Page 10 of Protected By the SEAL

God, a room. I don’t give a shit what the room is like or where it is as long as it has an actual bed. I would love nothing better than to have walls around me and somewhere safe to sleep. A bed would make me so fucking happy I could cry. If I wasn’t so afraid of tripping up once more over my bleary eyes, I would let the tears stream down my face right now. This is everything to me. The things that I took for granted before are now all I need in the world. I’ll never take them for granted again.

“Fuck.” Benji stops first. He halts like he’s slammed into a giant wall, which makes me crash against him. I bang my head hard. It leaves me a little blurry for a moment, but as soon as my senses come back to me, I realize what’s going on here. Why we’re frozen to the spot. This isn’t a wall we have crashed into.It’s a man, one of the guys from the gang we are trying to get away from… now there isn’t any way of getting away from them. Despite our best efforts, we’ve been caught.

We should have stayed hiding in the rocks. At least we were safe there…

9

BENJI

Fucking hell. This isnotwhat’s supposed to be going on here. We’re supposed to be heading toward the motel, aiming for safety, but hell has come for us. I know that this is one of the gang members, I can see it in his eyes. He’s the enemy, and we ran right into him.Iran right into him. I let Cassie down by taking her toward danger, not away from it.

“You’re them.” The man runs his eyes all over us. “Oh, my God, you are the ones they’re looking for.”

He starts yelling as I spin around to take a glimpse at Cassie. All the color has completely drained from her face. She knows what’s happening here, she knows that I’ve betrayed her and let her down without even meaning to. I hate that haunted look on her face. It makes me want to lose my shit, but Ihaveto stay in control here. Normally, I’m good at staying in control, but now I don’t know what the hell I’m doing. There are emotions which I can’t control, and they’re fogging up my judgement. How is that happening? I never normally have any feelings which will get in the way of my actions, but something about being with Cassie…

I don’t know what it is. I can’t control or contain it. It’s agonizing. I need to make it right. This moment, more than ever before, needs to work out. There’s so much more riding on this than there has been on anything else, and it’s when I’m fucking up most.

“Guys!” the man yells into an old-fashioned-looking cellphone device. “Guys, I have them. You need to come here. No, the Jones chick isn’t alone, she’s with some guy. Someone else we’re going to have to kill off. Another body to burn.”

The way these assholes talk about human life as if it’s nothing… it’s horrific. They seem to get some kind of enjoyment from murder and death. And this idiot is getting more of them to come to me and Cassie. I’m pretty sure that one of them is coming now, I can hear the sound of footsteps off in the distance, getting ever closer to us. We need to act now.

I glance back at Cassie, trying to reassure her with my eyes, but she doesn’t seem to get it. She doesn’t seem to want to let me go, either, but she’s going to have to. I can’t drag her along with me when I fight. I think knocking this asshole out is going to beat shooting him and making an unnecessary racket with the gunshot. I’m trying to think fast, but also smart.

I shake Cassie off. I hate doing it when she so clearly needs to hold on to me, but I’m hoping that she’ll understand why when it’s all over. When this guy is down and we can start racing for the motel again. It isn’t too far from here… actually, it’sreallyclose to here. Thinking about it, the gang might know where we’re going… oh, but I’ll deal with that later. First things first.

I leap high and onto the man, shocking him and knocking him backward. I have the element of surprise working for me. Hestaggers backward and drops his cellphone right at the moment I slam the butt of the gun into his head.

“Ah, fuck!” he screams, or at least he tries to, but his voice is strangled and weak. The curses keep flying out of his mouth as I slam the gun into his temple over and over again until he’s silenced. I don’t think he’s dead, but he can’t keep me and Cassie trapped, either. We can keep on going. At least I think we can until the other man descends upon us. The one I heard before coming toward us through the jungle. This isn’t over, not yet, anyway. We still need to fight…

Fuck, I’m going to have to shoot this one. I have no choice but to get rid of him rapidly. More needless death will have to happen because if Cassie and I don’t run away now, we don’t stand a chance of survival. We don’t have a chance in hell. I glance over to Cassie to try and see if she will hate me for this and think a lot less of me, but she isn’t even looking. Her eyes are on the floor. It’s almost as if she doesn’t quite know how to accept what’s going on. This is a bizarre situation to me, and I’ve been through things like this before. I’ve seen the worst areas of the world and survived just fine. But Cassie, she’s been sheltered. She’s been living under a freaking rock when it comes to shit like this. No wonder she’s a mess.

