Finding Trust (Centre Games)

by Natalie Gayle

  The fire was intensifying by the second. He reached for her again, yelling, “It’s not worth your life.”

  She struggled madly again and he knew he’d either have to hurt her or let her go. “It’s not my life I’m worried about,” she cried, slipping from his hold again. “It’s my livelihood.”

  He knew right then that the only way he was going to get her out of there short of knocking her unconscious was to help her get the prime mover off.

  “Get back,” he screamed, pushing her away. He reached up for the hoses and ripped with far more strength than needed. The connectors released. The truck was free of the trailer. Little miss pixie didn’t need any further encouragement; she scrambled up the steps and slid into the seat that seemed far too big for her delicate frame. The engine roared to life and she shifted the beast into gear and gunned it forward.

  He leapt back from the trailer to a safe distance. The prime mover was quickly picking up speed as she hauled ass out of the transport area. The whine of the turbos screamed over all the other noise as she redlined the engine before upshifting. He counted three upshifts before she hit the entry to the transport yard. Diesel plumes curled skyward from the twin exhaust stacks. She rounded the corner onto the road and the truck let out a long blast from the air horn. A tiny arm came out the window in acknowledgement.

  For a split second, he held her gaze as he returned the wave. Who was the crazy pixie? And what the hell was that all about?

  Wasn’t that just the damndest thing?

  ***

  The place was descending into chaos. Rihanna was jogging back to the D Block to grab more horses to be loaded and moved out. Her father and Quade were trying to round up several loose horses. The rain was coming down by the bucket load. At least the thunder and lightning had moved on for now. Pools of water were already appearing all over the pavement. Horses were calling out, anxious whinnies of distress. To make matters worse, she only had a vague idea where Brayden was.

  She’d caught a few glimpses of him as he moved horses beside her. But moving horses wasn’t really an activity conducive to couple togetherness. The horses kind of got in way of getting close. By her estimations, they still had at least another hundred horses to move.

  The biggest problem was the sheer lack of manpower. Tom had made a call to remove all personnel from the site except those directly employed by the organisers. This meant any grooms of the vendors had been removed from the facility. Well, that’s what they’d attempted to do. The reality was slightly different. Horse people, being horse people, followed their own rules. In most cases, these rules didn’t align with those generally in authority positions.

  Alpha team was tied up at the racetrack part of the facility. They were running checks and moving people from the venue. A crowd of about ten thousand had turned up for today’s race meet. The massive storm that had descended upon them had meant the last two races had to be cancelled. That meant no help from Alpha team. They had enough of their own headaches to deal with.

  The crux of it was there were five of them trying to move more than two hundred horses out of a facility that had now been contaminated. Standard protocol would normally dictate that the horses stay in the infected area. However, this situation was different. They’d recognised the contamination early and had managed to isolate the blocks where the water had flowed to A,B,C,D, E, and F Blocks. The likelihood of the horses ingesting the water from the auto system was very low. Therefore, the safest course was to move them from the contamination as soon as possible. They’d done this by immediately getting them out of the stalls. Now they were getting them off the property. The facility would not be suitable for use until it could be thoroughly decontaminated, cleaned, and tested.

  Rihanna grabbed another two horses and headed for the transport yard. She’d seen Brayden, Rory, and Quade take four. She had no idea how they managed it, but she knew beyond doubt that two was all she could safely manage. Even two had been very hairy when the thunder and lightning was crashing down.

  “Rihanna, can you hear me?” Her radio comm crackled in her ear. It had been really clear up until a few minutes ago. She could only assume the rain was creating the static.

  “Yes, Brayden,” she replied, using her chin to depress the button microphone.

  “Whereabouts are you?” The concern in his voice was unmistakable.

  “On the northern side of D Block, heading for the transport yard.”

  “Is everything okay?” A little of the tension had evaporated from his voice.

  “Apart from being saturated and dealing with oated to the eyeballs young stock, I’m just peachy.”

  “Okay, I’m to the south of you working along E Block, almost at the trucks.” She could plainly hear the tension in Brayden’s voice even through the static. Moving all the horses was taking a long time and the conditions they’d been doing it in were terrible. Coupled with these horses being mere babies, the job just got ten times more difficult.

  Rihanna really hated dealing with babies. These horses were all between eighteen months and two years old. Their bodies had matured quickly but their minds were nowhere near as advanced. Her dad normally took care of the young stock. He seemed to enjoy it. He was welcome to it.

  “Okay.”

  “I’ll see you at the trucks in a couple of minutes.”

  “Okay.”

  Rihanna finished her conversation and was focused on keeping her head down to keep the rain out of her eyes and moving steadily along the pavement leading to the transport yard. She knew she was running on adrenaline. She’d been ready to drop this afternoon before all the excitement started. Her body had already taken quite a few knocks from the boisterous babies she’d been leading down for the last hour or so. Thinking about how many trips remained wasn’t the smartest thing to do but her mind seemed to keep wandering there—her own form of personal torture.

