Page 53 of Wired Target

Somewhere close, heat.Increasing heat.A flickering behind his eyelids.

Fire.

She had booby-trapped the house and he’d walked right in and pushed the button that destroyed the place.

And it had killed his men.

Raveaux couldn’t suppress a cataclysmic gasp of grief.Tears burst from his eyes.The agony was acute.

A light source beyond turned his vision red.

Muffled sounds came closer, became louder.

Someone wiped his face with a wet cloth and pried one of his stuck eyelids open.

A light filled that eye, piercing all the way into his foggy brain.A voice a thousand miles away asked him something in a foreign tongue.

“Sam.Rab,” he tried to say.

They lifted and moved Raveaux onto a gurney.

He thought he screamed at the pain but couldn’t hear it.

More wiping at his face; the other eye was freed.

Now he could see the masked faces of medical people above him, and beyond them—flames.

Giant, brilliant flames, reaching up out of the window through which he’d been thrown and clawing up the side of the building to grasp at the roof.

The house was burning.

His men were still inside.

“Rab!Sam!”Raveaux thrashed to get free of the straps they’d anchored his limbs to the gurney with.“Please help!My men are inside!”

But no one listened.No one understood him.

They tightened the straps, ignoring his struggles, and pierced his arm with an IV.

Covered his face with an oxygen mask.

Cranked up the gurney and wheeled him to an ambulance.

Loaded him inside.

“Sam!Rab!”Raveaux sobbed through the knives of pain, trying to communicate, pointing at the house with bloody fingers.

Through the windows at the back of the ambulance, the fire reached up and grabbed for the moonlit sky like the monster it was.

Raveaux shut his eyes and sagged back, sucking oxygen, as the ambulance lurched forward, and the road rumbled beneath it—nothing but pure vibration.The siren on the vehicle was a soft lullaby in his damaged ears.

If only he could go to that dark place where he’d been ...and stay there, forever.

32

Sophie faced Lei at the yellow crime scene barrier.“I need to see her.I need to say goodbye.”

“You can see her from right here.”Lei rested a hand gently on Sophie’s shoulder.“Getting closer won’t change anything.”

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