"No!" Isabel's tortured shout was the only sound in the room, besides the feed from the guys’ comms devices as bullets were exchanged upstairs.
A high-pitched alarm sounded, and Maggie knew that that was their cue to leave. She looked around at the faces of the women that had become her friends. Her only friends.
On each face, she saw her own emotions reflected back at her. Fear. Longing. Despair. Determination.
"I'm not leaving until I know Ethan's ok," Isabel said.
Maggie nodded.
"Hunt! Where are you?" Sully's voice cut through the airwaves.
No reply.
"Hunt, you son of a bitch! You better answer me, now!" Sully said again.
Nothing.
A sob broke loose in Isabel's throat, and Maggie put her arm around her and drew her close. They'd wait. A few minutes. See if Ethan responded.
"Hunt, man. Please tell me you're ok."
Gunfire continued to erupt over the airwaves. And for several moments, no one made a sound. Not the men upstairs. Not the women down below. Just silence, accompanied by the percussion of the gunfire.
"Remind me to do some speed work this week," Ethan's voice said, sounding throughout the room.
A gasp rang out, and Isabel's knees buckled as the tears she'd been holding back broke through, and her whole body was wracked with sobs.
"You bastard. Get down here. We need some help," Sully said, but there was laughter in his voice along with a healthy dose of relief.
"And Pixie, if you're listening—you keep your promise to me, understand?"
She nodded even though he couldn't see her, and the rest of the women looked at her with questions in their eyes.
"Ladies, our men are relying on us to get the hell out of here. They don't need to be worried about us while they fight for our lives. Let's go."
"Wait, I just want to see if…" Scarlett started.
"Sully said we need to go. The alarm sounded. It's time," Maggie said softly, her eyes pleading.
"I know, but Zach might need our help with the controls down here," Ella protested.
"They don't. We need to go."
"What if we just wait a few more minutes? See if they gain the upper hand?" Scarlett tried.
Maggie didn't want to go, either. She wanted to stay and help somehow. She wanted to make sure that Sully would return to her to say those three amazing words again. She wanted to spend the rest of her life telling the man she loved how she felt about him. Her resolve started to waver until she remembered her promise.
Maggie took her promises seriously. And one day, she'd promise in front of God and everyone to love, honor, and cherish Sullivan Castle. She wouldn't start now by breaking them.
As she started to open her mouth, Isabel rose to her feet, determination set in her jaw.
"Maggie's right. We need to go. We do them no good by being down here. And if they have to flee in a hurry, they don't need to be concerned about us while doing so. In the van, girls," Isabel said, and took Maggie's hand in hers.
"They will be ok. My brother and my husband are the best. And the other three aren't too bad, either." She winked and smiled, and Maggie's hope rose.
Scarlett and Ella rushed to the van, with Ella getting behind the wheel. Isabel tugged on Maggie's hand, but Maggie turned back to the monitors and grabbed the comms device.
"It won't reach far, but at least we'll be able to hear for a little while," she explained. Isabel nodded.
Maggie gave the monitors one last glance, watching as enemy after enemy filed into the warehouse. Even after Zach's explosions and the rocket that had been launched into the warehouse, the bad guys just kept fighting, the fire and the crumbling building not enough to keep them from pursuing their enemy. The odds weren't good. The Castle guys were extremely outnumbered. Maggie just hoped that they had a few tricks up their sleeves and could get out of this alive.
Isabel and Maggie climbed into the back of the van just as Ella pushed the button to open the steel doors of the bunker. As they parted, the four of them stared into a dark tunnel. Ella stepped on the gas and drove as Maggie looked back at the doors closing to the bunker behind them.
Sully and the team would be ok.
They had to be.
* * * *
Ethan burst through the stairwell door. His clothes were singed, and his hair was a burnt, crazy mess, but he was alive. He sported holes in the sleeves of his shirt, with raw pink skin peeking out from underneath it.
Sully turned his attention back to their retreat. Ethan ran up beside him, laying out two pursuers with a single bullet each.
