Page 15 of Scars Run Deep

I started forward, only for my good arm to be grabbed by Aurora. I turned to her in question.

“You just dislocated your shoulder. You can’t take another round right now.”

“It’s fixed back into place.”

“It needs time to heal, though.”

“You wanna retreat?” Jonah asked me. “We could make it out through those trees if we split right now. Make it to the main road, call Security to come pick us up?”

Retreat? The very notion of it was blasphemous to me.

Weakness.

“I kept one of them alive, like you ordered,” Jonah went on, gesturing twenty feet away at one of the masks slumped against the rear tire of a van. “I’ll carry him, you two lay down fire to cover our retreat.”

Before I could respond, a sharp whizzing sound had me jolting.

One of the masks slapped a hand to their throat. It came away doused in blood. They were slumping to their knees in the next moment, gurgling as they choked on their own blood.

Another was hit straight through the skull—instant kill.

Another through the temple.

It went on and on in rapid-fire succession until all of them were dead, either drowned in a pool of their own blood, or a hole blown through their skull.

“What the shit?” Jonah exclaimed, spinning around.

Aurora did the same.

I studied the fallen, determining the trajectory of those shots.

To the east.

High up.

I twisted around, staring in the determined direction.

A blur of movement caught my eye, high up in one of the trees.

But as I blinked to get a closer look, it was gone.

The screeching of tires burning rubber drew our attention back down the road, the way we’d come.

A black Audi came into view, hurtling down the road, kicking up mud all over the place, before it came to a halt a few feet behind the blown-to-shit car at the bridge.

Killian stepped out a moment later.

Alone.

He swung his head toward us, and then he was running over, all frantic.

“Where is Olivia?” I demanded.

He stopped when he reached us and shook his head in dismay. “She got a text and took off like a bat out of hell.”

“What?”

“She cuffed me to the fucking stairs. I’m ace with picking those things, but even the few minutes it took me to free myself were enough for a woman of her skillset to completely disappear. She left the Audi for me, so she must’ve disappeared into the forest surrounding the safehouse on foot.”

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