Page 12 of Penny for Your Saints

“Oh, shit,” Caz hisses under his breath as Louise Penny tears out of the massage suite like a bat out of hell—arms windmilling in time with her long strides as she makes great time down the hall.

Quentin lurches out of the doorway, his hand grasping at his knee.

It takes me a second to register the growing red blotch beneath his hand, but quickly my mind connects the dots as I watch Q pull a plastic ballpoint pen from just above his knee.

“Fuckin’ hell,” I groan softly, picking up our pace as we move down the hall—Quentin struggling after her, blood seeping down his pant leg as other staff members in the hall begin to scream.

“Seb, we have a big fucking problem,” I seethe as quietly as possible while Caz and I close the distance between us and Q. “We have a runner,” I grunt under my breath as we weave the cart through the panicked women crowding the hall.

“Merde,” Seb clucks on the other end of the line.

“Go, you try to catch up to her. There’s just not that many options for where to go—I’m going to get Q back to the van. If you can’t nab her in a minute or less—fucking bail—come back to the van and we roll,” I growl, low and heated with anger. I reach into the laundry cart, pulling the thin black nylon case containing the tranq rifle and darts from the pile of used sheets and towels, sling it over my shoulder and move to grab hold of the hobbling Quentin.

Caz keeps pace down the hall as I drape one of Quentin’s beefy arms over my shoulders. He’s almost a whole head taller than me and built like a comic book superhero—but I manage to get him off his bleeding leg and moving at a brisk pace toward the staff elevator and out of the building.

“What the fuck happened in there?” I spit as soon as the staff elevator doors close, whisking us down to the basement and the loading bay exit in relative obscurity.

“I paid for our hubris with my so-called ‘pound of flesh’.” Quentin sucks in air through his teeth with a wince, ripping a snowy white sleeve off of his athleisure zip up as if it were a wet paper towel, doubling over momentarily to tie the piece of fabric around his thigh with enough pressure to help stop the bleeding. “We seriously underestimated Miss Louise Penny,” he admits, though I can see how much it costs him—a wound to his pride and mine.

“Holy shit, she is fast and squirrelly as hell,” Caz huffs, his voice low and feathered by his ragged breathing. “I thought I had her, but she took off through the men’s locker room. Her feet are bleeding everywhere now though, so she shouldn’t be hard to track.”

Quentin nods, opening his hand in a signal for me to throw him the keys to the van.

“Ditch the bin Cazzy.” I grin at Q, tossing him the spare keys and dongle for our makeshift laundry van. “Follow our little friend as close as you can, Seb—you’re already on the west side of the building, Caz—funnel her down Seb’s hall, and I’ll get her at the fire exit bottleneck. Q will bring the van around to the west lot.”

Quentin and I take off in different directions out of the service elevator.

“She’s heading to Seb's hall—be ready,” Caz warns, as I swing out of a service exit—crouching low in the neat row ofornamental cypress hedges that act as cover for the unsightly utilities—air vents and electrical meters; my hands working all the while to assemble the tidy little tranq rifle as I approach the west fire exit.

The crushed white stone crunches beneath my boots, my eyes never leaving the fire exit door with its heavy push bar and bright yellow and orange signage.

“Intercepting now,” Sébastien bites out before falling silent again.

I listen to my heartbeat,bu-bump, ba-bump, ba-bump.

As sideways as this whole thing has gone, the fact is—Louise Penny has a terry bathrobe and slippers to her name right now, and Sébastien is packing a handgun. It’s no contest.

Still, the acquisition should have been essentially instantaneous…

“Seb, what the fuck is going on in there? Did you nab her yet or not?”

“Shit!” Caz yelps suddenly. “Oh fuck, are you serious!?”

“Caz, talk to me!” I bark back.

“She’s going full on kung-fu movie on Seb’s ass right now—she disarmed him and now—Oh shit!”

That’s all I need to hear. I’m on my feet and kicking in the fire escape door in my next breath.

You know that they say: if you want a job done right—you gotta do it yourself.

The bright midday sun beams into the mood-lit resort hallway, Louise’s eyes narrowing to slits instinctively against the sudden burst of brightness.

Even stripped down and bleeding, Louise Penny’s sigma aura is absolutely insane. Even though I’m an alpha, I can feel it exerting its pressure on me—like someone adding one cinder block to your chest, then moving on to a second one.

There’s no time to waste, then.

"I see we got us a lively one here, boys!" I cheer before pumping a tranquilizer dart into the meat of her thigh.

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