  The thoughts of the number of trips were quickly erased from her mind when the chestnut filly she led in her left hand lunged sideways into her. Rihanna felt herself falling, the body of the chestnut pushed into her side. The pavement seemed to rise up to meet her and intense pain engulfed the entire right side of her body. She caught a glimpse of hooves flying near her head before it all went foggy.

  The next thing she recognised was being dragged to her feet and not gently either. Her brain still felt too fuzzy to focus but she knew without a doubt the person who held her was not anyone she knew.

  ***

  Fear gripped Brayden’s belly in a tight knot. He’d heard Rihanna yell out a few seconds ago and it hadn’t been over the radio comms. She was in pain. Something had happened and he knew deep in his heart it wasn’t good. He’d shoved the four lead ropes into the hands of the nearest person and charged off towards where she said she was.

  Even with his animal speed, he couldn’t seem to cover the ground quickly enough. He rounded the corner and his worst fears were realised. Rihanna was being dragged from the pavement by two Asian-looking men, both wearing shirts indicating they were employees of the facility.

  There were two things wrong with this picture.

  First, the facility employed no one of Asian descent. The boss had checked earlier as a standard protocol.

  Second, they had his girl. Nobody touched her but him.

  He reached behind his back and pulled his weapon from his waistband. His Heckler and Koch USP was the same weapon used by specialist teams in the Australian military and police forces. It felt reassuring in his hand. He wasn’t big on weapons. The team usually had enough of their own, courtesy of their altered DNA. But sometimes you needed more.

  Never bring a knife to a gunfight. And he knew without a shadow of a doubt this was going to be a gunfight.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  “Let me go.” She knew, even through the haze that was her brain at the moment, her voice sounded weak and unconvincing.

  Her right side felt like it was on fire. Blood was trickling down her nose from a woun
d on her forehead and the metallic taste of blood was prominent in her mouth.

  Fear was steadily replacing the fog and she realised she must have lost consciousness for a few seconds. She really didn’t have time or the energy to piece it together just now. All she could think about was the chokehold around her neck. Someone had her pinned with an arm around the neck. She could feel his other hand completing the hold. His palm was spread wide at the base of her skull, ready to force her neck tighter into the hold.

  At the moment, she could breathe. It was uncomfortable but tolerable. If her attacker tightened the hold, she would have seconds before unconsciousness returned. Getting out of this hold had to be her priority.

  “Let her go right now.” Brayden’s voice broke through the confusion in her mind and fear in her belly. She’d recognise his voice anywhere. He was her lifeline. And hearing his voice somehow fought down some of the fear.

  “Don’t come any closer or I’ll snap her neck.” The voice from her assailant reverberated through her ear. It was heavily Asian accented.

  She raised her eyes and tried to focus on where Brayden was. He was somewhere off to her right-hand side. Her head was turned to the left and she couldn’t see him but that’s where she thought his voice sounded from.

  As she became more aware, she realised they were standing at the corner of one of the stable blocks. Someone was standing beside them. This she sensed, rather than knew, because they were outside her limited field of vision.

  “I’ve got men all over this facility with weapons trained on you. Let her go now and this will all stop before it gets out of hand.” Brayden’s voice remained calm and steady, making her hope and believe that maybe Rory and Quade were really covering these two men.

  “And I have a man beside me with a gun to her head.” His voice was also calm. However, Rihanna could clearly feel his heart thumping wildly against her back. These could be the last few breaths she took if her attacker decided to tighten the hold.

  No, no, no. She still had so much to do. She’d just found Brayden. For the first time in her life, she felt complete. There wasn’t the restless yearning in her gut for something more. It couldn’t end today. She had so much more to live for.

  “Your call. But I’ll give you to a count of three before my men take you and the guy beside you out.”

  What should she do? She knew that the guy holding her didn’t have a weapon. He couldn’t hold her this way and have a gun or knife in his hand. Did she dare try one of the self-defence moves the guys had been teaching her over the last few days? They’d taught her the countermove to this hold. Would Brayden want her to try something?

  “One.” Brayden’s count punctured the bubble of her thoughts.

  A million things were running through her head in slow motion. Nothing seemed to jell or make sense.

  “Two.”

  She heard the blast of a gun and reacted instinctively. Rihanna slammed her left elbow back hard into the ribs of her attacker, and was immediately rewarded with the sound of air escaping his diaphragm. She twisted her head into the hold, creating space in the crook of his arm. Her body was now turned far enough around into his to use the element of surprise and pain by bringing her left knee up sharply into his groin. His weight pitched forward and she stepped to the side to avoid him falling on her. For good measure, she brought up her knee to catch his chin as he fell forward. He was down for the count. And her next breath was safe.

  She realised that she was looking down at two bodies. The world seemed to stand still. At least one of them was dead.

  The man who must have had the gun on her would not raise breath, ever. The neat entry hole to the back of his head assured that. He wouldn’t have even seen the shooter. Wouldn’t have known it was coming.

  She could already see the growing pool of blood surrounding his face. In her years of being a vet, she’d seen plenty of ugly wounds. Some of them were even quite grotesque. This was different. The wound was clinical but the result the same. Somehow this scene was even more distressing.

  The bullet lodged in this man’s brain was the one that quite probably saved her life.

