Shadows (Black Raven Book 1)

by Barcelona, Stella

  “Would you at least let me do a field bandage?”

  Sebastian shook his head. “No time. Get the first aid kit from the back.” To Skye, he said, “Get Spring situated in the back. I need you in front.”

  Skye coaxed Spring into the back seat, opened her backpack, and with shaking hands, she handed Spring her tablet and colored pencils. Spring shook her head. She tried Spring’s iPad and earphones. Spring wouldn’t put the earphones on her head, but she held onto them. Skye dug in Spring’s backpack for a rawhide for Candy and handed it to her, as the agent approached Sebastian with the first aid kit. Sebastian took it and placed it on the center console in the front seat. “Go. You have work to do.”

  The agent nodded. “Yes, sir.”

  He turned and left, as Spring eased her headphones on her head and buried her face in Candy’s fur. Before getting in the car, Sebastian eased the jacket off with a grimace. She gasped. His shirtsleeve was soaked with dark red blood. Most of the right arm of it had been slashed through. He unbuttoned the sleeves, unbuttoned the shirt, and shrugged his left arm out of it, gingerly slipping it off his right arm. The man was obviously in pain, clenching his jaw and grimacing as the fabric fell away, yet he kept talking to people who were mic’d to him, giving orders, discussing logistics of how they were going to get to safety, as calm as she’d ever heard him.

  Taut muscles rippled across his lean abdomen, chest, shoulders, and arms. He had the perfect amount of curly, golden brown chest hair. At any other moment, she’d have paused to admire the sculpted specimen of maleness, but the tendrils of red blood that oozed from a six-inch gash in his right arm, from firm tricep to midway across his generous bicep, stole her attention. The cut bisected a tattoo of a lone black raven. It was the same stark, sleek, and powerful profile of the bird that she’d seen on his agents’ clothing. A crimson river poured from the inside of the raven and ran down his arm.

  “How can you drive when you’re bleeding like that?”

  “I’m not,” he said, opening a bottle of alcohol, drawing a breath as he poured it onto the gash. He clenched his jaw, shook his head, then ripped open a pack of gauze with his teeth. Letting the paper-wrapping fall to the ground, he used the gauze to dry his arm. “Get in. While I drive, you’re going to make the bleeding stop.”

  Chapter Twelve

  Sebastian waited for the troopers to box them in. They were using four vehicles, two troopers in each, with enough firepower to deter even the most determined kidnappers. It was going to make driving tricky, but he wasn’t taking chances. Someone wanted the Barrows girls badly. Whoever they were, Sebastian wasn’t going to fuck up again and give them another shot. He was hedging every goddamn bet from here on out.

  As he put the car in drive, he glanced at Skye to see how she was holding up, just as she lowered her window two inches. It was the third time that day he’d noticed her need for fresh air. He wondered about the depth of her claustrophobic streak and made a mental note to ask Ragno about it.

  “Too much cold air for you?” Skye asked, studying his bare chest as she pulled on rubber gloves from the first aid kit.

  The car thermometer read thirty-four. He reached for the heater and turned it up. “No.” He drove onto the interstate on-ramp, with their escorts surrounding them. “Ragno. Departing now. ETA forty minutes to the airport, total of ninety minutes driving time to Last Resort.”

  Last Resort was the nearest of Black Raven’s training facilities, and one of the largest. It was also the closest significant installation where he felt comfortable bringing Skye and Spring, given what he’d seen at the safe house.

  “Last Resort is a two-hour drive from your present location,” Ragno pointed out. “With the stop at the airport, you’re looking at more like two and a half hours.”

  “Not tonight.” He planned to drive as fast as he could.

  Using the Georgia state troopers as protection and guidance through traffic, he was going straight to the airport, where Raven One had landed when they’d been dropped off an hour or so earlier. For diversion, he’d drive into a private hangar, one that Ragno was now securing. There they were going to pretend to board Raven Four, a jet that was now en route from an airport that was closer to Last Resort. Raven Four would depart to parts unknown. The flight plan would not be made public. There’d be enough agents there and enough Black Raven vehicles to create a plausible scenario where he, Skye, and Spring had boarded the jet and left Georgia. The state troopers who were now privy to knowing that Skye and Spring Barrows were in the custody of Black Raven would think they had left the state on Raven Four. In reality, once the jet was in the air, he and the sisters were going to proceed to Last Resort in one of the Range Rovers, in a convoy. No one outside of Black Raven was going to know where they were.

