four seconds.”
I bang the back of my head on the desk, my vision clouded by the tears teeming in my eyes. I stare at the door in dismay. Those twenty feet seem so much farther with the never-ending spray of unrelenting fire.
They’re harder to kill than I was expecting. Not as cowardly as we’d predicted.
We’ve been so right about everything else.
“I love you,” I say to Jake, biting back the pain as I twist around to fire more.
“I’ll hate you if you die,” he says angrily.
I hear the tears in his voice, taste his pain from here.
“The fire is coming, Lana. Nine minutes exactly now. Get. The fuck. Out of there.”
“Remember that time when we were kids and we found that stick of dynamite in your father’s basement?”
“Don’t, Lana. Don’t fucking do this!” he begs as the tears start to leak from my eyes.
I fire blindly just to keep them from getting closer, lifting the gun up.
“You told us it was too dangerous to mess with, but I convinced you it’d be fun. Marcus and you tried to stop me, but I refused to listen.”
“Damn it, Lana! Get out! Get out now!”
I try to stand again, but I cry out in pain as I drop to the ground one more time. I blink away the tears, blowing out a breath as I continue to stave off the pain that would overwhelm me otherwise.
I wish I hadn’t turned my nose up at the grenade suggestion Jake made a few months ago now.
But I still wouldn’t be able to get out of here in time. It hurts too bad. My leg refuses to move, and without the speed it prevents, it’s pointless.
“You wanted to study it, but I just wanted to blow shit up,” I say, laughing humorlessly.
“Don’t,” he whispers.
“So we blew up that old barn outside of town. I lit the fuse and threw it, and Marcus covered your body with his when it exploded. The explosion never touched me, but the force of it slammed into my back like a solid wall, throwing me across the field. We had no clue it was that powerful.”