Take (Deliver 5)

Furniture tipped upside down, legs in the air. Debris and breakage covered the dance floor, the musicians gone. And the partygoers…

Some lay on the floor in fetal positions, trying to protect their ears and organs. Most ran toward the exit. Others stood off to the side, shell-shocked and unmoving. The rest had been tossed amid the blast, at least a dozen dead.

Tiago spun toward her and gripped her shoulders, shouting with his eyes. His mouth barked commands, but she couldn’t hear him over the deafening noise.

He surveyed the glass-covered floor, glanced at her feet, and scooped her up into his arms. It was a considerable distance to carry her over the wreckage from one end of the demolished ballroom to the other, but gratitude overrode her stubbornness.

Wrapping her arms around his shoulders, she pressed her face into his neck and held on.

She assumed Arturo and Cole followed behind, but she was afraid to look. A barrage of closely spaced gunshots broke out around them, firing close enough to damage her eardrums.

The President’s opposition might’ve been here to assassinate him, but if they were willing to bomb a house full of people, they didn’t care who they hit in the crossfire.

Tiago tucked her close to his body, bowing over her with his head ducked as he ran like hell.

She wished she had a gun, so she could shoot back. She wished they’d stayed in bed and skipped the fucking party. But wishes wouldn’t help them. They needed a fucking miracle.

The din of the surrounding chaos redlined her heart rate. The blaring alarms, panicked screams, and approaching gunfire pounded from every direction. She lifted her head.

Twenty feet from the exit. Almost there.

As every nerve ending in her body stretched toward that door, a great thunderous clap blew apart the world.

One second, she was in Tiago’s arms beneath a vaulted ceiling. The next, she was airborne under the open nighttime sky.

Then everything went black.Kate floated in a painless state of silence and disorientation. Every few seconds, a series of flashes burst through, like the intermittent vibrations of a dying heartbeat.

She couldn’t hear anything. Not her cries or her breath. Was her head detached from her body? Or her limbs? That didn’t make sense. But why couldn’t she move?

“Tiago.” His name chanted from her mind, but she wasn’t sure her voice touched the air.

The floor shook violently beneath her. More explosions, farther away. Alarms strobed, but the wailing didn’t penetrate her ears. People stumbled and ran, but she couldn’t hear their screams.

As she attempted to recover her senses, a blanket of hellish heat saturated the front of her body. Blinking through semi-blindness, she stared up at a pillar of fiery smoke and dust. It rushed out through sections of the roof that had been destroyed by the blast.

Blackened orange flames billowed from the rubble near the exit, baking the startled air. A pressurized wind swept through the room, pulling on her, as if trying to draw her into the fire.

“Tiago!” She struggled to turn her neck and found herself lying by a wall some distance from where he’d been carrying her.

Panic tortured her heart, and her muscles refused to respond. It was so dark, so confusing. Why couldn’t she see him? Or feel his hands on her? He would never leave her behind.

The blackness shuddered with jarring flickers of light. Bullets ricocheted, kicking up dirt across the floor. She tried to sit, until she felt the reverberation of approaching feet.

She held still, her stomach clenching as a dozen black-clad men with guns ran past her, their boots stepping close enough to bounce the broken pieces of wood beneath her.

Her hearing detected fragmented sound within her body, like the whooshing of blood and crackling static. Was she hurt? She couldn’t sense pain or time, and her brain didn’t seem to be working right.

Consciousness shriveled to a pinprick of light, and she strained for it, desperate to stay alert.

After a while, something touched her. Frantic hands, shaking her shoulders and rousing her awake.

Oh God, she’d passed out? For how long?

She opened her eyes, her mouth, struggling to identify the face hovering over her.

Brown hair, blue bow tie, American features—none of the details she ached to see.

Cole Hartman jostled her limp body, his lips moving without sound.

“Where’s Tiago?” She braced a hand against the splintered debris beneath her and pushed up. “Where is he?”

Her head pounded something fierce, and sporadic noises filtered in, making the pain unbearably worse.

She must not have been unconscious for very long, because the same chaotic level of disorder raged around her—the fire, the gunfight, the exodus of terrified people.

Tiago was nowhere in sight.

They were on an island. Did that mean there wouldn’t be fire crews or ambulances? Where the hell was the mob of people running to? Where would they go?

Away from the fire and spraying bullets.