I lift the gun and pull the trigger the moment a new face comes into view. I don’t even think he sees me and Cassie. I don’t give him a chance. He’s gone before there’s even a moment for us to make eye contact. The bullet tears right through him and he slumps to the floor, a little like Alex did only a little while before. Two in one fucking day. This isn’t going well.

“Cassie.” I don’t want to have to force her out of her comfort zone again, but I don’t want that guy to die for nothing. I shot him so that we can run, and now we really need to. We’re goingto have to take a different direction as well. As much as I want the comfort of the motel, and I’m pretty sure that Cassie must feel the same way, we can’t be tracked. “Come on.”

This time, Cassie doesn’t take my hand, but she does run fast. There’s a definite shift in the air between us, but I know better than to worry about what’s going on inside her mind. We have too much else to worry about and I need to zone in on those tracking skills of mine since I can’t use a map. I need to get us away from those men but somewhere I know where we are.

It’s a challenge, though, I’ll be honest about that much. I’m finding it harder than I should to stop myself from panicking about Cassie and her feelings toward me. I definitely shouldn’t care about her hating me, but I do. I can’t stop myself. I ache for her to like me, to want to be closer to me, to hold on to me like there’s no tomorrow. I miss when she wanted me.

Stop it,I growl at myself as the frustration gets to me.Stop thinking about this. Stop it, it’s weird.

It’s because I feel like I know Cassie, because I’ve read up on snippets of her life in a file that Max gave to me. It isn’t even from her point of view, so I can’t judge anything about her. I certainly don’t know her well enough to feel anything for her. And just because she’s a beautiful woman isn’t a good enough reason. There are lots of beautiful women in the world, even if they don’t captivate me in the way that Cassie did right from the very first moment I laid eyes on her. In the pictures, and in real life.

“Where are we going?” she asks me quietly, her ragged breaths falling hard and fast out of her mouth. “The motel?”

“Not the motel.” I hate telling her this, but I have to let her know the change in plan. “Not right yet. I know we want to get back there, but we can’t. We were near the motel then, but those guys saw us. I have a feeling the gang will track us that way.”

Her breath catches in her throat and she pauses for a moment. “So, we’re going away from the motel right now?”

“We have to,” I let her know firmly. “We don’t have any choice in the matter. I know that isn’t exactly ideal…”

“Ideal? No, this is a nightmare.” She throws her hands in the air in frustration. “I can’t seem to get home. Every time I think that I might be headed in the right direction, the gang throws me further into the jungle. The hope makes it worse. When Iknowwith utter certainty that I’m going to die, then it’s one thing. But getting hope and losing it is another. It’s too much, I can’t stand it.” She clutches onto her stomach and holds it hard. “I can’t handle this anymore.”

“Don’t lose hope.” I can’t tell whether she wants me to or not, but I take her shoulders in my hands and stare into her eyes. “Don’t lose hope because I’m going to get you out of here. I have a plan in place. I know what we’re going to do.” I swing my bag in her direction and smile at her. “I have everything that we could possibly need in here. We’re going to be just fine.”

She doesn’t look convinced, but I know that we have everything under control. Max and his excellent planning win out all over again. Inside this backpack I have food, water, a tent, camping equipment… anything and everything we could need. I wasn’t fully intending to camp in the jungle, but I brought all of this stuff here with me for a reason, just because I knew thatanything could go wrong at any moment and it’s always better to be safe than sorry. Cassie and I will have to hide out some more.

“Are you sure we’re going to be fine?” she whispers sadly. “Because I’m really struggling to believe that.”

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