Page 80 of Rescuing Brinley

She was weakening, but she wasn’t going to let him rape her without one hell of a fight.

Louis swore. “Stay still, bitch!”

That wasn’t happening.

Brinley didn’t waste a breath answering him. She tried to use her legs to buck him off, but he outweighed her by too much. He reached for something at his side, then swore again when he obviously didn’t find what he was looking for.

He wasn’t holding the gun in her face, which made her hope that he’d lost it at some point in their scuffle. If he still had that gun, she probably would’ve stopped fighting. But if he didn’t, that meant she had a chance. A tiny one, but a chance all the same.

And she was going to take it. Because even being left out here in the middle of nowhere was better than being dead and never seeing Cypress or Dash again.

Just as she had that thought, his hands wrapped around her neck.

Brinley’s hopes crashed and burned.

He might not have a gun, but he could still kill her without one.

He squeezed, cutting off her oxygen.

Brinley’s efforts turned frantic. She desperately tried to get him to loosen his grip, to knock him off her, something.

A statistic she’d heard during one of the true crime shows that Cypress watched sprang to her mind. How it took an average of four to five minutes for someone to die of strangulation. Looking up into Louis’s face, she saw nothing but determination and evil.

“Die, bitch!”

Blackness was creeping in. It might take minutes for her to die, but she was going to lose consciousness way before that.

The last thought she had before the world went dark was regret.

Regret that she wouldn’t get to live the rest of her life with Dash.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Shadow gasped. It felt as if he couldn’t breathe, and he had no idea why.

Kodiak had driven to the Army base, parked the truck, and they’d all transferred to his teammate’s F-150 pickup. They were on the way to Brinley’s apartment to check on her when all of a sudden, it felt as if he couldn’t get air into his lungs.

He actually gasped, making Echo turn to glance at him.

“Shadow?”

But he couldn’t talk. All Shadow could do was close his eyes and put a hand on his chest.

It was the strangest sensation. He was breathing, but it still felt as if he wasn’t getting enough air into his lungs. A chill went through him. He didn’t know what it meant, but it scared the shit out of him.

He opened his eyes when he felt the car slow, and just as suddenly as the strange sensation of not being able to breathe began, it dissipated.

Jumping out of the back seat of the truck, Shadow ran into Brinley’s building and up the stairs, taking them two at a time. He knocked loudly on her door, shifting his feet impatiently as he waited for it to open. By the time his three teammates joined him, Shadow already knew that Brinley wasn’t there. She would’ve opened the door by now if she was.

He turned to leave, but Grinder caught his arm. “Give her a minute. She might be in the middle of something.”

But she wasn’t. How Shadow knew that, he wasn’t sure, but he knew as well as he knew his name that Brinley wasn’t there.

“We need to go to the coffee place. See if her car is there.”

All four men jogged down the hall to the stairwell and were back in Kodiak’s truck in less than a minute. Shadow kept his gaze locked out the window as they drove toward where Brinley was supposed to meet her new client.

As soon as they pulled into the lot, Shadow could see that Brinley’s Outback wasn’t there. Disappointment hit him hard. On the heels of that was terror. Where was she? How was he going to find her?