  “Lock down protocol is activated at Last Resort,” Ragno said. “Interior and perimeter are secure.”

  “Update on the news conference.”

  “The good news is that it’s over,” Ragno said, her tone clipped. “Better news is that it ended before there was any tie-in between the prison break, the action at the safe house, and the shoot-out that just happened on the highway outside of the mall. We have a few hours before media’s going to connect the dots. Bad news is that the world now knows that Barrows is out, that no one can find him, and that Biondo, an escapee, killed a man. As expected, fingers pointed at Black Raven, and now the talking heads are running with the theme of how private security contractors are nothing better than armed, unregulated militia. The politicians who opposed the outsourcing of prison security are calling for congressional hearings.”

  Beautiful, he thought, fucking beautiful. He adjusted his speed to accommodate the four state trooper vehicles, who at the moment weren’t going above seventy-five. “How’s Pete?”

  “Alive. Holding his own in the emergency room. Nothing more for you until that arm is bandaged. Tell Skye you need a tourniquet first, butterfly bandages second, and then a pressure bandage.”

  The SUVs cameras were on, and Ragno was watching everything, as usual. Skye had been pressing gauze onto his arm in an effort to force the bleeding to stop. “Tourniquet,” he told her, “and make it tight. Right below my shoulder.”

  He glanced in the rearview mirror, where Spring was watching her sister’s first aid efforts. Tear streaks stained Spring’s face, her hair was half in, half out of her braid, but her headphones were on and, thank God, she was quiet. Ignoring all of them, the dog was gnawing on an oversized rawhide, as though her life depended on each bite.

  He glanced back at the road, as the lead trooper turned on his siren and picked up the speed to eighty. Atlanta’s interstate system was busy, even after ten on a Monday evening. To maintain a speed of eighty, they needed sirens. Fine with him.

  “Now what?” Skye asked, attention riveted to the wound.

  With the tourniquet in place, he said, “Pinch the edges together and close the cut with butterfly strips.”

  He felt her fingers on his arm, pressing.

  “You need stitches,” she said.

  “There’s a needle and thread in the kit.” He glanced at her. Her eyes were wide, studying his face, and she was frozen in place, her fingers on his arm as she leaned towards him.

  She shook her head. “I don’t even sew on buttons.”

  He chuckled as he focused on the road. They were moving steadily now and doing an average speed of eighty.

  “Really,” she said. “I have no clue how to do stitches on cloth, much less a human! You should have had a paramedic do this.”

  His lips twitched at her vehemence and the worry in her eyes. “I was joking.”

  “Not funny.”

  “The cut isn’t as bad as all of the blood is making it seem. I take medicine that makes me bleed.”

  “For your headaches?”

  He nodded and kept his eyes glued to the road. His headaches weren’t a state secret, but he didn’t like that she, or anybody, was aware of them. He wondered wha
t else she’d learned about him in this interminably long day. He shook off the worry. Headaches were now a fact of his life, and, for better or worse, at least for the near future, so was Skye. Some of the pills that he was now taking for his headaches would be damn good right now, because his head felt like it was going to explode. He couldn’t medicate while driving, and not when he was responsible for the two of them, but he sure as hell looked forward to a double dose of the medication smorgasbord when they got to Last Resort and were in capable hands.

  “As long as you have your arm bent like that, I can’t get the wound to close.”

  He’d been holding his arm at his chest, elbow bent, with his hand on his lap. He unflexed his arm and stretched. His hand had nowhere to go but in her lap, palm down. His tricep was up, his bicep was down, and the wound was positioned so that she could look straight down at it. When she did, her breasts pressed into his arm. On any other day, the position would have been a good thing. Her firm, yet soft, thighs inspired an urge to stroke her legs.

