Page 45 of Guarded By Them

I grimaced. “You can say that again.”

“But what other options do we have?” Dillon continued. “We can’t take the risk of contacting someone else to try to get Rue a passport, can we? Or we stay in the country and just hunker down, but we could only do that for so long. At some point, our names or faces are going to get spotted by the wrong people, and then we’ll all be in trouble again.”

“Before we decide anything else,” Ryan said, “I think there’s something we need to do first.”

I frowned. “What?”

“We need to teach you how to shoot.”

They all looked toward me, and I experience a little spark of excitement. “I would feel better if I was able to defend myself.”

“I’d feel better, too,” Dillon agreed. “I hate the idea of Rue not being able to shoot one of the sons of bitches if they tried to hurt her.”

Kodee pressed his lips together and nodded. “We’ll need to go somewhere remote. Somewhere the gunshots aren’t going to get us any unwanted attention.”

“It’s deer season,” Ryan said. “I think we’ll be okay. If anyone hears gunshots, they’ll just put it down to hunters.”

Hunters. I liked the sound of that. For once, I’d rather be the hunter than the hunted.

Chapter Sixteen

Ryan

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I LOVED THE FEEL OF a gun in my hand. I had from the first moment I’d held one when I’d been only fifteen years old. There was power in it, no doubt. A dangerous kind of power. Just the weight of the weapon in my palm filled me with adrenaline. Maybe it was the way some people felt when they were drinking or taking drugs—confident, invincible, one rung higher than everyone else.

Learning I was good at shooting was even better. It was like a kind of superpower. While others were peppering the targets, my shots hit dead on the mark every time.

But the thing that had almost destroyed me wasn’t affected by a gun. There was nothing my weapon could have done against the IED hidden in the truck. Perhaps I could have shot the person who’d hidden it, but since I’d had no idea it was even there, that would have been outside of my ability, too.

That vulnerability had come as a shock. It had changed who I was as a person. I thought that, perhaps even more than the loss of my leg, the realization of my vulnerability had altered me. I’d gone from believing myself to be indestructible, to suddenly knowing just how quickly things could change. No one was ever safe in this life. Anything could happen at any moment, and even though I’d been living in a war zone, and had seen people die, I’d never truly believed it might happen to me until that moment.

By mid-morning, we’d already passed over the bridge and were back into forest area.

Kodee pulled the car off the road, driving through some trees, making sure the vehicle wouldn’t be spotted by any passing traffic. We hadn’t seen any sign that we were being followed, and I was sure we would have noticed by now if we were. The roads were too quiet for us not to have seen another vehicle trailing us. If we were in a city or on a busy freeway, I could understand how one black or silver car might look just like another, but out here, with how aware of our precarious situation we were, I figured we were safe.

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