Fueled by endorphins, I drove a fist into Hannah’s side, my hands moving to block her return blows. I had some self-defense training from the police academy, but this woman was on a completely different level. She expertly picked apart my attack, blocking three punches before smashing my head straight back down into the earth.
Dizziness washed over me as my eyes went blurry.
Hannah’s grip loosened as she pulled herself away from me. She was scrambling against the dirt, her knee driving painfully into my chest as a parting gift. I didn’t have time to react as the blinding light that bathed us suddenly rolled away. I gazed to the sky again, watching as the spotlight spun upward, the huge beast of a flying machine rolling unnaturally toward the hillside.
“It’s going down!” I heard one of the Dragons shout as I spun back around toward Hannah. She was pulling herself to her feet, and even with the world spinning around me, I could spot the telltale grey lump held tightly in her hand.
The phone!
THE BOMB!
My body was on autopilot, fingers clawing the ground and desperately trying to put distance between the container and myself…
Coming to rest against something that didn’t belong…
Something hard, something metal, something my mind had been intimately conditioned to recognize and use on instinct from my time served on the force…
“It’s over, little brother! Tell your men to stand down!” Hannah screamed, her voice punctuated by the horrific sound of the huge helicopter slamming into the ground a few hundred yards away.
The mighty blades swung and obliterated themselves against the mountainside, before being consumed by an explosion that lit the night sky.
The gunfire had ceased, but my ears were still ringing loudly. Hannah crossed the distance between us, reaching down and grasping me by the hair with her still intact left hand. My fingertips curled around the small but remarkably heavy object beneath me, the dangerous lines of the weapon so very familiar.
I knew the weapon by feel alone.
It was a Glock 19.
The same handgun I was issued when I first joined the force. Efficient. Reliable. Deadly. I’d fired thousands of rounds from a gun just like this one, and as my scalp screamed out in pain, my hand was tingling in anticipation.
“You’re not driving out of here, Hannah. You’re not going anywhere!” Hunter replied, his voice full of obvious pain. My heart screamed out and my body recoiled as Hannah tugged at my hair again, lifting my chest up from the ground and twisting my neck in an unnatural direction.
“My patience is over!” She screamed out. “I am getting in that fucking truck, and now… Now, I’m taking your girlfriend and your unborn goddamn brat with me... You move a muscle and I’ll break her fucking neck. You come near me and I’ll blow us all to fucking hell!”
I felt her anger swell as she yanked my hair a little harder. Furious, animalistic rage had overcome this woman who had seemed so badass at first, so vested in the interest of my pregnancy and my place in Hunter’s life…
“You stupid, goddamn idiots!” She continued to snarl. “I gave you – both of you – a fucking chance to get out of this shit unscathed, and you wasted it! I was going to let all of you goddamn walk away from this!”
“Hannah, you’re my sister!” Hunter shouted out to her over the burning wreckage nearby. “We could have worked together! I would have helped you! I would have went to the ends of the fucking Earth for you!”
“You just don’t get it, do you?” She replied with unhinged laughter. “Hannah is dead, Hunter. Your older sister as you knew her died a long time ago, and you’re just too stupid to see it.
“I won’t let you stop me again. I won’t let any of you stop me. I’m going to save lives. Millions of fucking lives!” Hannah screamed. “I’m going to be a hero! You think I’m dangerous? You don’t know the people I’m fighting! You could never understand the bigger picture of what I’m doing!”
“I’m… I’m sorry, Hannah,” I murmured.
Hannah pulled at my hair a bit harder, looking down and catching my gaze. My hand came up from beneath me, and I pulled the trigger. A gunshot rang out as Hannah’s hand unwove itself from my hair.
And then everything went completely black.
Sarah
I was falling, tumbling, rolling down a dark and empty abyss. Everything felt hazy and foggy, and I could barely stand the idea of even opening my eyes. My arms and legs were sluggish, my breathing was heavy, but I knew that I had to go back.
