Page 14 of Hunted

“Molotov to my friends.”

“Molotov?” She swung the wheel and the car veered wildly. She’d almost missed that curve. “Why Molotov?”

His answer was a slow grin, and he lifted the thing he held, pointing it behind them and pressing a button with his thumb.

An explosion rocked the earth. The car vibrated with it. The night glowed for a moment, and Lexi jammed the brake and the clutch at the same time, skidding to a stop.

She looked behind them, saw what had been that another dark van, minus several important parts. A bumper landed right behind the Porsche and she jumped so hard her head bumped the ceiling.

The van was on fire and men were spilling out of it like cockroaches when the lights come on. They scurried, then regrouped and ran forward, and she heard a rat-a-tat sound she couldn’t place at first.

Then the back window exploded, and she screamed.

The man who called himself Molotov—for obvious reasons—gripped her waist in his large hands and pulled her onto his lap. Before she could yell again, he was sliding out from beneath her into the driver’s seat. In what seemed like a heartbeat, they were flying, and one of his hands rose to the back of her head.

“Stay down, Lexi.”

Lexi stayed down.

Chapter Five

Romano didn’t know where her brief flash of moxie had come from, but it was gone now. She was curled into the passenger seat, hugging her knees to her chest, her long sable hair hiding her face. And he thought she was crying. Trembling, too.

When they finally hit a paved road, he slowed down just enough to avoid drawing undue attention. He turned up the heat, but it still didn’t make up for the winter cold coming through the demolished back window. She must be freezing, as well as terrified. Not to mention sick. He didn’t know much about those short of breath, chest grasping moments she’d had back there, but he didn’t imagine being traumatized and half frozen was exactly good for them. He wished she’d speak, strike up a conversation, say something, anything, but he didn’t expect her to. He wanted to draw her out of her shell and told himself that was just because it would make their forced companionship a little less awkward and tense.

“Are you sick or something?” he asked.

“No.”

One word answers. Great. “Is it asthma?” He didn’t know why the hell he’d asked that. He didn’t want to know anything about Lexia Stoltz, except where her father had hidden his man-made disease. He didn’t care about her health, that was for damn sure.

“PSVT."

“I don’t know what that is.” Let her answer that with one word, he thought.

“Paroxysmal Supraventricular Tachycardia.”

Three words. None of them in any language he spoke, except that last one. Tachycardia.

“That means it’s something with your heart, right?”

“It sounds scarier than it is.”

“Looks scarier than it is, too, I hope?”

She lifted her head a little, so her hair fell back and revealed her face, as she glanced sideways at him.

He shrugged. “When you grabbed your chest back there, it shook me.”

She looked at him a minute, like she was trying to see if he meant it. Then she said, “It’s like a misfiring spark plug. An electrical signal gets garbled, and tells my heart rate to go up too high. I didn’t count, but this was a really good one. Probably around two-twenty.”

“Two hundred twenty? Per minute?” He shot her a look, and he thought his own heart was speeding up a little. “That’s almost four beats a second.”

She nodded. “When it happens, I feel like I can’t breathe, even though I can. My blood isn’t carrying oxygen efficiently, so my respirations automatically get faster to try to make up for it. I get dizzy. I feel weak. Simple hyperventilation, but knowing it doesn’t help all that much. The worst that can happen is that I pass out. But it’s not damaging my heart muscle or anything, and if I take a simple beta blocker, it’ll convert back to a normal rhythm within a few minutes.”

“A few minutes seems like a long time to spend in that condition. What if you don’t have a … beta blocker on hand?”

“Don’t worry. I brought them.”

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