Page 6 of Crossfire Creek Vengeance

Beside her, Deacon’s breath hissed between his teeth. Not pain. This time, it was frustration.

“Why do you need Wynn alive?” he pressed.

Of all the questions she didn’t want him asking, that one topped the list. She clenched her jaw, staring into the dark. He deserved something. Anything. But the weight of it pressed like a vise in her lungs.

He waited. And she could feel him looking at her despite the shadows.

She sighed, low and tight. “You’re hurt, you’re freezing, and you’re trying to fight off a sniper who’s better trained than either of us. Maybe save the interrogation for later?”

“I’m bleeding, not dead,” he whispered back. “And someone tried to kill me. I think I’m owed a little intel.”

She couldn’t argue with that.

Damn him.

She shifted, still listening for movement, for anything, before she finally whispered, “Wynn gathered… things. Secrets,” she said, the word bitter on her tongue. “A stash of information and intel. On Crossfire Ops. On Creed Response. On people I care about.”

Deacon stiffened beside her. “You’re telling me Wynn has a blackmail file?”

“I’m telling you that if something happens to him—if someone kills him, arrests him, scares him too hard—that stash gets released.”

“To who?”

Her throat tightened. “Everyone.” She swallowed hard. “The press. Law enforcement. The wrong hands. And definitely our enemies.”

Deacon let out a slow, careful breath. “So that’s why you don’t want me putting a bullet in him.”

“That,” she whispered, “is why I need him alive.”

She didn’t add the rest. Didn’t tell him the part gnawing at her, the guilt twisting under every breath. She didn’t trust herself to.

A branch cracked somewhere deeper in the woods. Close. Too close.

Jessa’s fingers tightened around her weapon, adrenaline spiking again. “We move on my signal,” she whispered.

He nodded, eyes sharp despite the pain.

The headlights were gone. The woods were quiet. But Wynn, or whoever drove that vehicle, was still out there. And Jessa wasn’t about to let that shadow get any closer to the man bleeding beside her.

Deacon’s eyes said he had a hell of a lot more questions. Questions she didn’t have the breath or the strength or the damn emotional bandwidth to answer right now.

“We need to move before he circles back,” she whispered, lifting his arm back over her shoulders.

They pushed deeper into the trees, the cold gnawing harder now. He leaned more heavily on her with every uneven step, and she kept adjusting, shifting, silently begging the universe not to let him collapse.

Branches thinned. The trail opened up. And through the trees, she finally saw her SUV. Black. Angular. Bullet-resistant. A refuge waiting in the dark.

Relief flooded through her, but before she could take another step, movement flickered to their right.

A shape. Low. Fast. Closing in.

“Down,” she hissed, dragging Deacon with her behind a fallen log half-covered in frost.

They hit the ground hard. The cold blasted up through her knees. She positioned herself between Deacon and the movement, gun raised, every muscle coiled tight.

Leaves crackled. A shadow slid between the trees.

Wynn.