Page 43 of Run

Her tear-filled eyes met Ryan’s, and she mouthed “I’m sorry” before answering her brother. “You know the answer to that, Marcus. I don’t want anyone else to die. You really have turned into him, haven’t you?” Her voice trembled, and David took a step closer, wanting to hold her tight while she dealt with her brother but forcing himself not to. “You swore you’d never end up like Tommy. You swore.”

“You’ve got an hour to get to the Granger house.”

“Not possible. The drive takes more than an hour from here,” Ryan said. “An hour twenty, maybe, if the traffic cooperates.”

“Then an hour twenty it is,” Marcus said. “Come alone, Elle, or someone dies.”

“No,” David snapped. That was not going to happen. He plucked the phone out of Elle’s hand and held it close to his mouth. “This is David Knight. Your family set up an ambush for me in Amsterdam.”

Elle gaped at him, horrified, and his fingers tingled with the need to touch her. Which he didn’t.

“You aren’t running this show, Knight. I am,” Marcus said. “Put my sister back on the phone.”

Elle made a grab for the phone, but David moved it out of her reach, earning himself a glare and a quick kick to his shin. He was glad she was barefoot.

“Not going to happen,” he told Marcus. “We can do the exchange, but Elle won’t be alone. You take her; you take me. I’d like some payback for Amsterdam. How about you be a man and face me yourself this time?”

Marcus gave a bark of laughter. “Is that supposed to intimidate me? I’m happy to have you too, Knight. There are several parties who’d bend over backward to take you off my hands. You try anything, pull any tricks, and everyone dies. Am I clear?”

“We’ll be there in an hour twenty,” David said and hung up.

There was a moment of utter silence before Elle shouted, “Are you insane?”

Probably, but he wasn’t about to share that with the group.

“Knight,” Callum rumbled. “What did I say about working as a team? That means you don’t take over an op by making unilateral decisions. You’ve painted us into a corner, boy, and I am bloody furious. I should have kicked your arse out after that first debrief.”

“We can still salvage this.” Ryan clasped his hands on top of his head. “I know the layout of my granddad’s house like the back of my hand. We can storm the place and take them down.”

“Marcus would shoot your grandparents at the first sign of trouble,” Elle said softly.

His jaw tightened. “Then we go in covert and sneak them out.”

“Normally, I’d agree,” Joe said. “But we don’t have the time. Maybe if we’d said we were three hours away, we could have sneaked up on them. Right now, there’s very little wiggle room between when we’ll arrive at the house and when Marcus expects to see Elle. We can’t stage a rescue in under five minutes.”

“I shouldn’t have mentioned the drive time.” Ryan was clearly pissed at himself.

“It doesn’t matter,” David told him. “There was only ever one option in this situation. He wants Elle, and we need to give her to him in order to save your family. I’ll make sure she gets out in one piece.”

“That wasn’t your decision to make,” Callum snapped. “This isn’t a bloody movie. You aren’t James Bond. We’re a team. And you just undermined all of us.”

“It was the only choice.” David wasn’t intimidated. He might be the smallest man in the room by a couple of inches and some body mass, but he was definitely the most dangerous. And he’d faced off against far worse than Callum McKay. “Marcus wouldn’t have let anybody else go with Elle, and she can’t go in there alone, so that leaves me as the only logical choice. None of you have a price on your heads. I’m worth something to him.”

“So what?” Elle exploded. “You’re just going to sacrifice yourself for me? How is that smart? How does that help?”

“I have skills that will help us get out of whatever we’re walking into.”

She nodded, a little frantically. “I forgot. You’re a one-man army. You can take on the whole James Syndicate on your own. What was I thinking? You don’t need backup. You’re bulletproof.”

Rachel stood, sighed loudly, and strode to the middle of the room. “Argue later, children. We’re cutting it fine with drive time. David has chosen the plan. It’s stupid and will probably get him killed, but we’re stuck with it. I suggest we use the next couple of minutes to come up with a way to protect Elle as best we can before we have to be on the road.”

As the men continued to glare at David, Julia turned to Elle. “How can we track the two of you? We don’t have any tracking equipment, except for phones, which are easy to detect.”

“Harvard?” Elle said. “Is that a smartwatch you’re wearing?”

“Yeah, why?”

“I need it.”