The Jackal (Black Dagger Brotherhood: Prison Camp #1)(77)

She picked the one on the left and aimed. Just before she pulled the trigger, she had a passing image of herself at the farm, out by the lower paddock, picking soup cans and water jugs off the fence line at fifty yards.

This was a whole different ball game.

When she pulled the trigger, she didn’t wait to see if she had hit the target of that calf. She immediately discharged the weapon at the other guard’s lower leg. Then it was back to the first—but she’d always had good aim, and she’d nailed her mark: The first guard was hopping on one foot, and as he slumped against the truck’s hood, she aimed again— and popped him in the other knee. As he howled and went to ground, she picked off the one who was still standing by hitting the meat of his thigh, the spray of blood a graceful sprinkle that caught the headlights in a flush of red.

As both of them writhed and hollered for help into the communicators on their shoulders, she swallowed through a dry throat. Closing her eyes, she knew what should come next.

Her . . . or them. If she let them live, they were injured and armed. A bad combination—and she and Kane had to get out of wherever they were.

“Do it,” she said under her breath.

Bullet to the brain. Or the chest.

Bullet to the . . .

. . . brain. Or to the chest—

“Shit,” she hissed as she sagged and let her forearms relax.

Nyx just couldn’t murder two males in what felt like cold blood. It was one thing if she had a gun in her face, a direct threat to her life. But this? She wasn’t a killer. She wasn’t like Apex.

She wrenched around. “Where do we go from here?”

Kane looked to the guards, who were both rocking on their backs and alternating between holding one of their legs and then the other.

“Come on,” he said.

When he took her hand, she scurried out from under the truck bed with him, and then they tore off as fast as they could go—

Right into a landslide.

Some twenty feet of walling had collapsed, and she didn’t have time to wonder about the whys or the wherefores. Kane led the way up the mound of debris, and then they were on the other side, and tooling down the properly paved road that was lit from the ceiling. But they didn’t go far.

Two or three hundred yards away, a bright light was kindling, and she could hear a big engine growling as something approached. It had to be another semi.

“In here,” Kane said as he pulled on her arm.

A fissure in the rock wall presented itself at just the right time. As the next semitrailer truck rounded a corner and its headlights pierced the road right where she and Kane had stood, they jumped out of sight and squeezed into a horizontal crack the size of a shallow closet.

As he’d gone in first, she was on the outside, so she got a good look at the flank of the vehicle. Gray and black, just like the other one, with a cargo trailer that was big enough to fit two stacks of four cars. After it passed by, she caught another whiff of the sickly perfume of a diesel engine.

When she went to leap out, Kane tugged the sleeve of her tunic.

“No, wait. Those two guards will have called for—”

Multi-colored flashing lights now, down from where the second semi had come from—and then the van that streaked by them had “Ambulance” written all over it. Literally. With the red cross and a logo that looked legit on its flanks, it could have passed for an official human one—which was undoubtedly the point.

“We need to wait,” Kane said. “There’ll be another truck. And that’ll be the one you need to get on. Right on the top of the trailer. Stay flat, stay down.”

Nyx turned her head toward him and focused her tired eyes. There was enough illumination reflecting in from the road’s light fixtures that she could make out his face. He was bleeding at his hairline and pale beneath a layer of dirt and oil.

“What . . . what happened?” She sneezed into the crook of her elbow. “ ’Scuse me. What happened back by the Hive? Why the change?”

Kane shuffled his arm around in the tight squeeze and then he was offering her a square of cloth. “You’re bleeding.”

As she stared at the kerchief, he sighed. “I wish it were of better quality. I used to have ones of hand-loomed silk. With my initials.”

When he put the cloth above one of her eyebrows, she winced. “What happened?”

“The lockdown.” He shook his head as if he were frustrated. “When I tried to get to the transport area, to do the risk assessment, I could not get anywhere near it. They’d blocked off the entry to where the delivery trucks were—and no one called in for the shift was allowed anywhere near them. The guards themselves were doing the loading. I realized I had to take you another way.”

“What about Jack?”

“He’s going to run into the same problem even if he goes through the Command’s area. I don’t think they’re going to let even him in there. I’m so sorry.”

Nyx didn’t go there. Couldn’t go there. She shied away from the implications of her leaving right now, without saying goodbye to Jack.

“Shit,” she breathed. “I almost shot you.”

Kane smiled a little. “That’s the only reason I fought with you. I never would have put upon you a hand if I had not been convinced that if I did not, I would be a dead male where I stood.”