In His Keeping (Slow Burn #2)

His eyes glittered with fury and then, strangely, triumph. A chill went up her spine just as the overwhelming urge to duck and react defensively overtook all else. She dropped like a rock and then performed a powerful leg sweep, rotating blindly behind her.

She connected with something hard and solid, pain shooting up her leg at the contact. Judging by the muffled oath, her assailant hurt worse than she did, though. Splitting her concentration between two objects, or rather people, was more difficult than she’d imagined it would be.

Goon A, still suspended from the ceiling, dropped about a foot before she shot him upward again, but the lapse in concentration cost her dearly. A fist connected with her chin, sending her reeling back several feet. The damn man had bricks for hands.

She grasped her jaw, massaging as she focused on keeping the man who scared her the most where he could cause her no harm while planning her offense against her newest assailant.

Her gaze lighted on the pistol the goon trapped on the ceiling had shot the lab rat and Goon B with. Evidently, he’d dropped it when she slammed him into the wall. Remembering what Beau had told her about Glocks she whispered a prayer that this was a Glock as well and she didn’t have to figure out how to mentally turn a safety off. But then surely the goon wouldn’t have engaged the safety after killing two men.

Now that she was effectively splitting her mental energy between three things, she found it a lot harder to summon the pistol from across the room. It went skittering erratically over the floor, bumping and knocking. She winced hoping to hell it didn’t arbitrarily go off because if she had to ward off a speeding bullet, she could kiss all her other focus goodbye.

Finally the gun lifted into the air and floated toward her, unseen by her newest assailant. The damn goon shouted a warning though, and the man turned just in time to see the gun dangling in front of his face.

Shit!

He reached for it and her instincts, or self-preservation, kicked in. She pictured the gun leveling itself, aiming for the man’s shoulder, because damn it, she just couldn’t bring herself to be the cold-blooded killer she’d almost convinced herself that she could be.

The gun went off and the man went down, holding his left shoulder as blood rapidly spread, seeping through his fingers, coating them red.

She flipped the goon off and then sprinted from the room, knowing she had a hell of a lot more to do before she could call it a day. She squared the ceiling goon away, compartmentalizing him in a section of her mind, issuing a firm command for him to stay.

Then she realized, to her utter horror, that she’d been thinking she was having to split her focus on three things when, in fact, she had four things going on simultaneously.

Her parents!

Oh God. What if the barrier had slipped? What if she’d killed them because she’d spent too much time focusing on not killing someone who actually deserved it? She and her conscience were going to have a serious come-to-Jesus meeting when this was all over. Because clearly, having a conscience didn’t get one ahead in life. If anything it put her at a major disadvantage in the evolutionary chain.

Her plan would have to change on the fly. She couldn’t very well bring the building down and reduce it and everyone in it to rubble if her parents were vulnerable. Damn it all. She wasn’t an on-her-feet thinker!

She’d committed the winding passageways to memory—again, thank you, eidetic memory—on her way out today with the guard dogs because her first trip through them wasn’t exactly under the best circumstances.

It took her three of the longest minutes of her life before she finally entered the long hallway that housed the ancient jail cells. Where the hell were they, anyway? What kind of creepy place had a lab and prison cells?

She was at full sprint, counting the cells, until she skidded to a halt outside the one that housed her parents. The door was wide open and not only was there no invisible protective bubble. There was absolutely no sign of her parents.

What she did see froze her heart to the very core and fear blazed like a wildfire through her veins.

There were multiple puddles of blood—a mortal amount of scarlet liquid pooled on the floor exactly where she’d instructed her parents to stand. Fresh blood. Worse, there were smears of blood that ran from the spot in front of the cot all the way to the door, and as she looked down, she realized it had continued into the hallway. What the hell had they done to her parents? Had they shot them and then dragged them off to parts unknown?

While she was being snarky and sarcastic, indulging in taunts with her enemies, her parents had been left unprotected because she wasn’t adept at multitasking with her newly tapped powers.

Utter despair, grief and . . . rage flooded her mind, swamping her in wave upon wave of agony. She’d failed. She’d vowed to them she could do this. Had made them swear they’d trust her.