“Loud and clear.” Alex leaped. In one quick motion he struck the weapon away from Theresa’s body and yanked Brick’s arm around behind him. Theresa fell free and stumbled forward. Brick yelped in pain. Alex wrenched Brick’s arm upward, using the pain and leverage to force him down onto the floor.
“Theresa, are you okay?” Alex stood over Brick. Concern filled his eyes as he searched her face. “Did he hurt you?”
She blinked. It had all happened so fast she’d barely been able to see it happening. But there Brick was, groaning on the floor, while Alex stood over him, keeping the huge thug down through pressure on his wrist alone. Her mind swam. This couldn’t be happening. She must be dreaming. Her former fiancé had always been an athlete, and Zoe said he excelled at his private security training, but she’d never expected...
“Theresa!” Alex’s voice rose. “Look at me. You’re in shock right now. I need you to focus. Are you hurt? Can you move?”
The word shock snapped her mind back like a jolt to the system. She spent a lot of her professional life explaining to clients that the surreal, frozen feeling people went through in a moment of crisis was perfectly normal. Not that knowing that had prepared her in the slightest for suddenly having her dashing ex come swinging in like an action hero.
“I’m okay. Not hurt.” She took a deep breath and let it out slowly.
“Thank You, God.” A quick prayer slipped through his lips, then his eyes locked on her face again. “Check him for weapons. Then grab the shotgun. Point it at buddy here. And tell me everything you know about his friends, where they’ve gone, who this Castor he mentioned is and whatever trunk he thinks I was here to steal. Quickly.”
“There were three of them.” Quickly she patted down Brick’s jacket and the legs. No weapons. Then she pulled the shotgun from a puddle of melting snow and trained it on Brick. Still Alex didn’t loosen his grip. “They’re looking for a trunk. Castor and Howler left while I was locked in the closet. I don’t know where they went. This guy’s named Brick. Castor asked me if I knew where Mandy and your sister were. He mentioned Mandy by name.”
“Well, as long as Josh is serving overseas we can’t ask him what he thinks his second cousin might be mixed up in.” Alex’s mouth set in a grim line. “Josh’s grandfather was in the military, too. Maybe Mandy’s side of the family inherited some old war medals or weapons, or something valuable from his tour of duty. Because, for me, a military footlocker is the first thing that springs to my mind when somebody mentions a trunk. But Mandy’s brothers are pretty well-off. Maybe one of them was storing something at their parents’ cottage that was worth stealing.”
“Maybe,” she said. “Castor seemed to think I should know something about it, but I don’t. You and Zoe know Josh’s family better than I ever did. I wondered if the intended target was Emmett or Kyle, too, not that an old trunk is the usual place a guy who’s almost thirty would keep his valuables.”
“Did Mandy say anything at all that would shed some light on any of this?” Alex asked.
Theresa shook her head. “No. Mandy was upset, but nothing to make me think she was afraid, let alone of something like this.”
“Doesn’t mean she wasn’t.” Alex took a step back, but his grip on Brick’s wrist didn’t falter.
“Do you have anything to add to this conversation?” he asked. “How about you tell me what you know about who this Castor is and why he hired you?”
A gun blast shook the air.
“Theresa, get down!” Alex shouted.
She turned toward him. For a second the world froze as she saw the strength that shone in his eyes. Then time sped up again and suddenly it was as if everything was happening at once. Alex dropped Brick’s wrist and pulled Theresa to the floor, knocking the couch over in front of them like a shield. A second gun blast sounded, then a third and a fourth, shattering what remained of the windows and tearing up furniture. Brick leaped to his feet, yanked a small handgun from inside his boot and returned fire, momentarily seeming to forget about her and Alex. Only then did she realize she no longer had a grip on the shotgun.
“We can’t look for it now,” Alex shouted. “Something secure. Somewhere low. Any thoughts?”
“There’s a hatch under the floor.” She pointed.
They crawled toward the hatch opening. Alex kicked it open. They tumbled through onto the brick floor below. The hatch snapped shut behind them. Darkness filled the space. Alex urged her up against the very corner of the wall. Then his body covered hers. His heart beat against her back. He pulled a rough tarp over them. Bullets and shotgun blasts rained in the cottage above them, roaring like a hailstorm. Then the noise stopped. Silence surrounded them, punctuated by nothing but the sound of their ragged breaths, their pounding hearts and whispered prayers mingling in the darkness. Her legs cramped beneath her. Her arms were pinned tight against her chest. She started to stretch.
“Wait.” Alex’s breath filled her ear. “Not yet.”
And then she heard the footsteps, one set, walking slowly through the cottage, stepping on the broken glass, kicking furniture aside. There was swearing in a muffled male voice.
Then there was the slow creak of the hatch door opening above them.
Light filtered down through the hole. Fear filled her chest. Panicked prayers filled her heart. Then the hatch clanged shut again, the footsteps moved on and eventually silence fell. After a long moment, Alex unfolded his body and crouched. “Stay here.”
He forced the hatch open and looked out. And she heard him sigh heavily, then pray for God’s mercy under his breath.
She crouched up beside him. “Everything okay?”
“I think we’re alone. The cottage is a wreck.” He hauled his body up through the hole. Then he looked back down at her face. “Brick is dead.”
* * *
Alex searched the rest of the cottage quickly, while Theresa waited in the relative shelter of the storage hatch. He found nothing. Except for Brick’s corpse, they were alone. The cottage had been so totally destroyed it was hard to imagine the criminals having any motive other than causing damage. When he returned to the living room, Theresa had already hauled herself up and was sitting on the edge of the hatch with her legs still dangling in the hole.
Okay, not quite where he’d asked her to wait. But no harm done.
“They’re gone, whoever they were.” He reached for her hand, helped her up and then closed the hatch behind her. “I only saw one shooter and it was a fleeting glance at that. He was about six-three, I would guess, masked, with square shoulders.”
“Sounds like Castor.” Her face paled as her gaze ran to where Brick’s body now lay. “But that doesn’t make sense. Castor knew I was here, too. He should’ve gone searching for me. But he barely checked the hatch.”
“We were pressed right up against the wall in the shadows,” Alex said. “If it was Castor, he probably thinks you escaped somehow. Do you have any idea why he would come back just to kill one of his men?”
“I have no idea.” She shook her head but she was still looking at Brick’s body. “But if it wasn’t him, it means somebody else is running around Cedar Lake destroying cottages. This is my fault. I didn’t think to check inside his boots when I was looking for weapons, and then I dropped the shotgun. If he’d run instead of returning fire he might not have gotten shot.”
Gently, he took her by the shoulders and turned her away from the body.
“Hey, it’s not your fault,” he said. “You do know that, right? It was chaos. That gun was hidden pretty deep inside his boot. I might’ve missed it, too. You pointed out the hatch.