HelenKay Dimon - Locked and Loaded

Then the world stopped tilting. She dared to hope they were safe. “Is it over?”

“Not for you.” The stranger’s voice came from behind her.

Before she could turn around, a beefy hand grabbed her arm and yanked her hard to her feet. Her muscles seemed to tear as if she were made of paper. Blinding pain shot up to her shoulder and pounded there.

The pressure of the attacker’s hand on her elbow made her vision blur. Nausea rolled over her, but she bit it back. She wanted to reach up and slap the man’s gun away. It hovered right in front of her face, pointed at the dead center of Adam’s chest.

Adam stood now, facing down the remaining gunman with his own weapon drawn. It was a standoff and suddenly it hurt just to stay on her feet.

“Let her go.” Adam’s voice dipped to a gravelly octave she’d never heard before.

A dark covering hid the gunman’s face, but she could see the white teeth in his feral smile. “You messed up. You only counted two.”

Adam’s gaze never wavered. He stared the attacker down, looking every bit as terrifying as the man in battle gear. “I’m guessing there were three of you.”

“Lower your weapon or I’ll kill her.”

“No.”

The pain took her breath away as the dizziness assaulted her brain. “Adam—”

The attacker chuckled in a deep grumble that promised an unending nightmare of anguish. “Listen to her panic. Now imagine what I’ll do to her before she dies.”

“You need her alive.”

“We’re not negotiating.”

She tried to focus on Adam, to send him a silent message that she was about to drop. But every time she blinked he shifted. It was subtle and the move so slight, but he now stood off to the left instead of directly in front of her.

And he kept talking. “That’s the plan, right? You need to take her back to your boss.”

“You don’t have to worry about it since you’ll be dead.”

Adam shook his head, then shot the attacker a patronizing grin. “No.”

She felt the gunman jerk. “What?”

Adam’s smile grew wider. “Your turn.”

“What are you—” With the gun blast the question turned to a gurgle. Blood spurted out of the man’s neck as his hands dropped and his body fell right after.

Shock and disgust knocked her speechless. Not that this was her first body or even her first bloodbath. No, she’d earned her ticket into witness protection the hard way, through the deaths of others. Still, she stood there held together by nothing more than a bit of adrenaline and watched the red puddle inch closer to her once white sneakers.

Adam reached out but didn’t touch her. “Maddie?”

“You could have killed me by accident.”

“I’ve got good aim.” Adam glanced around. “I think we’re clear here.”

Anger flooded through her and exploded, spewing with enough strength to break her. She clenched her jaw to keep from screaming him deaf. “You are supposed to be a computer guy.”

“Sometimes I am.”

His shrug just made her more furious. “What are you the rest of the time?”

“An agent with the Recovery Project.”

“What the heck is that?”

“I work for Rod Lehman.”

Just like that her anger evaporated. Melted right out of her. “Rod?”

“There are three things you need to know right now. Ready?” He didn’t wait for a reply. “Rod’s missing. You’re in trouble. We have to go.”

The pieces floated around in her mind, but she couldn’t put them together. “I don’t—”

“But first I have to fix your shoulder.” Adam tucked his gun in his waistband. “This is going to hurt.”

“What is?”

Before she could pull back or process what he planned to do, he bent her elbow at a ninety-degree angle then rotated her arm to the left then right. Each movement shot red-hot pain through her body. She cried out for him to stop as tears filled her eyes. When she couldn’t take one more turn, something popped in her shoulder and the ruthless agony stopped.

She tried to catch her breath, but she could only pant and glare as she rubbed the spreading soreness. “What was that?”

“I fixed your dislocated shoulder.”

She thought about strangling him with her good arm. “You killed two men—”

“Three.”

She shifted to her right and glanced around him. The third body lay just feet away from the spot where Adam had curled up around her on the ground.

She stared at him again. “Were you shot?”

He looked offended by the question. “Of course not.”

Massaging her injured shoulder made it throb even harder, so she stopped. “Right. How silly of me.”

“And it’s Wright.”

She looked him over for signs of blood, wondering how a guy could take out three obviously trained killers and not suffer anything more than a wrinkled shirt. “Do you have a head injury or something?”

“The name is Adam Wright, not Wallace.”

That little tidbit ticked her off. “And I’m just supposed to believe you?”

“Yes.”

Her fury was ridiculous. She knew that. She lived under an assumed name with a life she never wanted and certainly didn’t earn. She had no right to judge him. But now she understood she couldn’t trust him and that ticked her off. He’d taken out a trio of guys with guns, but she still didn’t know who was on what side.

And she could not depend on him to be honest. The only thing that saved him from a knee to the groin was the way he threw out Rod’s name.

“Is anything about you real?” she asked.

“I could ask you the same thing.”

Luke Hathaway stepped up to the conference room table of the newly rebuilt Recovery Project headquarters. From the outside, the place looked like nothing more than an abandoned beige warehouse near the southwest Washington, D.C., waterfront. Inside was a different story.

Monitors and enough flashy electronic machinery to make even the most hardened technogeek smile lined one wall. Adam had set up the surveillance part of the office, using the unwanted inheritance of Luke’s wife, Claire, to fund the construction.

Stairs ran up from the middle of the large open room to the crash-pad bedroom above. The space under the stairs served as both a storage space and an informal seating area with couches and chairs.

The building stayed in lockdown and required palm prints and a secret code for access. Luke insisted on the extra security measures after a group of commandos had stormed his suburban home and left in body bags.

Three months ago they’d operated as a quasi-governmental but still legitimate venture. They found missing people, both those who wanted rescue and those who were desperate to stay hidden. One of those missions had centered on Claire. Saving her had meant blowing their agency cover and losing their funding, all at the direction of a corrupt politician who had died in a shoot-out with Recovery agents.

Now they were a private organization, which meant no government oversight…and no one to stand up for them if they messed up. Since they rarely did, that was not much of a concern.

Luke took the seat at the head of the table and reached for the coffeepot in front of him. He poured what was his fourth cup before six in the morning. Much more and his eyes would float.

“What’s the word from Adam?” he asked the others in the room.

Without any planning or fanfare, the team had designated Luke their interim leader now that Rod Lehman, the previous boss, had gone missing. Making the head chair the one available to Luke was their way of reaching a silent agreement on the matter. Their loyalty humbled him.

“Adam checked in. Said there was gunfire during the extraction.” Caleb Mattern managed to fold his arms behind his head and shrug at the same time. “He took out three and is on the way back here with the Timmons woman.”