  She shifted in her seat, and he frowned. Damn. All he had to do was touch her and he became hard, even with a headache, a gash in his arm, casualties among Black Raven agents, and more shit raining on him than he had ever imagined possible. His libido was back, and it didn’t give a damn about everything that was going wrong in the world.

  He tried to focus on driving and maintaining a safe distance between their SUV and the lead trooper. Out of the corner of his eye he saw her open another pack of gauze and throw the wrapping at her feet. He bit back a smile of admiration at her willingness to dive into a bloody first-aid project. She shifted in the seat, which caused her breasts to press tighter against his arm, and now his hand was between her thighs. With soft touches, she dried his arm one more time. The combination of her strong touch, delicate fingers, and breasts that were pressed against his arm sent sparks from his arm straight to his dick, igniting even more of a fire.

  Hell. He groaned, not quite under his breath.

  She cast a worried look in his direction. “You sure you’re not lightheaded? You’re going eighty. I’d hate for you to pass out.”

  “Nope. Feeling fine.” He glanced at the speedometer. Eighty-five, with his dick rock-hard, and no relief for that in sight. He resigned himself to unrequited arousal as she held the gauze against his arm with her left hand, gripped a pack of butterfly strips in her right and tore it open with her teeth. She drew a deep breath as she pinched the edges of the wound together and applied adhesive strips across it. She used a light, but firm, touch.

  The fact that she didn’t know what to do told him that she wasn’t highly skilled with first-aid, yet her touch was confident. He liked people who weren’t afraid of doing things that were out of their usual orbit, and Skye certainly fit that bill. When she had eight bandages in place, crisscrossed into not-so-neat x’s, she paused and studied the wound. “Hey, this is working. It stopped bleeding. Now what?”

  “Gauze. Wrap it around the whole arm. After, tape it. Make it tight.”

  She ripped open another pack of gauze. “You’re probably going to have a scar running through the tattoo.”

  “Not the biggest problem of the day, and it won’t be my first scar.” He glanced at her and saw her studying his exposed skin. All the lights were on in the car, and there was no hiding the collection of battle scars on his shoulders and chest that he’d gathered over the years.

  “I’m through.” She patted down the tape that she had wrapped around his bicep. “I think it’s holding.”

  Ragno said, “It looks great, Sebastian. Elevate your arm and have her remove the tourniquet.”

  He chuckled. Ragno didn’t have to say Get your hand out of her lap, but he knew she was thinking it.

  “What’s funny?” Skye asked.

  “Nothing.” He lifted his arm so that it was resting on her headrest behind her head. “Now undo the tourniquet.”

  As Skye turned in the seat to untie the rubber strip, she asked, “What happened at the safe house?”

  “Same thing that happened on the road.”

  “It was supposed to be a safe house,” she said. “What happened to the men who were there, making sure that it was safe?”

  He glanced in the rearview mirror. Spring was looking at his arm. “Is she listening?”

  “Not with her earphones on, but use your nice voice.” Skye gave him a slight half smile, though her eyes looked more worried than happy. “Keep it low and try not to look stressed. She’s a master at nonverbal clues.”

  “I was ambushed,” he said, focusing on the road. “Three bad guys. The two marshals were dead, as were my two men.”

  “I’m sorry that you lost your men.”

  “Thank you,” he said, keeping his gaze directly ahead, focusing on the taillights of the lead state trooper. He didn’t want to see sympathy in her eyes. Her voice was packed with enough of it.

  The path of feelings, for him, was a slippery slope into a dark house of horrors, a place where he never willingly went. With the two agents who had gotten killed on the road at the mall, the body count for Black Raven due to the prison break was four. If Pete didn’t make it, it would be five. In his business he’d learned to develop a thick shell of hard-ass emotional armor, and the sympathy in Skye’s voice prompted him to call upon that overly-developed skill.

  The hardest part about the head injury he had suffered in July was that there were holes in his carefully cultivated emotion-shielding armor, and until he fully recovered from the head injury, he had to deal with feelings that zapped at him from out of the blue.

