Page 73 of Viral Justice

Bending over to shield the little boy by turning him away from the man, she pulled a throwing knife out of the sheath inside her right boot and threw it hard.

The man with Bull’s weapon dropped in an awkward sprawl.

“Don’t look,” she told Berez in Arabic as she pulled her knife out of the militant’s eye and removed Bull’s rifle from around his neck. She wiped the blade on the dead man’s coat, put the knife into its sheath, then herded the boy away from the body. “Go, go.”

He ran ahead of her and she followed. They were a few houses away when shouts from behind her told her the dead man had been discovered.

Berez led her to what looked like just another house, though this one seemed unused. Broken furniture littered the ground around the front door and windows. He went through the empty maw that should have had a door guarding it and into the dark.

All it would take was one wrong step and that little boy would be injured.

She rushed after him.

The interior was almost completely dark. The boy's hand grabbed hers, and he tugged her deeper into the room. She ran into a couple of unidentifiable items before passing through an interior doorway.

Footsteps crunched on the debris-littered floor.

They weren’t alone.

Chapter Seventeen

Awarm stir in theair raised the hairs on the back of her neck. A man stood right behind her. Adrenaline hit her system. She elbowed him in the chest, knocking the wind out of him, and had the heavy breather on the floor a second later, one of her knives at his throat.

“Ali,” hissed a male voice from several feet away.

“Max?” Relief released her from the battle high.

“Let him go,” he whispered. “That’s our host.”

The boy’s father.

Oops.

She released him and backed away. “I’m sorry,” she said in Arabic. “I didn’t mean to... I’m so sorry.”

“You are fierce,” Ferhat said, getting to his feet. “Do not apologize for protecting yourself or my son.”

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