The embassy was under siege.
Darcy managed to get his pistol out of his holster, but his movements felt slow and awkward, as if he couldn’t quite convince his limbs to do what he asked of them.
A pair of small but strong hands wrapped around his arm and pulled. “Move it, Darcy! We’re under siege!”
He turned to look at the speaker, tried to focus on her small, freckled face and her sharp green eyes, but the world seemed to be spinning out of control, around and around until black spots started to appear in his vision.
She muttered a profanity and started yelling for help in that hillbilly accent of hers that always made him smile. He tried to smile now, but his face felt paralyzed.
Nothing made sense. Not anymore.
His world fragmented into a thousand shards of light, then faded into nothing.
Nick Darcy woke to the sort of darkness that one found miles from a big city. No ambient light tempered the deep gloom, and the only noise was the sound of his heart pounding a rapid cadence of panic against his breastbone.
Only a dream.
Except it hadn’t been. The embassy siege had happened. People had died, some in the most brutal ways imaginable.
And he’d been unable to save them.
He pushed the stem of his watch, lighting up the dial. Four in the morning. As he sat up and reached for the switch of the lamp on the table beside him, he heard a soft thump outside the cabin. His nerves, still in fight-or-flight mode, vibrated like the taut strings of a violin.
Leaving the light off, he reached for his SIG Sauer P229 and eased it from the holster lying on the coffee table in front of the sofa.
The noises could be coming from a scavenging raccoon venturing onto the cabin porch or the wind knocking a dead limb from one of the blight-ridden Fraser firs surrounding his cabin.
But between his years with the DSS and the past year he’d been working for Alexander Quinn at The Gates, he knew that bumps in the night could also mean deadly trouble.
As he moved silently toward the front door, he heard another sound from outside. A soft thump against the door, half knock, half scrape.
There was no security lens set into the heavy wood front door of the cabin, a failing he made a mental note to rectify as soon as possible. He improvised, edging toward the window that looked out onto the porch and angling his gaze toward the welcome mat in front of the door.
The view was obstructed by the angle, but he thought he could make out a dark mass lying on the porch.
He checked the SIG’s magazine and chambered a round before he pulled open the front door.
A woman spilled inside and crumpled at his feet.
Fearing a trick, Darcy swept the porch with his gaze and his SIG until reassured the woman at his feet was his only visitor. Crouching next to her, he didn’t touch her at first, looking for any signs of a booby trap or some sort of body-worn explosive.
Instead, he found blood. A lot of it, seeping through the woman’s dark sweater and leaving a smear on the hardwood floor of the cabin.
In the dark, he couldn’t make out much more about her except that she was small and slimly built, with a mass of curly hair that seemed to wrap itself around his fingers like a living creature as he pushed it aside to take a look at the face hidden beneath.
Even in the gloom, there was no mistaking the belligerent round chin or small, slightly snub nose.
“Rigsby?”
She stirred at the sound of his voice, her eyes opening enough for him to catch the slight glitter of reflected moonlight before her eyelids fluttered closed.
He pushed to his feet and flicked the light switch by the door, squinting against the sudden brightness. Illumination only made things seem more dire, he observed as he knelt beside McKenna Rigsby’s still body and checked her vitals.
Her pulse was stronger and steadier than he’d anticipated. Good sign. The blood on her sweater, while sufficient in quantity to be alarming, seemed limited to only that one spot near her rib cage. He eased the sweater up and away from her skin, revealing a pair of bullet holes in the soft tissue of her left side, beneath the rib cage but above the curve of her hip. Not a large caliber, he saw with relief. The bullet had gone in and out without leaving a large exit wound.
Still, she needed medical attention, and soon.
Well, as soon as EMTs from town could get out to this stretch of wilderness in the Smoky Mountain foothills.
What was McKenna doing here? Had she come here looking for him after all these years?
Questions can wait. Find the phone. Call 911.
As he started to rise, McKenna’s hand snaked out and grabbed his, keeping him crouched beside her. Her eyelids opened to reveal bright green eyes dark with pain. “Don’t trust anyone.”
“What?”
“Don’t trust anyone. Don’t call a doctor.” Her grasp weakened, her hand slipping away to fall with a soft thud to the floor. Her eyelids shut again, and she was out once more.
At any other point in his life, he’d have ignored her whispered commands and called 911 anyway. But the past few years had taught him a hell of a lot more than he wanted to know about treachery. He was on suspension from The Gates because of someone’s treachery, with no access and no way to find out who was trying to destroy his life.
Tugging the sweater up again, he looked more closely at the bullet wounds, trying to remember everything he knew about field triage. Her pulse was still strong and steady, and the blood on her sweater, while a gory mess, wasn’t more than a couple of pints. As long as no vital organs or blood vessels had been hit, she could survive that much loss of blood if he could stop the bleeding and rehydrate her.
The bullet holes in her side were only a half inch or so from the curve of her abdomen, so it was possible the bullet had gone through flesh only, missing any organs.
But why was she unconscious?
He checked her head, ignoring the way her curls tangled around his fingers as he gently probed her skull for any sign of a head injury. He felt no bumps, no cuts or abrasions, nothing to suggest she’d taken any sort of blow to the head. He sat back on his heels and observed her for a second.
She appeared thin. Thinner than he remembered, certainly. Her skin was naturally fair, but the darkened shadows beneath her eyes gave him an uneasy feeling in the pit of his stomach.
“Rigsby?”
Her eyelids fluttered open. “Hi.”
He smiled. “Hi. Can you stick around this time and tell me what happened?”
“I’m tired.” Her eyes started to close again.
He gave her a light shake, earning a grimace of displeasure from his patient. “If I’m going to do what you asked and not call a doctor, I need you to give me a good reason for my restraint.”
Her eyes snapped open again, meeting his steadily for the first time. “Darcy.”
“Rigsby.”
Her lips curved slightly at his dry response. “Of all the cabins in all the Podunk little mountain towns...”
“You had to fall headfirst into mine.”
“I knew you lived here.” She made the admission as if she was a little embarrassed. “I didn’t know who else to trust. Not even sure