In His Keeping (Slow Burn #2)(99)

What she did see froze her heart to the very core and fear blazed like a wildfire through her veins.

There were multiple puddles of blood—a mortal amount of scarlet liquid pooled on the floor exactly where she’d instructed her parents to stand. Fresh blood. Worse, there were smears of blood that ran from the spot in front of the cot all the way to the door, and as she looked down, she realized it had continued into the hallway. What the hell had they done to her parents? Had they shot them and then dragged them off to parts unknown?

While she was being snarky and sarcastic, indulging in taunts with her enemies, her parents had been left unprotected because she wasn’t adept at multitasking with her newly tapped powers.

Utter despair, grief and . . . rage flooded her mind, swamping her in wave upon wave of agony. She’d failed. She’d vowed to them she could do this. Had made them swear they’d trust her.

And she’d failed.

Desolation and vast emptiness invading her soul, she slowly turned, her eyes glowing so that she felt the warmth emanating from them. Robotically, she stalked back through the passageways, the twists and turns that would take her back to the center.

God help whoever crossed her path. Gone was her conscience, her squeamishness over killing quickly and efficiently. Revenge and retribution consumed her. She could taste it, feel it. Wrapped herself in its cold and soulless embrace.

A sound alerted her to the presence of men in the passageway with her. They stepped in front of her, an ambush.

She lifted her frigid gaze, completely unruffled by the fact that they were spraying the entire hallway with bullets. They bounced off her, off the barrier that had formed without her even needing to focus on its construction. She saw fear in their eyes, the realization that she was untouchable. It was the last cognizant thought they’d have.

She simply snapped their necks—a quick mental flick of her powers and they collapsed onto the floor. She kicked one aside as she pushed past them, not giving them any more attention than they deserved.

They would pay. They would all pay. Starting with the bastard still suspended from the ceiling where she’d left him minutes before.

THIRTY-FOUR

“WE’RE going in hot,” Beau said grimly as the highly classified stealth chopper prototype that did not officially exist zoomed over the land, hugging the treetops and traveling at a dizzying rate of speed. “This has to be fast, as clean as possible, until we retrieve Ari and her parents. Once they’re accounted for and safe then I vote we level the entire goddamn place.”

“Fuckin’ A,” Zack muttered.

“That gets my vote,” Eliza said, a scowl darkening her pretty features.

Dane simply nodded his own agreement while the other two operatives, Isaac and Capshaw, gave a thumbs-up, something that amounted to eagerness reflected in their eyes.

They were all looking forward to some serious payback after the breach that resulted in Ari’s abduction. It was a black mark and a blow to their pride that they’d been f*cked on their own turf. For a second time.

When this was all over with, Beau was going to take great satisfaction in leveling the f*cking house that had proved nothing more than a means of hurting the people he loved. And if he was lucky enough to have a future that included Ari—God he hoped he wasn’t setting himself up for major disappointment—then he’d build a f*cking fortress that would make security at Fort Knox look like child’s play.

Ari would always need protection from the public eye and fanatics wanting to harness and use her powers for their own twisted agenda. Oh hell no. Not while he breathed.

Just as Caleb had closed ranks around Ramie and was ruthless in his protection of her, so too would Beau do the exact same with Ari. He may not have understood his brother’s overzealousness when it came to Ramie in the past, but he damn well understood it now. Identified with it. He’d spend the rest of his life keeping Ari safe, no matter the cost.

“Almost there,” Dane said, his eyes sharp with readiness for the mission ahead. “Everyone needs to be ready to go on my count. This has to be fast because we’re open targets when we descend the ropes from the chopper.”

Dane, with his endless connections, half of which still managed to bewilder Beau, had gotten his hands on a f*cking military stealth helicopter that was invisible to radar and looked like something out of a futuristic movie.

It always pays to have friends in low places.

That was Dane’s pet phrase and one he frequently whipped out when asked how the ever loving f*ck he managed to get his hands on something most civilians would never even know existed, much less actually see. Not that they’d know what the hell they were looking at if they ever did lay eyes on it.

Zach, who’d headed the recon of the partially underground compound in the Mojave Desert, had uploaded scanned schematics from ground and air surveillance. Using a high-tech classified heat-seeking device, they’d been able to identify three heat signatures just hours before on the periphery of the compound where old jail cells were housed. And Beau had been able to confirm that Ari was one of those heat sources by pinpointing her location with the implanted tracking device. Thank God they’d at least gotten that accomplished before everything went to hell or they truly would be uncovering a needle in a haystack, and he shuddered to think of Ari being out there and him not having the first clue where to start their search for her.

The building used to be a sanitarium in the 1800s. The prison cells were later added in the early 1900s when the hospital had turned into a maximum-security prison for the criminals clinically insane and exceedingly dangerous to society.