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He grinned at her from the door. “You asked for it.” He closed the door, leaving her to burn.
Tied up and helpless, she screamed at him, “Hunt’s coming! You won’t get away with this!”
Chapter Twenty-Five
Hunt couldn’t push the SUV to go any faster. He fishtailed around a curve in the road and nearly slid into Rad’s oncoming truck before he slammed on the brakes and came to a jarring stop. He leaped out of the vehicle and drew his gun.
Rad had miraculously stopped just yards away with his window down. He pointed back up the road. “Arrest me or save your precious Cyn? What will it be?”
Hunt turned and spotted the smoke rising through the trees up ahead.
Rad slowly rolled the truck down the road, calling out, “Better hurry if you want her back alive. But I’m pretty sure it’s too late, asshole.”
Hunt didn’t think. He let Rad go, jumped back in his car, got on the radio and called for his fellow officers to try to apprehend Rad. That was a long shot since most of them were too far away at the site where the missing hiker had been found. He told the dispatcher he needed fire and an ambulance on scene immediately, though it would take a while for both to reach the remote property. During all this he raced down the road, his heartbeating practically out of his chest, fear eating away at him that he’d be too late.
By the time he made it to the structure, half of it was completely engulfed in flames. Luckily, the wind was blowing the flames away from the rest of the building, slowing down the fire’s progress, but he still had precious little time. He ran for the door and flung it open, coughing as a wave of smoke and heat hit him in the face. It billowed out of the building through the door and cracks in the dry wood. He pulled the T-shirt he wore under his uniform shirt up and over his nose, then raced in to find Cyn.
“Cyn, baby, where are you?” he called out, but didn’t hear her respond back to him. “Cyn!”
Somewhere in the distance he heard her coughing.
He sank as low as he could to avoid the worst of the smoke and tried to see where she was as he bumped into a table, then some piece of equipment.
“Hunt,” Cyn called out. “Are you here? Help me,” she wailed, then got caught in a fit of coughs.
He pulled his flashlight from his belt and used it to scan the darker part of the room, the flames at his back. And there she was a dozen feet in front of him, lying on the floor, her arm bleeding, hands behind her back.
He fell beside her and softly touched her face. “I’m here.”
She sighed out her relief as her pain-filled eyes met his and she tugged at her hands.
He pulled the knife from his belt, cut her free, then picked her up and ran out of the building with her. He took her to his car and set her on the grass beside it,cupped her face and kissed her hard. “Don’t ever fucking do that to me again!”
Cyn’s eyes rolled back in her head, and she passed out.
“Fuck.” He caught her and gently laid her back in the grass, ran to his SUV, pulled out the first aid kit and went back to her. He used his knife to cut the sleeve of her sweater away from the bleeding wound on her arm. He guessed she’d been grazed by a bullet. He found a gauze pad, tore the wrapper off and pressed it to the wound.
Cyn started coming around, then sat bolt upright. “Angela.”
Hunt held the pad to her arm with one hand and gently took her by the neck to steady her with the other, noting the bruising on her skin. “What about her? Is she in there?”
She pointed to the structure. “He said I walked over her grave.” She pointed to the door of the building again.
He turned back to her. “Lana?”
Tears overflowed her eyes. “She’s alive. I don’t know where. He wouldn’t tell me.”
He pulled her into his chest, hugged her close and kissed her a dozen times on the head. She had a death grip on his sides. It took him a good long time to be able to let her loose. He only did so because she kept coughing.
He went to his car and got her a bottle of water. On his way back to her, he stopped dead in his tracks and stared at the busted-out window at the back of her car where Rad had shot through it. He didn’t know exactly what happened, how she survived and got away somehow, but she was damn lucky to be alive.
And he was even luckier to have gotten to her in time.
He handed her the water. While she drank, he put a new pad on the gash on her arm and tied some gauze around it to put pressure on the wound and hold the pad in place.
Sirens sounded in the distance, soft, but growing louder.
He sat beside her and pulled her into his side; the relief that she was here with him, alive, overwhelmed him.