  Brayden was suddenly there beside her, drawing her into his arms, hugging her tightly to his body. She loved the feeling and hated it simultaneously. She loved having him close but her injured right side screamed in protest. She must have winced because he immediately loosened his hold.

  “Oh, baby, how bad are you hurt?”

  “I’m not really sure. I’m kind of numb but aching at the same time.” She buried her head in his chest, not wanting to be anywhere else.

  Rory jogged up and joined their little group. “Rihanna okay?”

  “Yeah, she’ll be fine; she’s just battered, bruised, and has a fair bit of bark off by the look of her right arm,” Brayden responded, his hand stroking gently down Rihanna’s back. The relief in his voice was evident.

  “Where’s Quade and Peter?” Rory asked; he was clearly still focused on the task at hand.

  “Last I knew they were down the south corner. See if you can raise them on the radio while I update the boss.”

  She saw a nod pass between them and a look. From the silent exchange, she knew immediately what it was about. Brayden had just silently thanked Rory.

  She then realised the fatal bullet had come from Rory. Rory’s actions had most probably saved her life. Her grip on Brayden tightened.

  She vaguely heard Brayden talking quietly through the comms unit to the boss. Exhaustion hit her. Her legs felt like limp noodles. The pain down her right side was intensifying. She needed to sit down, before she fell down. Brayden wouldn’t let that happen but that’s how she felt.

  Brayden must have felt her drooping. He shifted more of her weight on to him as he finished up his conversation.

  “Don’t ever scare me like that again, Rih. My heart can’t take it,” he said into her hair.

  “One second I was leading horses; the next I was being dragged by him.” She motioned with her head to the man still unconscious on the ground.

  He reached down and swung her into his arms. She noticed that the rain was still coming down. They were both soaked to the skin. He bent down and placed her gently against the nearby stable wall, protected from the tumbling rain.

  His hand stroked the wet hair from her face. “I need to take care of this guy.”

  She nodded weakly and closed her eyes for a few seconds. When she opened them, Brayden had rolled over the man she’d rendered unconscious and was securing his hands and feet with wide plastic zip ties that he must have had in his pocket.

  Brayden then moved to a nearby stall and grabbed a horse blanket that was neatly folded over the outside railing. He spread it out over the dead man, attempting to cover the disturbing sight of a person passed.

  She hung her head and let time pass.

  ***

  Brayden watched Tom and a few more of Charlie team approach down the paved roadway between the stable blocks. They were riding in golf carts, two in the back and two directly behind facing in the opposite direction. Unlike Beta team, Charlie team wore the white protective decontamination suits that were customary during these sort of events. To the outside eye, they looked like something out of a B grade sci-fi movie. Brayden thought it was about the best sight ever. He needed to get Rihanna out of here. Her day was done.

  He moved to her side and crouched down. “Rih, baby, are you with me? Charlie team is here. Let’s get you out of here.”

  She opened her eyes, pain and weariness evident in their hazel green depths. “Yeah, I’m okay.”

  He grinned at her. She was far from okay but she was still determined to put on a brave front. The golf carts pulled up and Jazz rushed to Rihanna. She carried a duffle bag marked with a big red cross.

  Jazz dropped beside her and Brayden stepped back to give her room. “Jazz’s going to take care of you for a few minutes, Minky. I need to go sort some stuff with the boss. I’ll just be right over here,” he promised
before dropping a kiss to her head and covering the ten paces or so to Tom.

  “Rih, how’re you doing?” Jazz quickly looked her over.

  “I’ve been better. But I’ll live.” She winced as Jazz placed a hand on her right ribs. “Love your new fashion choice.” Rihanna nodded towards the white space suit and gloves Jazz wore.

  “You can’t be too bad if you’ve noticed what I’m wearing,” Jazz said, not looking up from her attentions at Rihanna’s side. “Okay, looks like we’ve got a reasonably deep cut to your head, a nasty case of road rash down your right arm, and I wouldn’t be surprised if you’ve got a couple of cracked ribs. I think you’re going to have a huge bruise on your hip. Think we’ll x-ray that as well.” Jazz squeezed her hand.

  “Thought about as much,” Rihanna confirmed for her.

  “I’ll cover the head wound and the road rash for the time being.” Jazz spoke to her as she placed large sterile dressings over her head and arm. “That’s about as much as we can do here. We’ll need to get you to a hospital for some x-rays. That road rash is going to hurt like hell when we clean that out.”

  Rihanna smiled weakly. “Thanks for the reminder. You’re such a ray of sunshine.”

  “At least you’re in one piece. When it came through the comms that he had you—I nearly died on the spot with fear.” Jazz had picked up her hand again and squeezed tightly. “I’d hug you but that’d hurt you even more. Don’t put me through that again.”

  “Umm, definitely not on my list of things to repeat in a hurry,” Rihanna confirmed for her.

  “Do you want a shot for the pain?”

  “No, but I’ll take some pills if you’ve got any.”

  “Sure. Won’t be as good as the shot, but it’ll help take the edge off.” Jazz pulled a plastic box from the duffel and sorted through the packages containing pills until she found what she was looking for.