by Cindy Dees
“Damn straight, I’m thorough. I’m not taking you. Just Chloe. And I’m not telling you where I’m taking her. Someplace you’ll never find her in a million years.”
Her heart leaped into her throat and threatened to choke her. She managed to force out words, but it was an effort. “That’s kidnapping, Ivan. You won’t ever be able to come home again. Are you sure you want to do something so drastic?”
“I’ll do just about anything to make your life a living hell.”
She refrained from telling him he’d already done that brilliantly for the past several years.
“And besides,” Ivan added, “I’ve got a few creditors to get away from.”
Ahh. Not good. In that case, he really would leave the country with Chloe and never come back. She fell silent, thinking frantically. There had to be a way to stop him. But how?
She became aware that Ivan was driving way too fast for safety on the icy, winding mountain road. “You need to slow down, Ivan. This is a great car, but even it has its limits.”
“You always were a nag, telling me what to do and how to do it.”
“Please, Ivan,” she begged. “Slow down a little. You wouldn’t want to make Chloe an orphan, would you?”
In response, he stomped on the accelerator, and the big car roared forward.
Good Lord. They were both going to die. Just like her parents. Had this been how her parents met their end? Having an argument and her father speeding up to spite her mother? She would bet her mother hadn’t been zip-tied to the door, though, or had a gun pointed at her head.
It didn’t help her panic that Ivan was driving with the pistol gripped between his fist and the steering wheel, still pointed in her general direction.
She watched him warily, in between glancing through the windshield at the shiny glare of ice on the road in the headlights.
A sharp curve to the left came up all of a sudden, and Ivan threw the car around the bend. The back end skidded to the right, and he yanked the steering wheel back to the right. The pistol jerked, and she flinched, squeezing her eyes shut against the shot she was sure would come.
The car’s rear end fishtailed as the road S-curved back hard to the right, and Ivan hit the brakes.
“No!” she cried out reflexively.
The car turned sideways of the road and slid across the ice, careening completely out of control. They were going to die.
Just like her parents. This was how their lives had ended. In terror and panic. With thoughts of her and Fox ricocheting through their minds.
As the car smashed through the guardrail and slid toward the edge of the cliff, Sloane screamed at the top of her lungs.
Chapter 19
Liam lay in the snow and tried to breathe, but damned if he could draw a breath. The bullet that had hit him square in the chest plate of his bullet-resistant vest had really knocked the wind out of him. Cold soaked through his body as he frantically tried to relax, and more importantly, tried to hear movement from his attacker. He had to regain control of his body and breathe again before the bastard closed in on him and finished him off.
He struggled to sit up in the snow half-burying him, grappled to draw a proper breath.
The crack of a gunshot made him jolt violently. That was a shotgun. Had Sloane come outside to enter the fray? Please, God. No. Let her be safe inside and not tangling with a professional hit man out here while he was down and out for the count.
He opened his mouth. Tried to shout her name. To hell with giving away his position to the killer. He had to get her to go back inside to safety. Barricade herself in the heavily walled cabin—
Turned out it was impossible to make sound with no air in one’s lungs to force out past one’s vocal cords.
Swearing up a blue storm inside his head, he forced his unwilling body to get vertical. He paused on his knees, searching the darkness frantically. No sign of the killer or of Sloane.
With a sudden spasm of his diaphragm, his lungs reengaged and he drew a ragged partial breath. The encroaching tunnel vision retreated a little. Another approximately full breath and the gray at the edges of his vision disappeared.
He tried again to shout for Sloane, but he still didn’t have enough air to make more than a sigh of sound.
Grabbing on to the tree trunk beside him, he dragged himself upright. His entire rib cage felt as if it had shattered, and every breath he drew felt like an anvil on his chest. Slowly, painfully, he made his way up the hill in roughly the direction he’d last seen the assailant.
He’d slogged maybe a dozen yards straight ahead when he heard a noise to his right. Liam froze, listening hard.
Was that a male voice?
Crap, crap, crap. Had the hit man found Sloane?
He turned to race toward the driveway when he literally tripped over a body lying facedown in the snow.
Please, please, please not Sloane.
He rolled the body over and stared down. The hit man. The guy was breathing but peppered with a half-dozen bleeding holes in his coat. None of them were gushing blood as if they were life-threatening. But the guy had definitely taken some shotgun pellets.
Liam stepped over the man, who was just starting to rouse, and ran as fast as he was able toward the driveway.
He was in time to see Ivan Durant jump into a big black European sedan. The taillights went on, and he spied the shape of a passenger in the front seat.
Was that Sloane? No way would she go anywhere with her ex voluntarily. Was the bastard was kidnapping her?
The big car pulled away from him, disappearing around a bend in the driveway.
Dammit!
He ran back into the trees to where the hit man was now sitting up, putting pressure on his various wounds.
Drawing his weapon, Liam approached him. “Come with me,” he ordered.
“You taking me to a hospital?”
“Eventually. Come on. I’m in a hurry.”
