Page 81 of Out for Blood
My voice sounds foreign to my own ears.
A muscle jumps in his cheek and a myriad of emotions cross through his eyes.
A bruise is already forming beneath his fingertips.
All I can focus on is Tyler.
The look in his eyes.
I reach up and cover one of his hands with mine.
“I’m here.”
His shoulders unwind by a degree.
Then reality collides back around me.
Neither of us wants to, but we break our connection.
Tyler still stands beside me, eyes laced with concern on my face.
“We need to keep moving.”
The rain streams down both of us as I concentrate to get my breathing under control. I fetch my knives and head back to Tyler.
The light leaks from the warehouse in the dark like a living hell daring us to come closer.
Tyler takes my wrist briefly before we set off.
“You with me?”
I fix my gaze on the warehouse and wonder how much blood waits for us behind those walls. My hand flexes around the handle.
“Always.”
Tyler searches my face for a heartbeat longer before freeing my wrist. Then we move out.
The side entrance door of the steel gate around the warehouse sits thirty yards ahead near the loading dock, partially hidden beneath a rusted roof. A lone dim security light sputters above it through the storm.
Warning bells start ringing in my head. No one leaves an entrance this exposed, especially someone running an operation like this. Which means there’s another guard somewhere.
Tyler crouches beside the corner of the gate and checks his watch, rain dripping from his hair onto the ground.
“Two moving toward the west side.” The words leave him with unshakeable authority. “Probably making rounds.”
I scour the yard, once, twice, three times.
Shipping pallets, forklifts, stacks of plastic-wrapped crates turning ghostly beneath the rain.
Motion registers in my peripheral vision, and my gaze snaps toward it.
A flashlight beam skims across the gap between the containers before just as quickly retreating back into the darkness.
“There,” I whisper.
Two men, both armed. Walking lazily side by side holding umbrellas while one of them laughs at something on his phone.
My control on my emotions weakens, stretched thin by the faint screams coming from the phone’s speaker.
