Austin nodded. “Call the flight crew. We’re out of here in two hours.” He ran a hand through his hair and pulled out his phone. “Keep the team here. Gray can take charge of the training, and I can go over the results with Connelly on video conference. I’ll call him now. You round up the guys.”
“Roger that.” Decker trotted up the stairs, and Austin swallowed his pride and called Connelly.
Anger coiled inside him as he apologized for the change in plans. He hated being at the mercy of these guns for hire. Hated the way Seaver fucked with his and Bella’s life.
“Yes, sir,” he told Connelly now. “A family emergency. I’m really sorry I can’t be there, but my men are highly trained and very capable of continuing the—”
The crack of rifle fire touched Austin’s ears a mere split second before bullets hammered his chest. The force pounded him backward, and he hit the sand on his back. His phone was flung from his hand. Pain swamped his body. His lungs froze. His head filled with the static buzz of white noise. He couldn’t pull in air.
Everything slowed to quarter time. Muscle memory had him reaching for his weapon. He aime
d into the jungle in the direction of the shooter and emptied his clip. The bullets pumped out of his Glock in a painfully slow stream of metal. Ty and Mark were already firing in the same direction.
Austin turned his head toward the ocean, toward Everly and Bella. He opened his mouth to yell, but nothing came out. He couldn’t fucking breathe. Everly pulled Bella off her feet with an arm around her middle. She pushed toward him, her lips moving with Austin’s name.
“Run!” he tried to scream, but still, nothing came. His vision blurred around the edges.
Ty headed toward the jungle while Mark put himself between the girls and the gunfire, guiding them toward the house. The shooter laid down a strip of bullets in the sand between the girls and Mark, separating them. The sand flew, and Everly flinched, turning her head away from the spray. Austin’s vision dimmed, graying around the edges.
Air. He needed air.
He forced his lungs to release. Forced his body to roll. He pulled in his first, painful lungful of air as Everly ran past him, handing Bella off to Decker. Then she was back, on one knee beside him.
“House,” he rasped. “Get in the house.”
“Did any get through?” She seemed unaffected by the gunfire as her hands searched his chest. “Are you hit?”
“No,” he managed, rolling to his knees.
She jerked on his arm and pushed to her feet. “Then get the hell up.”
Austin got to his feet just as somebody yelled, “He’s down. I repeat, the shooter is down.”
All gunfire ceased. A sudden silence rang in Austin’s ears. Then his own heartbeat. He bent, supporting himself with his forearms on his thighs. His head spun from the lack of oxygen. Spots danced in his vision. Every breath shot shards of pain through his chest.
“Sit down.” Everly pulled him to his ass on the stairs.
“You just told me to get the hell up,” he complained. “I’m okay. Just knocked the wind out of me.”
She ignored his assurances. Her hands went right to the two clips across the zipper of the vest and unsnapped them in seconds, then continued to the clip at his waist. Then the zipper came down, and her hands were underneath, probing. Her deliberate touch shot more pain through his body, and his breath stuttered.
Austin swore. “Everly.”
She ignored him, her expression fierce, her search for wounds methodical and quick. Her hands pushed beneath his T-shirt. Over the skin of his torso. When she confirmed what he’d already told her, she released a heavy breath, and tension drained from her body in a wave that buckled her. Before Austin could reach out to give her a reassuring touch, Everly gripped the railing and pulled herself to her feet.
“If this is Seaver, you’d better find a way to make goddamned peace with her.” She was breathing hard when she pierced him with a glare. “If it’s not, you’d better move Bella back to the States with her grandmother, where she’ll be safe.” She stabbed a rigid finger toward him. “Because this is not the way to raise a little girl. And don’t give me that happiness shit, because she can’t be happy if she’s dead.”
Six hours later, Austin popped another handful of ibuprofen and acetaminophen, the perfect pain-relief cocktail. There had been local authorities to answer to over the shooting, delaying their departure. Even with pain meds, he still felt like someone had taken a baseball bat to his upper body. And his heart was still stinging over Everly’s words.
He glanced toward the back bedroom, where Everly lay on her side, one arm protectively curved over Bella where his daughter had burrowed into her before she’d fallen asleep. Ty and Mark continued the search of public and private databases for links between Seaver and any military, paramilitary, security team, or guns for hire. Cody had flown to the Cayman Islands to demand answers in person from the company they’d used for the original four members of the supplemental security team. And Decker was pacing the aisle, his phone to his ear as he grilled various contacts within the government.
Austin refocused on his own laptop, where details of one of the Seavers’ bank accounts filled the screen. He scrolled through payments and transfers, stopping to skip to the internet to research any entity he didn’t recognize.
Decker ended his phone call to one of his many friends in secret places and dropped into a seat opposite Austin. “No one knows anything. What have you got?”
When Austin shook his head, Decker prompted the others with the same question. And got the same answer from everyone. They had nothing.
“She’s either covering her tracks like a pro,” Ty said, “or she wasn’t involved.”