Page 44 of Ruthless Keeper
“There’s no cover.” I try to think fast on my feet. Obviously, this is an enemy plane, so who knows what it’s equipped with. Hopefully, just surveillance equipment… but I fear it might be something much worse. “The greenhouse is made of glass.”
Max’s jaw clenches. He looks me up and down swiftly. “We need to run,” he says. His hold shifts to my hand, and without waiting for a response, he takes off in a sprint. I break out into the fastest run I can manage as well, heart pounding in my throat. If the presence of this plane is enough to makeMax, someone who kills people for a living, afraid, then I have every right to fear it.
Lucky for me, I’m extremely familiar with the sensation of fear. I grew up with it. I know how to let it propel me rather than handicap me.
In this moment, with a threat bearing down on me from the fuckingsky,my fear propels me to run faster than I ever have before… but it’s not enough.
As the plane passes overhead, I catch a glimpse of an object falling from it. Something that gleams in the daylight and drops toward theground at a dizzying speed. A horrible sinking sensation in my gut foretells the true danger…
Max jerks me sharply to the left a moment before a deafeningboomechoes through the field. Thebombdropped from the plane ignites in a horrifying pillar of smoke and flames… and then an unbearably searing wave of air singes my skin and sends me flying through the air, tossed backward by the force of the shockwave.
I land hard on my back with a sickening crunch. A horrible ringing in my ears robs me of the ability to hear. I try to gasp, only to find that my lungs are frozen. My vision’s blurred, the world around me dims, and for a moment, I feel my body teetering on the brink of failure…
Air rushes into my lungs, making my chest expand with a painful, ragged gasp. Agony detonates across my skin, and as my vision focuses, I see that some of my clothes were burned off—and the skin on one of my arms is blistering. I think I might’ve caught fire at some point.
I release several painful, wheezing coughs, forcing myself into a sitting position. Basic survival mode tells me that I need to get the fuck out of this open field before another bomb actually succeeds in blowing me up, but I don’t even know if I can stand. Everything aches, and my head feels like it’s stuffed full of cotton.
“Scarlett!” I hear a faint echo of Max’s voice through the disastrous ringing in my ear. I manage to turn my head to look for him… just as he squats down in front of me.
His clothes are ripped and singed, and there are smears of black char staining his face, but he seems to be in fine shape, without any visible injuries.
“Scarlett, we have to go!” he shouts, right in my face. His words, the panic staining them, manage to cut through my temporary deafness. “Can you run?”
I don’t have much of a choice. A quick glance into the sky shows that the plane is out of sight… but it won’t be long before it returns. And when it does, I don’t think I’ll be so lucky as to avoid a fatal blast.
Somehow, with Max’s help, I manage to get to my feet. The agonizing burn on my arm constitutes the worst of my injury—the rest of my body aches and pangs fiercely, but nothing’s burned, broken, or immobilized.
Max takes one look at my wobbling form, curses under his breath, andpicks me up in his arms. “Hold on,” he mutters. “Faster this way.”
He sets off at a break-neck pace, running as fast as we were before, evenaftersurviving a blast and carrying my weight in his arms. I curl my arms around his neck and squeeze my eyes shut,prayingthat I won’t be sentenced to death by explosion. There are a lot of shitty ways to go, and that one tops the list. If I’m going to die, I’d much prefer to go out by a bullet in my head or my heart—a quick death. Not an agonizing one.
Time slows to a crawl as the plane appears in the sky once again. The hairs on the back of my neck rise, and everything within me shrivels at the understanding that I’m going to die. Here, with the Nighthawks. In the arms of a relative stranger. In an open field that I could’ve turned into a self-sustaining farm.
I’m going to die after a half-lived life that was taken from under me by an obsessed madman, and is about to be cut short entirely.
My chest tightens with emotions, and a sob gets caught in my throat. I cling tightly to Max, waiting for the moment another bomb drops. Waiting for the sensation of being burned alive.
A deafeningboomsounds, but it comes from above us—not on the ground surrounding us. Screeching follows, and mere seconds later, the horrible noise of something crashing. The very ground beneathus rattles, as if there’s an earthquake. My eyes flash open and I look around, confused.Why am I not burning alive?
Less than fifty feet away from us lies the black jet that was dropping bombs, crumpled into a heap andon fire. Above us, ahelicoptercircles, one armed with a freakingmachine gun. The whirring of its blades is deafening, cutting through the fog dazing me, but I can make out the faint outline of someone manning the machine gun. Someone who, presumably, aimed it at the enemy jet and fired off a round that resulted in the crash.
The helicopter veers away, disappearing from sight, just as my vision begins to dip and swim. My adrenaline starts to crash now that the most immediate threat has been addressed, and the burns of my arm swiftly turn from extremely painful but tolerable to outright agonizing, enough so that a whimper gets caught in my throat.
“Scarlett—Scarlett,” Max says. He gives me a shake. I turn my head to look at him, listen to him, but the ringing in my ears has returned with a vengeance, and I’m losing my grip on reality.
Whatever Max is seeing prompts him to break out in a much faster sprint, and each of his steps jostle my body, overwhelming me with pain until black spots start to grow in my vision. They multiply and expand, turning into a swirling vortex that swallows me whole.
Chapter Seventeen
Greyson
I’m in a panic when I get back to the fortress. I’ve had two hours to agonize over every single horrible possibility on my drive back here, and the reports I’ve received from people on-base are not promising. Communications are largely down, but a single, haunting message got out; Scarlett’s in the medical wing. Despite my numerous requests for more information, I couldn’t get any, so my mind has been circling around to the worst possibilities imaginable.
She’s in the newly-constructed ICU, fighting for life.
She’s dead, and nobody wanted to risk telling me and inevitably becoming the messenger I shot.
She’s crippled, or she lost a limb, or she has hours left to live…