I had to see Hunter again.
Forcing my eyes gradually open, I abandoned that dark pit in my head. As painful light started to filter in, I murmured, moving to slowly cover my face.
“Sarah? Princess?”
That voice…
Hunter.
My eyes snapped open, and I gasped a deep breath of air. I felt strong hands on me and I fought them, barely able to rein myself in as I started to burst into uncontrollable tears.
“Babe, I’m here, it’s okay…”
It was his voice.
My rapid heartbeat began to settle, and I stopped trying to shove him off of me as I broke down in my darling Hunter’s rugged, warm embrace.
As I started to pull myself together, I realized that I was in a hospital. Some tubes were connected to me, some of which I’d dislodged in my frantic panic attack.
There was someone else here now, a nurse. She was talking to Hunter, looking at me in concern. He was saying things to her…
Don’t let them take him away from me.
But she didn’t. Instead, she left the room, and Hunter returned his attention to cradling me and running his fingers through my hair. I stared up, taking notice of the bandages wrapping his shoulder tightly.
A few minutes later, the nurse returned with a doctor, and they reconnected the tubes and monitored my vital signs before trying to speak to me. I could barely understand their questions, but Hunter helped. The doctor jotted down some answers on a clipboard, looking stern and unhelpful, but he eventually left after speaking to us about something that sounded serious.
“What was that about?” I asked when the two of them had left us alone.
Hunter sighed heavily.
“You suffered some pretty strong trauma there, Princess,” he told me. “Do you remember anything from last night?”
“Last… night?” I did remember something.
A dangerous woman who could have killed us all…
A blinding light from the Heavens…
Hunter, trying to reach me…
My head began to sharply hurt again, and I clutched it in my hands. “It hurts, Hunter…”
“I know, Princess,” he told me tenderly. “But you’re okay now. It’s all over. You hit your head pretty damn hard on the way down.”
“How long have I been out?”
He smiled. “Almost twenty-four hours. You were always such a heavy sleeper, even when we were kids… always liked that about you.
I couldn’t help but smile back.
“Sark… Soro…”
“Soroka Sarkonov,” he replied calmly, his face etched with pain. “My older sister, Hannah…”
“What… what happened?”
He ran his fingers through my hair again. “Hannah’s alive, but I’m pretty sure that she’s going to be in the hospital a whole lot longer than you are.”
“I shot her…”
“Yes, and you saved us all.”
“Sort of starting to realize that,” I smiled, but my brief happiness came quickly to a cold fear in my gut.
“Our baby!”
“Don’t worry Sarah… The doctor says the baby is fine. He even showed me the heartbeat,” Hunter replied soothingly.
“What about us? Are we okay?” I asked. It was something of a loaded question, and Hunter knew it.
We were mixed up in some deep shit now, more than even before. International arms dealing, a Chinese ballistic missile in a cargo crate… the boys s
hot down a goddamn cargo helicopter, for Christ’s sake!
“Relax, Princess. We’re okay,” he reassured me. “Funny enough, I spent most of the morning talking with the CIA. While they were never public about her, they had been trailing Sarkonov for half her career, always one step behind…
“Let’s just say they’re thankful for what they call our service. The suits in the agency are offering us all immunity if we agree to testify against her.”
“So, I guess this means I’m not going to be getting the rest of my payment for finding the cargo container,” I replied half-jokingly, trying to ease the conversation.
“Guess not,” Hunter replied distantly.
A painful look was plastered across his face.
I wanted to hold him… to tell him it was going to be okay. He’d been through so much over the last few days, and to find out his sister had been working against him all this time…
To find out she was willing to kill me to get her way…
It was about another sixteen hours before I was formally released from the hospital. Since I was still a little too weak for a motorcycle ride, Hunter chose to bring us back to our temporary headquarters by something a little more traditional: the services of a beaten-up, yellow taxi.