Page 118 of Surrender to Me
He hits the snow in a brutal roll, up on a knee in one fluid movement and opens fire.
It’s surgical.
Terrifying.
Beautiful, in the way lightning is beautiful when it hits too close.
One man goes down instantly—dropped by a single shot that snaps his body backward.
I crouch, desperate to avoid the hail of gunfire.
My heart slams against my ribs. My ears ring. The cold bites into the tear in my arm, the warmth of blood startling against the freezing wind.
The man who taunted me turns his gun back on me, but he’s too slow—Stryker sees him.
He fires again—precise, decisive.
The bad guy jerks, staggers, then crumples into the snow.
Another tries to flank him, sprinting low along the tree line.
Stryker turns and fires, missing by less than an inch, and the man dives behind a fallen log.
Then he bolts into the tree line and jumps on a snowmobile that I hadn’t noticed before and guns the throttle.
Snow settles like dust over the bodies.
The clearing goes still.
My vision tunnels, the edges pulsing black.
My breath catches, thin and sharp. The gun is still clutched in my shaking hands, but I couldn’t pull the trigger again even if it were loaded.
The rifle of my would-be assailant lies only a few feet from me.
Close. Reachable.
A surge of instinct overruns the terror, hot and sharp and primal.
Move, Lyra.
Dropping my gun, I throw myself forward, closing my fingers around the cold metal of his rifle.
Before I can even breathe, a muzzle flash ignites from the far side of the clearing. The gunman is half-hidden behind a drift, sighting down on Stryker’s back.
I don’t think.
Instead, I wrench the rifle up, aim it, and fire, acting on terror and muscle memory.
A scream tears across the clearing—sharp, startled—and the man collapses sideways into the snow, his rifle skidding from his grasp.
My chest heaves, my pulse a frantic drumbeat.
I’m not sure if I hit him clean or if the impact just knocked him off balance. I only know the shot was going to Stryker. And now it isn’t.
Then there’s sudden, awful silence.
This whole exchanged seemed to last a lifetime, but in reality, I’m sure not even two minutes have passed.
