Page 19 of Catch My Fall

“I will be when we get her back,” I say, wincing as I press harder onto my wound.

We gain on Austin’s van in no time, but it veers left and right, the driver weaving erratically, doing his best not to allow us alongside.

Bullets pelt the SUV, showering us in a spray of gunfire that ricochets off the armoured metal. The windshield takes a couple of hits, the glass splintering into a spiders web that spans the entire width, but it doesn’t break, not completely.

They manage to get a little further ahead, but there’s no shaking us. There’s movement in the back of the van, and we watch as a body is dumped unceremoniously out the back, rolling and tumbling along the ground over and over and over like a rag doll.

Sierra.

“Fuck!” Our driver swerves hard to the right and slams on the breaks as we skid to a sharp stop.

I slide open the door and rush over to her, dropping to my knees beside her body. Her black hair is a matted mess that covers her bruised face.

Her skin is marred with a dozen cuts and scrapes as a result of being shoved out of the van.

“Sierra? Princess?” I reach for the pulse point in her neck, relief flooding me when I feel its steady rhythm beneath my fingers.

“Max, I need your jacket!” I shout.

He climbs out of the van and crouches beside me, laying the jacket over her naked body.

“Jesus,” he mutters. “What the fuck did they do to her?”

“I think we both know the answer to that.”

I carefully scoop her into my arms and a frown knits her brow and she groans in pain.

I hurry back towards the SUV and climb back in, slamming the door shut behind me.

“Hospital, now!” I shout as I cradle her in my arms, her head resting against my chest.

My mind swirls with everything that just happened.

“My car is still at the house, and one of Austin’s guys, Ollie, the one who helped me, he’s injured,” I tell Max.

“I’ll send the SUV behind us back to the house to get him and get one of my guys to collect your car.”

“Thank you,” I say. “And, thanks for coming, I know it goes against your protocols but, if you hadn’t, we’d probably both be dead.” If not me, Sierra definitely would be.

“I might be FBI, but above all, I’m your friend. No way in hell was I letting you do this alone, despite how much I could murder you sometimes.”

“I knew you loved me really,” I tease.

He barks a laugh. “Shut the fuck up.”

Sierra stirs in my arms murmuring my name weakly. And if the sound of that doesn’t pierce straight through my heart.

I lean down and press my lips to her forehead. “You’re safe now, princess. I’ve got you.”

8

“We need help!” I shout as I burst through the doors of the hospital, Sierra’s body limp in my arms.

A nurse rushes over with a bed that I carefully lay her down on.

“What happened?” the nurse asks as she begins to wheel her down the corridor.

I manage to keep up with my long strides. “She’s been held captive, tortured and raped. She was thrown from a moving van earlier tonight. She’s losing a lot of blood, especially between her legs.”

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