Chapter 1005
For a moment there was no pain, only cold numbing shock. Then the fire started — a burning, searing agony radiating outward from her left clavicle. She looked down. Her thermal shirt was turning dark, a rapid bloom of red spreading across the fabric like ink dropped in water.
“Skye!” Alistair’s roar was primal.
She looked up, her vision blurring at the edges. The shot hadn’t come from the woods. It had come from the helicopter team.
One of the medics was standing tall, a suppressed pistol in his hand, smoke curling lazily from the barrel. He reached up and pulled off his surgical mask.
A smile Skye knew too well. A smile that belonged at family dinners and charity galas, not here in the dirt with a gun.
Preston Sterling. The exiled cousin. The black sheep cast out years ago, long before Arthur’s desperate schemes with Gemma.
𝖱o𝗆𝖺𝗇с𝖾 𝗇𝘰v𝘦l𝘴 o𝗇 𝗴аln𝘰𝘃e𝗅𝗌.𝘤𝗈𝗆
“Sorry, Skye,” Preston said, his voice carrying easily over the idling rotors. “The Kensington Patriarch pays better than loyalty. And he pays better than the scraps the Sterling family left me.”
“Preston,” Skye whispered, the name tasting like ash. “You’re working for them?”
Lucian’s face went rigid. He reached for his sidearm, but two of the other medics instantly leveled their weapons at him.
“Don’t be a hero, Graves,” Preston warned. “You were useful for the transport. Now you’re just a spectator.”
“You dare draw a weapon on me inside my own extraction team?” Lucian hissed, his eyes narrowing. “You’ve been compromised.”
“Bought,” Preston corrected. “There’s a difference.”
He snapped his fingers. The remaining men in the clearing tore off their medical patches. They weren’t rescuers. Red laser dots materialized on Alistair’s chest, on Liam’s forehead, on Julian’s unconscious form.
It was a trap nested inside a rescue.
Alistair didn’t care about the lasers. He looked at Skye bleeding in the dirt, and his eyes went black with murderous rage. His hand moved toward the gun tucked in his waistband.
“No!” Skye tried to scream. It came out as a gurgle.
“Drop it, Thorne!” Preston shouted. “Or the next one goes in her head.”
Alistair hesitated, his hand hovering over the weapon. He was calculating. He was fast, but not faster than six automatic rifles already trained on them.
“I said drop it!”
Alistair snarled, his muscles coiling. He was going to do it. He was going to die trying to reach her.
Then a blur of motion.
Liam.
He didn’t go for Preston. He didn’t attack the mercenaries. He threw his entire body weight into Alistair, slamming him backward against a large boulder.
“Stay down!” Liam roared, pinning Alistair to the rock with his forearm across Alistair’s throat. The move was violent and desperate. Alistair looked up at him, shock warring with fury.
“Get off me!” Alistair shouted, struggling. “They shot her! Let me go!”
“If you move, they kill all of us!” Liam yelled back, his face inches from Alistair’s. “Look at the lasers, you idiot! You’ll get her killed!”
“You’re protecting them?” Alistair spat, betrayal carved into every line of his face. “You’re with him?”
.
.