Liam made the guy hustle in front of him to the cabin and open the front door.
“Sloane!” Liam shouted.
No answer.
“Go inside and flip the light switch just to the right of the front door. I’ll have my gun pointed at you, so no funny business.”
“They ain’t paying me enough to get killed, man.”
“They who?”
“The Durants. They want me to kill some chick so they can kidnap her kid.”
Satisfaction coursed through Liam The Durants were toast. They would never bother Sloane or Chloe again.
He raced up the porch steps and poked his head into the cabin. Sloane was gone. And so was her coat. Dammit. That had been her out there shooting the shotgun.
“C’mon. Let’s get you to town before you bleed out.”
The man looked down at his torso in alarm, but Liam frog-marched him over to his pickup truck. Quickly, he yanked the guy’s hands behind his back and handcuffed him. He put the perp in the back seat of his truck, and zip-tied the guy’s ankles for good measure.
“Hey, I ain’t gonna fight you if you’ll take me to a hospital, man.”
Liam jumped in the truck and gunned it down the drive. At least there was only one road off this mountain, so Ivan and Sloane couldn’t disappear on him. Not for a few miles, at least. He had to catch up with them before they reached any intersections and could disappear.
He called the sheriff’s department as he drove. Trey Colton answered the phone.
“Trey. It’s Liam Kastor. I need one of your guys to block White Mountain Road at the base of the mountain where it comes out on Highway 192. A black sedan is coming down the mountain with Sloane Colton and her ex-husband in it. He has kidnapped her.”
“Will do,” Trey bit out.
Liam heard him issuing orders over a radio to the nearest units to get over to the base of White Mount
ain Road ASAP and block it. Liam disconnected the call to concentrate on driving down the treacherous road.
The good news was he knew the winding trail down the side of White Mountain like the back of his hand. The bad news was he didn’t see headlights ahead, which meant Ivan had taken the road at a much higher speed than was safe for someone not familiar with the twisting route.
Liam came into the Kiowa Gorge and slowed down. This was the most dangerous part of the road. Sheer drop-offs of several hundred feet came right up to the edge of the road, and only a guardrail and the traction of good tires prevented vehicles from plunging to disastrous ends in the fast-running river below.
He rounded the first bend in the gorge and swore as he saw damage to the guardrail. He touched his brakes, attempting to slow down more.
Even his truck, with chains on the tires, slid a little on the ice, and then caught traction again as he crept around the steep hairpin turn back to the right.
Oh. My. God.
The guardrail was completely broken through, and the few saplings clinging to the edge of the cliff were bent and broken as if something big and fast-moving had crashed through them.
A voice in the back of his head started to scream. He eased onto the brakes as hard as he dared, and the truck finally came to a stop a few yards beyond the break in the rail. He jumped out of the truck and his boots nearly went out from under him.
The road was a solid sheet of ice.
He approached the precipice carefully and, hanging on to one broken end of the twisted metal of the guardrail, peered over the edge.
Far below, he made out the mangled shape of a car lying on its roof, half-submerged.
No one could have survived that crash.
No one.
He fell to his knees as his world ended then and there.
Sloane’s right shoulder was screaming, and her right arm wouldn’t move at all. Even the slightest shift of her weight sent spears of agony through the joint. Her entire right side felt as if she’d taken a beating, and she was having trouble drawing a full breath.
The snow she lay buried in was cold on her cheeks. She closed her eyes as hot tears traced down her face until they froze.
She honestly wasn’t sure if she was alive or dead.
When Ivan locked up the brakes and went into that final skid toward the cliff, she’d broken through the zip ties with the superhuman strength of life-and-death panic, opened the door, and flung herself out of the vehicle.
Thankfully, it had been sliding away from her and hadn’t run her over.
She’d hit the icy road hard. Really hard. She vaguely remembered rolling over and over, and then hearing a horrible crunching sound of metal impacting on metal, twisting and tearing with a terrible rending squeal.
And then silence.
She had no idea how long she’d been lying here.
The cold had felt good at first, and then had hurt so bad she could hardly stand the daggers of it piercing her body. But it felt better now. Warm almost.
She was so sleepy. It would be so nice to close her eyes. Drift away to someplace warm and safe and free of pain.
No. Wait!
Chloe’s face swam in her mind’s eye, and she struggled to focus on it. And there was something else—
Another face swam in her foggy brain beside her daughter’s.
A familiar face. A well-loved face. A face that also represented warmth and safety.
Liam.
The name drifted through her mind, a sigh and a blessing. She loved him, too.
Loved Chloe. Loved Liam.
Didn’t want to leave them.
Needed to fight.
Stay alive.
Stay awake.
Must embrace the pain.
But God, it hurt so much to live. To breathe.
One breath.
Another.
Her entire world narrowed down to that defiant act. Just breathing.
But it wasn’t death.
* * *
Liam dragged himself to his feet, the agony in his heart so intense he wasn’t sure he could stand it. He had to call in the crash. Get help up here.
He stumbled around the back end of his truck to approach from the passenger’s side so he didn’t slip and fall off the cliff.
