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Mattie raised her head from the floor, and where I expected to find fear, I found a satisfied, cat-like blink instead. Her lips trembled, but they pulled into a smile. She’d known I would come.
Good fucking girl, I thought with a brief flash of pride. Then my focus pulled back to the lethal weapon that the walking dead man had trained on her. I flicked my gaze to Jonathon’s, my rifle sights trained on his pale forehead. “Cohen. Put down the gun.”
“Why? So you can put a bullet through my head?” Cohen asked. He had intelligent eyes, I’d give him that. But they’d been written over with fear and masked by forced calm. The problem with fear was that it made people do illogical things.
Like shooting my Mattie when he knew it would get him killed.
“I don’t want to kill her,” Jonathon said evenly. “But you’re forcing my hand.”
“The only thing I’ll be forcing is the barrel of that nine-millimeter up your ass if you don’t point it away from her head,” I said just as calmly. “There’s death, Cohen, and then there’s unholy justice. Which one do you want from me?”
Cohen backed away, his grip tightening on the gun. “You move, and she dies.”
Typical. Men like Cohen didn’t know when to admit that they were done for. “Have it your way.” I shot his shoulder. It wasn’t a hard shot. I’d advanced within six feet of them both, and I was too pissed off to make the logical move by killing him outright. Was it tactically sound? Not necessarily. He could have fired off a shot toward Mattie if I’d missed.
But I didn’t miss.
Cohen crumpled to the ground, screaming as the pain in his shoulder likely invaded what was left of his sanity—if he’d had any, to begin with. His gun clattered to the ground, and Mattie, the clever fighter that she was, immediately grabbed it and stumbled back toward me. In my ear, Tabitha said, “Hallway is clear.”
“Dining room, too,” I replied, advancing on Cohen with my sights still on his bushy head in case he tried to pull something really stupid. With Mattie safe, I had to set aside my desire to go to her, at least until all the threats were fully neutralized. “There are two civilians in here with Cohen and Mattie.”
“On it.”
As Jonathon blubbered on the ground, I swung my rifle aside, letting it dangle from its sling. I reached him and shoved him to his stomach. Wrenching back his hand, I pulled a pair of handcuffs from the pouch at my side to secure his wrists. He screamed, shrill and long, when his shoulder wrenched with the movement. I grabbed his hair and slammed his face into the ground. “Shut up, Cohen.”
After patting him down and finding nothing but a cell phone in the pocket of his pants—which I took—I left him sobbing pathetically into the polished hardwood. I stood off him, doing one last sweep of the room. Tabitha had the doctor and nurse at gunpoint, and she ushered them out of the room to where her twelve other captives had been handled, I assumed.
Mattie stood several steps away, clutching the handgun to her chest. Her eyes looked enormous as they took me in. With her thin shoulders hunched and her hair disheveled around her sagging medical gown, she looked so vulnerable, it cracked through my heart with a hairline fracture.
I released the velcro along one of my wrists, loosening my glove as I took a tentative step toward her. “Hey, Bunny.”
Her eyes flew from Jonathon’s prone form to me, and her hands tightened around the gun. “You came.”
I yanked the black glove off my right hand, and letting it fall, I brought up my other hand to ease the gray mask off my face. “I told you I would.” With slow steps, I closed the distance between us. I didn’t think she’d do anything irrational, but then again, she’d witnessed a lot of violence in a short span of time.
Mattie swallowed, glanced down at the gun in her hands, and then held it out to me. “Do you—do you want this?”
I reached her, and plucking it from her trembling hands, I threw it to the opposite side of the room where it skidded and clattered so far, it banged against the wall. I cradled her head in my hands gently, my eyes taking in the two marks on either side of her face. One of them still had finger marks that had whipped across her cheekbone and the flat of her cheek. I hovered my thumbs over the marks. “They hurt you?”
“Mostly because I was a brat,” she smiled tremulously.
I kissed her forehead, breathing in the scent of her shampoo that had mingled with something aseptic and medical. “What is all this equipment? What did he do to you?”
She leaned into me as far as she could with my vest in the way, resting her forehead against the base of my throat. Her hands gripped my vest along the sides. “Can we just go?” she asked so quietly, I almost couldn’t hear it.
My gaze flitted to Cohen, who had begun to wriggle his way across the floor on his stomach like an inchworm, gusting out desperate, keening noises as he went for the nine-millimeter I had chucked across the floor. My eyes hooded with irritation. “Tell me what he did to you, and then we can go.”
“Kael,” she growled. Lifting her head, Mattie hooked me with a stare full of desperation and anger. “You blew up his shoulder. That covers it.”
Not by a fucking long shot, it didn’t. I set her away from me. “Tabitha will be here in a minute. Go with her.”
Mattie’s eyes fell to Cohen on the ground, and then found mine again. “Kael.”
Tabitha entered behind us, breathing hard and sweating. “Oh, good to see you’re getting your cuddles in. Do you realize you didn’t kill any of those bastards out there? I had to secure twelve of them, and the doctors, you asshole.” She pulled her gray mask down, freeing her nose and mouth, and then noticed Jonathon making his way laboriously across the floor. She gestured to him and cocked a thick eyebrow my way. “The fuck?”
“Ignore him,” I replied distractedly. To Mattie, I repeated, “Go with Tab. I’ll be right behind you. I promise.”
Mattie scowled. “What if you get hurt?”
