Page 8 of Assassin's Prey
Just like they’d shared a soft bed at night. And died together in it.
My skin crawled, a thousand ants scurrying over it. I bit out a “fuck” and paced into the kitchen.
Remi stood at the counter, his hand literally in the cookie jar. Abby even had a damn cookie jar.
“Get the fuck out of there.”
Remi stuffed the cookie he held into his mouth, his other hand still digging for more. “Why?”
“Because it’s not yours, asshole.” And seeing my twenty-eight-year-old brother stealing cookies brought back even more ugly memories. Of another kitchen, another jar, and a dirt-smudged, towheaded boy stuffing his face. Why were the memories before my parents’ murder so much more gut-wrenchingly painful than afterward?
“Hey, you got the girl,” Remi mumbled around a mouthful. “The least we can get for risking our asses is oatmeal molasses cookies.”
God, not the oatmeal ones. If I walked any closer, the scent of butter and molasses and brown sugar would overpower me, I knew. I couldn’t admit a weakness for anything, including a goddamn cookie.
My vision went red. “Get your fucking hand out of the fucking jar, then get your fucking ass out on patrol before I put my steel-toed boot up it!”
Remi raised an eyebrow. “Don’t get your panties in a twist.”
I stepped closer.
With a slant to his lips that looked suspiciously like a pout, Remi grabbed a fistful of cookies, put the lid back on the jar, and headed for the garage. “Dickhead,” he muttered under his breath.
“You’re damn right,” I called after him. Remi shot a bird over his shoulder—with the hand not full of cookies.
Fucking hell.
My watch said we’d been here ten minutes, which was ten minutes too long. Time to get the hell out of Dodge. Trying to roll some of the tension from my knotted shoulders, I pivoted, my target the stairs and Abby. I’d almost reached them when the sound of shattering glass took over my world.
Thousands of shards flew through the air. My arm came up automatically to protect my face, but not before the sting of a hundred scratches raced across my skin. A loudwhooshfilled my ears, the sound duplicated behind me.
I lowered my arm in time to see the carpet runner lining the steps burst into flames. A Molotov cocktail. As I processed what I was seeing, a second bottle shot through the shattered window. A similar impact echoed in the living room.
“Damn it!”
Something happens to a man when he’s used to battle, when fighting is his world. The adrenaline rush comes later. In the moment, everything slows—time, your breathing, your heart rate. All that exists is the calculations in your head, the plan. In that moment my focus went laser tight, my only thought whether I should hit those stairs running or not.
“Abby!” I crept as close to the stairs as the ball of flames would allow, the heat shriveling my skin. “Abby!”
Her face, pinched and white, appeared in the upstairs hallway. “Levi!”
Footsteps pounded the hardwood floor behind me. I pivoted and dropped to one knee, my gun coming up in a heartbeat.
“It’s me.” Remi advanced despite the gun in his face, brushing glass from his hair and shoulders.
“Garage too?” I asked.
A sharp nod answered me. Damn it. Both Abby’s car and mine were in there. They could blow any minute. And if they went, so did the gas line in the kitchen.
“The French doors in the living room are toast,” Remi said. “Looks like there’s another down the hall. They got us on all four corners.”
They wanted us to die. And if we didn’t, if we got out, they would most likely be waiting.
Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck.
“Take the basement,” I told Remi. We’d extended the space to include an escape tunnel that exited in the woods behind Abby’s house. “Come around behind the bastards if you can, see what you can find. There’ll be at least four of them.”
He didn’t wait. We both knew how critical time was. Already the smoke was obscuring my view of Abby at the top of the stairs, stinging my eyes, filling my lungs. Soon the heat would push her completely out of my sight.