He rounded the tailgate and saw a strange smudge on the white sheet of ice coating the road. What was that? A tire wouldn’t leave a trail of rubber if it skidded on ice. Frowning, he half walked, half skated over to it.
He fumbled for the small LED flashlight on his keychain and shone it on the dark smear.
Except when the light went on, it was red.
Blood.
Where did that come from?
Had Ivan hit a deer? Was that what sent him over the cliff?
Liam’s police instincts were operating on autopilot as shock lowered a dull blanket over his senses, numbing his thoughts. Must solve the mystery of where the blood came from. Maybe put an injured animal out of its misery.
He followed the blood trail to the interior side of the road, away from the drop off.
A deep divot in the snow bank indicated where the hit deer had been thrown. He waded into the waist-deep snow in search of it.
And spied a dark heap. He took a single step toward it—
And then a groan came from it. An entirely human groan.
Holy shit. He rushed forward and reached for the dark heap. That was a human shoulder—
He pulled gently, and Sloane’s face turned up toward him.
He fell to his knees beside her. “Sloane. Sloane! Can you hear me? Wake up, honey. Open your eyes for me. Be alive, dammit!”
“So loud,” she sighed.
His relief was so great he couldn’t have stood if he tried. Gently, very gently, he gathered Sloane into his arms.
She cried out in pain, and he froze in the act of pulling her into his lap.
“Liam?” she croaked. “Is this Heaven? Are you here to meet me?”
It took him a moment to realize that she thought he was actually dead. “I’m not dead, baby. And neither are you.”
She blinked up at him owlishly, as if she didn’t understand.
“You’re alive, Sloane. You’re lying in a ditch at the side of a road, and you’re hurt and dangerously chilled. But you’re alive. Do you hear me?”
Her big eyes widened in surprise.
“This is going to hurt. Shout all you want, okay? I’m going to pick you up now.”
She did cry out, but he gritted his teeth and stood up, cradling her in his arms as gently as he could. He carried her over to his truck and awkwardly opened the door. She cried out again as he jostled her.
“I’m so sorry, sweetheart, but I have to get you warmed up. The truck’s heater is running full blast.”
“What the hell happened to her?” the hit man asked as Liam set Sloane on the passenger seat.
By the time Liam came around to the driver’s side, she had fallen over on her left side and passed out.
He called the sheriff’s office again.
“Sheriff Colton here. Go ahead.”
“This is Liam Kastor. I need an ambulance to meet me as fast as it can. I’m driving down the White Mountain Road toward Roaring Springs. Have it flag down my truck as it approaches me. I’m going to make my way toward the hospital until it intercepts me.”
Trey was back on the phone in a minute.
“An ambulance is en route. You should meet it maybe five minutes after you reach Highway 192. What the hell happened up there, Liam?”
“You’ve got a car in the ravine at the bottom of Kiowa Gorge. Sloane was in the car and apparently bailed out of it before it went off the cliff. She has unknown injuries and cold exposure and is unconscious on the front seat of my truck. I also have the perp
who was hired to kill her in custody in the back of my truck.”
“Bitch shot me,” the hit man offered.
“He’s been hit by multiple shotgun pellets. He’s bleeding but not seriously wounded.”
“You said I was bleeding out, man,” the guy complained.
Clearly, he was not the brightest hit man on the planet.
“You may still die if you’re not very still,” Liam warned the guy. He seriously didn’t need the scumbag getting any ideas about trying to escape. Not with Sloane hurt and in need of urgent medical attention.
The drive the rest of the way down White Mountain was a never-ending nightmare. Liam kept having to fight the temptation to check on Sloane, but he dared not take his gaze off the treacherous road. The best thing he could do for her right now was get her down to that ambulance coming for her.
At long last, the road’s steep incline decreased and the intersection with the main road came into sight.
He turned onto the highway toward Roaring Springs and accelerated. He called Trey again. “Where’s that ambulance? I’m on Highway 192 now.”
Trey went away and then came back to report, “They’re about two minutes from you. They want you to go ahead and pull over the side of the road and put on your emergency flashers.”
Liam did as instructed, and sure enough, the wail of sirens and red flashing lights split the night.
Two EMTs rushed over to his truck with a gurney and quickly transferred Sloane into the ambulance. One of the men went to work on her in the back of the ambulance as the other leaped into the driver’s seat and took off toward town.
Liam followed the ambulance in his truck.
While he drove, he demanded over his shoulder, “Did you try to run down Sloane Colton in Denver a few weeks back, coming out of a restaurant?”
“Yeah. Nearly had her, but her date knocked her out of the way at the last second.”
Said date scowled into the rearview mirror at his prisoner.
“And you set fire to her house?”
“Yeah.”
“And to the barn at the Crooked C Ranch after knocking Sloane out?”
“Naw. I didn’t do that.”
“What?” Liam blurted. “You’ve already confessed to enough attempted murders to put you in jail for a good long time. Why not confess to the barn fire?”
