“Out of tricks?” he called up, his finger toying with the trigger.
I thought of Agent Sterling back in the cabin. He’d go for her next, run her through this sick little game.
No.
I did the only thing there was left to do. I jumped.
The gun went off. The shot went wide, and I crashed into him, feet first. We both went down in a tangle of limbs. He kept hold of the rifle, but I was too close for him to point it at me.
Three seconds.
That was how long it took for him to get the upper hand, to wrestle me to the ground. He pinned me with one hand, then rose to a crouch and slammed a foot into my chest, replacing his hand. Head wound bleeding heavily, he stood. From my position on the ground, he looked impossibly tall. Invincible.
He brought the gun to his shoulder. The tip of the barrel was less than three feet away from my body. It hovered over my midsection for a few seconds, then settled just over my forehead.
I closed my eyes.
“Take them. Free them. Track them. Kill—” He cut off, suddenly and without warning. It was only later that my brain processed the sound of gunfire, the rush of footsteps coming toward me.
“Cassie. Cassie.”
I didn’t want to open my eyes. If I opened my eyes, it might not be real. The gun might still be there. He might still be there.
“Cassandra.” There was only one man in the universe who could say my full name in exactly that tone.
I opened my eyes. “Briggs.”
“Webber’s dead.” He clarified that point before asking me if I was okay.
“Webber?” I croaked. I knew the name, but my mind couldn’t process it, couldn’t process the fact that the man who’d done this to me even had a name.
“Anthony Webber,” Briggs confirmed, doing a cursory check of my injuries, tallying them, down to every last detail.
“Sterling?” I managed to ask.
“She’s safe.”
“How did you—”
Briggs held up a hand and dug his phone out with the other. The call he made was brief and to the point: “I’ve got her. She’s fine.” Then he turned his attention back to me and answered the question I hadn’t even finished asking. “Once we realized the two of you were missing and unaccounted for, the director threw the entire agency behind finding you. He kept saying that Veronica had tried to tell him something was off about this case.”
“But how did you—”
“Your ankle tracker.”
“Agent Sterling said she hadn’t activated it.”
Briggs smiled wryly. “She hadn’t, but since she was on a playing-by-the-rules kick when she checked it out, she filled out all the paperwork. I’s were dotted. T’s were crossed. We had the serial number and were able to activate it remotely.”
It was ironic—I’d saved Agent Sterling’s life by breaking the rules, and she’d saved mine by following them.
Briggs helped me to my feet. “My team’s on their way in,” he said. “We left straight from the house, so we had a head start.”
We?
“Cassie.” Dean broke through the brush.
“I told him to wait at the cabin,” Briggs said to me. “I told you to wait at the cabin,” he reiterated to Dean, annoyance creeping into his voice. But he didn’t stop me from taking three steps toward Dean, or Dean from crossing the remaining space between us in a heartbeat. The next second, he had a hand on each of my shoulders, touching me, confirming that I was okay, that I was here, that I was real.
“What are you doing here?” I asked him.
His hands went from my shoulders to my face. His right hand cupped the left side. His left gently bypassed my injuries, burying itself in my hair and holding my head up for me, like he thought my neck might not be able to do the job.
“Activating the tracker was Sloane’s idea. Everyone else forgot about it. Briggs was at our place when we got the coordinates. I may have arranged it so that I was in his car when he went to leave.”
Briggs wouldn’t have wasted even a second trying to kick him out.
“What happened?” Dean asked me, his voice thick with emotions I couldn’t quite identify. I knew he was probably asking about the abduction, about my face, about being tied up in the cabin and scrambling for my life, but I chose to interpret the question slightly differently.
“I hit him in the head with a rock. Then I jumped on him from up in that tree.” I gestured vaguely with one hand. Dean stared at me, his expression unreadable until the ends of his lips began to turn slowly upward.
“I was wrong,” he said, “when I said I just felt something.” He was breathing heavily. I couldn’t breathe at all. “When I said I wasn’t sure it was enough.”
He was scared, like me. But he felt it, and I felt it, and he was there. I’d spent so long trying not to choose, trying not to feel, and in an instant, I felt something inside of me break, like floodwaters bursting through a dam.
Dean pulled me gently toward him. His lips brushed lightly over mine. The action was hesitant, uncertain. My hands settled on the back of his neck, pulling him closer.
Maybe this was a mistake. Maybe when the smoke cleared, things would look different. But I couldn’t stop it, couldn’t keep living my life on maybes if I wanted to live.
I rose up on my toes, my body pressed against his, and returned the kiss, the pain in my face fading, washed away with the rest of the world, until there was only this moment—one that I hadn’t thought I’d live to see.
I spent the night at the hospital. I had a concussion, bruising on my neck from nearly being strangled, and countless cuts and abrasions on my hands and legs. They had to pry Dean away from me.
I was alive.
The next morning, the doctors released me into Agent Briggs’s custody. We were halfway to his car before I realized that he was being too quiet.
“Where’s Agent Sterling?” I asked.
“Gone.” We climbed into the car. I gingerly pulled on my seat belt. Briggs pulled out onto the road. “Her injuries were minimal, but she’s on a mandated leave until a Bureau psychologist gives her the green light for fieldwork.”
“Is she coming back?” My eyes stung as I asked the question. A week ago, I would have been glad to be rid of her, but now…
“I don’t know,” Briggs said, a muscle in his jaw ticking. He was the kind of person who hated admitting uncertainty. “After Redding captured her—after Dean helped her escape—she fought to get back to active duty. She threw herself into work.”