Page 64 of Christmas Harbor Secrets
Rone clipped himself free.
A shot cracked.
Rone surged toward the scuffle, pushing through bodies.
“Enough!” Lucky barked.
One of the captors slammed Isobel into the wall, hands closing at her throat. Two men trained pistols at Rone’s head, but he kept coming, ignoring the leaden weight building under his ribs.
“Snap her neck if anyone else moves.” Lucky spat the words like acid.
They stopped Rone in mid-step.
“Enough of these games.” Lucky walked up behind Rone, and he was shoved to his knees, gun to the back of his head. “Enter the password in thirty seconds or this one dies.”
The fingers slid from Isobel’s throat, and she coughed and wheezed and fell to her knees. “Don’t. Know. It.” She managed between gasps.
“Better figure it out quick. Or he’s dead.”
Isobel moved, slow and methodical. Tripping every few steps as if she were a clumsy kind of girl, but she wasn’t. She was stalling, but for what?
That’s when Rone saw it: a pinprick of red, hovering in the dust motes, then steady, landing on the slope of Lucky’s cheekas he leaned toward the laptop. If you weren’t trained, you’d call it a trick of the light. Rone’s ribs iced over.
Sniper.
From the woods.
“I don’t think I’ll be doing that today since you just gave me a way out of this,” Isobel said with a tone that housed years of resentment and anger.
Lucky laughed, but his man shook his head.
The guard’s eyes flicked up and went wide. “Boss?—”
The shot came like the crack of dry wood breaking over a knee. The bulb above them burst, raining filament and glass. Lucky jerked sideways with a snarl, hand flashing to his cheek. Blood. Not a kill shot. A mark. A message.
Chaos ripped the room open.
“Down!” Rone snarled, lunging for Isobel. He caught her shoulder and yanked, dragging her off the line of that window as the second shot chewed a splinter out of the doorjamb where her head had been.
Men yelled. Rifles swung to the window. Someone outside opened up with a short, vicious burst that stitched the wall. Echo’s bark detonated against the roar—close now, no longer patient, all forward drive and teeth.
A Laurel Tide soldier rushed the window, turning to cover the breach just as a dark shape exploded through the torn screen—fur and muscle and momentum. Echo hit the man mid-chest and drove him backward into a table, jaws flashing for the wrist that held the rifle. The gun went off wild, the shot taking a chunk of ceiling and raining rot.
“Echo!” Rone’s voice broke in a way he didn’t recognize. The shepherd didn’t look, not for the command, not for confirmation. He was a streak of purpose, pivoting to the next threat even as hands grabbed for him.
Two more men swung their muzzles toward the dog.
Isobel moved.
She didn’t scream, didn’t freeze. She went for the cart, hip-checked it, drove her hands up under the edge, and heaved. The laptop pitched. Cables snapped. The cart surged and crashed into one of the gunmen’s knees. He went down with a curse. His finger clenched. The rifle barked.
Rone saw the line of the muzzle and knew the geometry before the sound hit his ears. He lunged toward her like he could outrun physics.
The bullet caught Isobel high, just above the collarbone. The sound it made was not like television. Flesh and bone don’t ring. They thud. They tear. Her body jerked once, all the breath driven out of her in a single, shocked exhale, and then she was folding, eyes wide with a kind of surprise that made something in his vision go white.
“No!” Rone’s voice tore itself. He stood in the line of the firefight and raced for her. He didn’t care about himself. There was only her.
And he couldn’t fail someone else. He’d die before he let that happen.