"About time," Sully deadpanned.
"I was sunbathing," Ethan replied, a wry grin on his face.
The enemy dragged furniture in front of the exit doors to give themselves some cover, not realizing that the Castle guys had another way out of there.
"We can't keep this up. We need to leave, now," Sully said into the comms device.
"I don't like that idea. I want to end this here," Ethan replied.
"We're gravely outnumbered. And it's obvious that Kingston has no regard for his men's lives. We need to get to the safe house and regroup. Live to fight another day."
Ethan nodded as he fired his weapon, taking out two more enemies.
Zach sidled up next to them. "It's time, man." He gave Sully a nod. "It's the warehouse or us. The warehouse is replaceable. We're not."
"Agreed. Let's do it."
Lucas and Gabriel joined them as they each took out two grenades from their gear and waited for the count. They lined up on one side of the boxing ring, a place where they'd worked out their frustrations for more than five years together.
This warehouse was a piece of them. They'd become a family here. But their real families, what was most important, were waiting for them in a cabin two hours away.
Sully gave the count, and each guy pulled the pins from both grenades, lobbing them all toward their enemy. Then they hit the ground, waiting for the explosions that wracked the building a moment later. When the dust cleared, Sully peeked over the edge of the ring. The destruction was monumental. Fire burned in every corner of the warehouse, making the ceiling look like a glowing sunset. They had to get out of there, and quickly.
Suddenly, another explosion rocked the warehouse, sending the guys sprawling back on their heels. That hadn't been from their grenades.
“What the hell was that?” Gabriel shouted over the explosions that continued to sound around them, causing gas lines to explode and timbers to fall from the ceiling.
"Rocket launcher," Ethan answered.
An alarm sounded as yet another explosion rocked the place.
"Go!" Sully shouted over the sound of everything he'd worked so hard for falling down around him.
The four men took off, running back to the safe room. The heat of the fire on their backs was so intense, and the smoke so thick, that Sully wasn't sure they were even going in the right direction.
The pop-pop-pop of gunfire behind them dropped all four men to their stomachs. Who could have lived through that? Only a bastard like Kingston would blow up a building with his men inside.
Jumping up, they ran faster, watching as fire and debris fell from the ceiling, and the building became more and more unstable as they raced towards safety.
Pop-pop-pop!
Sully fell, a fire burning so hotly in his leg, he knew it could only be from a bullet wound.
Ethan turned to help him up, and Sully waved him off. "Go! Get to the girls!"
"Not a chance in hell," Ethan said, dragging Sully up by his arm on one side, while Lucas took the other.
"Stubborn ass," he mumbled under his breath, the pain in his leg so intense that it took his breath away.
Sully’s vision blurred as they approached the door to the room with the hatch.
Pop-pop-pop!
The men ducked as bullets flew past their heads. Sully turned just inside the room as Zach worked to open the hatch. Peering t
hrough the smoke and fire, he saw the faint outline of a man dragging his leg behind him, holding a gun at eye level and sighting on him. Sully didn't hesitate. He shook the guys off, raised his gun, and fired. Two shots. Both to the head.
The man fell dead where he’d stood.
"I've got it!" Zach shouted, and he disappeared inside the hatch. The code on the outside would hopefully keep their enemies out and unable to follow any time soon.
Gabriel followed Zach, and then Lucas started down the hatch.
"You're going to have a hell of a time navigating these stairs. I'll go down first. Ethan, you pull up the rear—that way, we can assist him down."
"I’m not a damn baby. Go!" Sully shouted.
Lucas shook his head and started down the steps.
Sully motioned for Ethan to go, but he just stood there with his arms crossed over his chest.
"You're wasting our time, boss."
Sully growled and sat on the edge of the hatch before lowering his legs down to the first step. Pain shot up his leg, and his knee buckled. Lucas was there right below him. Had he not been, Sully would have tumbled down the steps and possibly broken his neck.