  Nightmares for Sebastian, even before the head injury, were never what could go wrong with a job, or whether he was going to get himself in a situation where he’d die. No. His nightmares were made up of feelings, of horror, fear, and incompetence. Of failing to help some innocent person who needed his help, and it didn’t take a rocket scientist to pinpoint the cause of why he’d prefer to be a callous son of a bitch than anything else. He was never going to be more than a few steps removed from the kid who had watched his father abuse his mother, physically and mentally. Before he had learned to turn off empathy as easily as turning off a light with a flick of a switch, he’d felt his mother’s pain that came with every hit, and the misery that fueled her many, many tears.

  “What went wrong?” Skye asked, her voice calling him back to the present. Thank God. Even today was better than reliving the memories of his childhood and the feeling of helplessness that came from being caught in the web that bound his mother and father.

  “We’re not sure.”

  “Is that all you’re going to say? What happened to those men? To you?”

  He exhaled and focused on the road, as he thought about what to tell her, because he now knew her well enough to know she wasn’t going to let the question drop. Black Raven had lost men before. What they did was dangerous, and this wasn’t the first day in company history with multiple casualties. Yet one death was one too many, and four deaths in one day was a disaster.

  Aside from the human tragedy of the individual deaths, four deaths on American soil, with American media circling the waters of the prison break like sharks at a chum fest, was going to be a PR nightmare. Congressional hearings? Holy fuck. The fact that Black Raven routinely cherry-picked the military’s top talent by offering huge paychecks was going to be aired publicly, and he wondered what kind of regulations would be enacted to prevent his hiring practices in the future.

  The only way out was to find the remaining two prisoners, get their asses back in jail, and conduct serious damage control while they did it. Just as it had been when the suck-ass day had started, finding Richard Barrows was priority number one for him. At least with Biondo there was a trail to follow. Barrows? All he had was mystery men who were hell-bent on seizing the man’s daughters.

  As he wondered what the hell to tell Skye, and still came up with no words, Ragno interrupted his thoughts by saying, “Within minutes of your appearance at
Creative Confections, everything in her life went to hell. If you expect her to open up to you and help us find her father, you need to at least give the impression that you’re being open and honest. Tell her something. Now.”

  Ragno was correct. As usual. “Whoever’s after you has a diabolical mean streak. You might think that you’re running from me, or the authorities, or whatever you think you’re running from, but all you’re doing is running to them, cause there’s no way you can avoid them.” Eyes back on the road, he told himself, because her eyes had a magnetic pull—of not just fear, but defiance—that was dangerous. “Black Raven cars are loaded with cameras. Before the gunfire erupted you were trying to bash Pete’s head in with your shoe.” Clever move on her part, but given the shit-storm that had happened immediately after, he didn’t dwell on the cleverness. “I know you were driving away from the scene, and I hate to think that you were doing that, regardless of whether Pete is getting medical help.”

  “I didn’t say to pick a fight with her,” Ragno said. “What the hell is wrong with you?”

  “Whoa,” Skye said. “Hold it for just one sec-”

  “Nice voice,” he said, as he glanced into the rearview mirror and saw Spring sitting up, erect, her eyes wide and focused on her sister.

  Skye turned to glance at her sister and offered her a reassuring smile, as she flashed her an index-finger-meeting-thumb OK signal. She said, “I’m OK,” before glancing again at Sebastian. “You’re damn right I was leaving.” Her tone was soothing and sweet, even though her words were razor-edged and to-the-point. “By now it shouldn’t be a news flash to you that I want to get away. At first I thought Pete was dead, so whether he needed medical help wasn’t really an issue, and you can’t blame me for not wanting to stick around there. Who’s to say more men weren’t arriving within seconds?”

  Well, maybe she had a valid excuse for running. Given the events of the day, her fear that the bad guys were winning and would continue to pursue her was realistic. If she truly had thought that Pete was dead, there’d have been no reason to pause to get him medical help. “If you succeed in running from me, all you’re doing is guaranteeing a run-in with men who are taking orders from someone with a sadistic mean streak.”