Darkness(19)

“I told you to stand down.” Ezra’s voice was tight. He held a gun in his hand.

That was when Cal understood that he’d been shot. Ezra had shot him.

Their eyes met.

“You f*cking—” Cal broke off to launch himself at Ezra with murderous force. Taken by surprise, Ezra dropped the gun and stumbled back as Cal cannoned into him, knocking him into Hendricks, who was thrown from his chair. Hendricks scrambled around on the steeply tilting floor after the gun, Cal grappled with Ezra, and Ezra got his legs bunched against his chest and mule-kicked Cal, sending him flying backward into the cabin to slam against the wall.

Ezra was charging him, barreling through the cockpit door with a roar, when the front of the plane blew up. The cockpit, the first small section of cabin, the first two leather seats, Hendricks, Ezra, Rudy—disintegrated before his eyes.

Boom! Gone.

A split second later there was nothing around him but air. He would have screamed, but it was as if he’d been sucked into a vacuum. There is no air. He dropped like a brick, plummeting through thunder and lightning and dark, angry clouds.

Until he slammed into something that felt like concrete and blacked out.

When he woke up, he was drowning in an icy sea. As he struggled to not die, hope had appeared in front of him in the guise of a woman in an orange boat.

Now it seemed like hope had deserted him. For sure the woman had.

He’d be damned if he was going to just lie on this frozen beach and die.

There was Harley. And his mission.

He needed just a minute . . .

In his head, just as he was about to lose consciousness, he once again heard Ezra say of Rudy, “We got people waiting for him on the ground.”

The harrowing thought he took with him into the dark was: this place, this island, was the only ground around.





Chapter Eight





Get up.” Crouching beside him, Gina grabbed his upper arm and shook it. His bicep was iron hard . . . his eyes were closed. His face had a grayish pallor that made him look dead. Icy spray broke over them both even as she shook him again. The waves were getting terrifyingly close. “Get up!”

His eyes opened.

“The tide’s coming in. You’ll drown if you stay here.” Her voice was sharp. “You have to get up and walk. We have to go.”

The wind had taken on a high-pitched keening sound, and daggers of lightning lit up the bay. The sky over the water was black and boiling. The sea was blacker still, ruffled with gargantuan whitecaps that pounded the shore. Snow blew in thick and fast. The air grew colder by the minute, and yet the stranger stayed unmoving on the ground.

“We have to go,” she repeated urgently.

He blinked. Snowflakes were caught in his lashes, which were stubby and black. More settled in his hair and landed on his alarmingly slack face. They didn’t melt, which was more alarming still.

“I can’t carry you.” Gina found herself shouting against the wind. She crouched over him. Her fingers dug into his arm as she shook him once more. “You have to get up.”

He breathed in with a harsh wheezing sound. His face tightened, hardened. With what she could tell was a tremendous effort, he pushed himself up onto his hands and knees, and from there managed to lurch to his feet.

“That’s good.” She rose with him, still gripping his arm. He staggered drunkenly, a symptom of progressing hypothermia, she suspected, and she wedged herself beneath his arm to steady him. It draped across her shoulders, hard and heavy and practically immovable, giving her the uncomfortable sensation that she was his prisoner. Shaking off that unpleasant feeling, she grabbed the thick, masculine wrist hanging from her shoulder to steady him and wrapped her other arm around his waist, careful to keep clear of his injury.

So much for not being stupid, she reflected bitterly. Apparently she hadn’t changed as much as she’d thought.

Not that she was surprised at herself. From the beginning, in her heart of hearts, she’d known that it wasn’t in her to leave him to die, whether she suspected he might be dangerous or not. The good news was, his condition had deteriorated to the point where he wasn’t in any condition to harm her even if he wanted to.

She didn’t think.

In any case, she was just going to see him safe, just going to get him out of the storm.

“Walk,” she ordered with a fierceness that reflected her anger with herself, and walk he did. He seemed to be having difficulty controlling his legs, she discovered to her dismay. His gait was stiff and clumsy. Supporting him across the gritty, uneven sand was beyond difficult. They tacked back and forth, their forward progress owing much to the force of the wind.

“Where—to?”

She could barely hear him over the wind, but—God help her, was that a note of wariness in his voice?

“Away from the water,” she snapped, with no breath to say anything more. He seemed to accept that, or at least he, too, had no more breath to waste on speech, because he didn’t reply.

With him leaning heavily against her, they staggered up the beach. Clearly they weren’t going to make it very far: he was too heavy, the going was too hard, and the storm was blasting in too fast. Already the rising surf lapped almost at their heels. Intermittent bursts of sleet bombarded them along with the snow. Even with her back to the wind, her nose and cheeks were growing numb. She could taste the faint tang of melting snow on her lips. Somewhere she’d lost her snow mask; otherwise she would have used it to protect her face.