"Told ya," Lucas muttered as he caught him under the arms before he could fall to his death.
Sully thought it best to keep his mouth shut.
Ethan shut the hatch above him, and they slowly worked their way down the steps. The pain was blinding. And Sully feared that he would pass out.
Thoughts of Maggie and her halo of pink hair flittered through his mind, giving him the extra push he needed to get down the steps, through the two security doors, and finally to the bunker, where Zach sat in the driver’s seat of the van.
"Let's go!" Gabriel shouted out the window from the passenger’s side.
Just as he said the words, an explosion ripped through the building again.
The ceiling started to fall in chunks, and the lights went dark.
One of the fluorescent lamps fell on the hood of the van, causing the security alarm to shriek through the room.
Ethan and Lucas each took one of Sully's arms and hoisted him off his feet, dragging him to the van. Unceremoniously, they threw him into the back of the van, yelling at Zach to go.
Their tires squealed as the large steel doors opened. Sully watched through the open van doors as the bunker's ceiling caved in. Then the steel doors closed, and the van was plunged into the darkness of the tunnel.
Ethan pulled the van doors closed, and Lucas got to work on Sully's leg.
As the adrenaline slowly wore down, Sully gave in to the darkness creeping at the edges of his mind.
Chapter 24
Two hours later, the women turned down a dark gravel road in the middle of the Shenandoah Valley. Mountains loomed all around them, making the night seem even darker. There was no moon that night, and only the stars lit their path.
The road widened into a circular clearing in the middle of the forest, and a cabin rose up at its center. A black sedan sat in the driveway, and Maggie remembered that Sully had said they'd sent a couple of their contract guys to the cabin to keep it secure.
Ella stopped the van, and the women piled out. Maggie led the way up the steps just as the door flew open, and two large men exited with guns in hand.
With a yelp, Maggie stopped short, and her hands flew up by her ears just as Isabel said in a rushed voice, "It's just us."
The two men lowered their weapons.
"The guys behind you?" one of the men asked. He was tall and broad, with sandy blond hair. Fairly good-looking, and definitely ex-military. He just carried himself with that confidence and air about him.
"I hope so, Marcus."
The other guy, whose name Maggie found out later was Stephen, was just as tall and broad, but his dark skin and closed-cropped hair were in stark contrast to his partner’s. The two of them went back inside, leaving the door open so that the women could follow. As they all filed in, the guys went back out to get their bags.
Maggie was amazed at the opulence of the place. When Sully had mentioned a safe house, she'd imagined a run-down junker with folding chairs and tables, and cardboard boxes as furniture. Not a place that had a grand staircase with an antler chandelier in the middle of the foyer. The stairs parted at the top, leading to two different hallways and wings of the house. Although the place wasn't huge, it definitely wasn't small, either.
Maggie knew that Sully had picked something large enough that if all his guys and their families had to be there for any length of time, it would be big enough to house them comfortably.
The living room was open, with a tall rock fireplace as the focal point, and soft leather couches framing it on both sides. Maggie walked a little further into the house and saw a large, chef's-grade kitchen with granite countertops and top-of-the-line cabinetry.
The place was beautiful. An escape. A place of refuge.
Worry gnawed at her gut, and she turned around at the sound of Isabel's approaching footsteps.
"It's beautiful, isn't it? Sully wanted us all to be comfortable, just in case." Her sad smile gave away the worry that Maggie knew was eating at all of them.
"It is. And just like Sully to think of everyone that way."
"Most people think that Sully is gruff and has no feelings or emotions. But you saw through that, didn't you?"
Maggie nodded as she fought back tears. She was terrified that she wouldn't get to peel back any more of Sully's layers. But that possibility would not be her reality. It just couldn't be.
"Let's put these groceries away," Isabel said, nodding toward the groceries that the guys must have brought in and set on the counter.
The two women worked, putting away groceries in companionable silence. Neither felt the need to talk. Idle chatter wouldn't do. And speculating wouldn't help, either.
They'd lost their connection to the guys' comms devices about midway through the tunnel. Maggie had hoped that they'd have longer to listen in. But all they'd heard was the sound of gunshots and directions being shouted at each other. They had heard Zach call for a final stand, and then the line had gone dead. The silence in the van after the radio had gone quiet had been deafening.
Once the groceries were put away, Isabel and Maggie joined Ella and Scarlett on the couches in the great room. Maggie had three glasses of wine balanced in her hands, while Isabel carried sparkling water for her and Scarlett.
Maggie handed a glass to Cate before offering one to Ella, and she put her hand up. "No, thanks. I think I'll get some water instead."
Maggie raised an eyebrow. "Oh, yeah?"
"Yeah, I'm just not in the mood for wine right now."
"Since when are you not in the mood? If anything, this moment is the best time for wine."
Ella's face split into a wide, but sad, grin. "Ok, fine. I can't drink it."
"You're pregnant!" Isabel shouted, squealing as she rushed over to hug Ella.
"I was waiting until we saw the doctor. I haven't even told Zach yet. Not with, you know…" she trailed off.
They knew. Ella wouldn't have wanted to tell Zach right before a big battle and distract him. Maggie felt a little twinge of jealousy. She was surrounded by happily married pregnant women—well, except Cate, but Maggie didn't think it would be too much longer before she announced her own pregnancy news.
They all circled around Ella, congratulating and hugging her. Ella's eyes were watery as they all found their spots again on the couches.
"I didn't know. With all that's happened to me—all the damage that’s been done—I wasn't even sure that I could have children. Zach and I had decided to just stop using birth control on our wedding night and see what happened. I thought it would take a lot longer. But here we are." She shrugged, but there was genuine happiness in her eyes.
Ella's past as a sex prisoner had resulted in abuse of all forms, especially from her forced boyfriend, Bruno Lopez. The man had been brutal, pimping her out left and right, and then becoming angry with her afterward
s and beating her almost to death.
Maggie and Ella had a lot in common. Histories with sadistic men that got their kicks from beating women.
"I'm so happy for you," Maggie said, squeezing Ella tightly and pushing down the tiny bit of jealousy that kept trying to poke out its ugly head.
The celebration died down as all the worry about their men crept back in. As if in unison, they all glanced down at their phones. Hoping for a text message. A phone call. Anything to let them know that the guys were ok.
The sound of a car engine broke through the quiet room, and each woman jumped to her feet. Marcus and Stephen jumped up from the chairs near the front door and pulled out their weapons.
Maggie rushed to the window to peer out, and Marcus stepped in front of her. Her eyes met his, and he gave a slight shake of his head. Right. Not safe. It was killing her not to know if that was Sully and the other guys coming up the drive, or The General or Anthony coming for them.
The sound of the motor turned off, and the banging of car doors followed. The women stood together in the middle of the room, waiting. Barely breathing.
A knock sounded at the door. Two sets of staccato knocks, followed by four short single knocks.
Marcus and Stephen breathed out a sigh of relief, dropping their guns to their sides and opening the door.
And when they did, all the air left Maggie's lungs.
Sully.
She rushed to him before realizing that Lucas and Ethan had him propped up on each side and were dragging him in the door. Sully's head lolled to the side, and it was then that she realized he wasn't conscious.
The women rushed to their aid.
"What do you need, Lucas?" Isabel asked, her eyes darting to Ethan to make sure he was whole and well. As Maggie glanced over, she barely noticed that his hair looked singed, his clothes were torn, and hot pink blisters shone through the holes in his shirt and pants. Her whole being was focused on Sully.
"A table. Hot water. Alcohol, if you have it. Both to drink and to disinfect. He's going to need it. And my medical bag, which is still in the van."
"I've got that," Zach announced, as Ella jumped into his arms. He almost fell as she wrapped her long legs around his torso and kissed his neck and face. The grin on his face was one of pure love and delight.
Castle Investigations Box Set Page 117
