Please don’t see me. Please don’t see me. Please don’t see me.
His eyes were on the ground. Tracks. I’d left tracks—and they stopped right under this tree. I knew the second he was going to look up. I only had time for one thought, one silent plea.
Don’t miss.
My arm whipped the rock at him so hard, I nearly knocked myself out of the tree. He looked up.
I didn’t miss.
The rock caught him just above the eye. He went down, but didn’t stay down, and as he climbed from his knees to his feet, bleeding and dazed, but very much alive, I felt the adrenaline that had pushed me to this point evaporate. There would be no superhuman feats of strength or speed. This was it: him aiming the rifle into the tree, and me clinging to a branch fifteen feet up in the air, shaking and bleeding, with nothing left to throw.
“Out of tricks?” he called up, his finger toying with the trigger.
I thought of Agent Sterling back in the cabin. He’d go for her next, run her through this sick little game.
No.
I did the only thing there was left to do. I jumped.
The gun went off. The shot went wide, and I crashed into him, feet first. We both went down in a tangle of limbs. He kept hold of the rifle, but I was too close for him to point it at me.
Three seconds.
That was how long it took for him to get the upper hand, to wrestle me to the ground. He pinned me with one hand, then rose to a crouch and slammed a foot into my chest, replacing his hand. Head wound bleeding heavily, he stood. From my position on the ground, he looked impossibly tall. Invincible.
He brought the gun to his shoulder. The tip of the barrel was less than three feet away from my body. It hovered over my midsection for a few seconds, then settled just over my forehead.
I closed my eyes.
“Take them. Free them. Track them. Kill—” He cut off, suddenly and without warning. It was only later that my brain processed the sound of gunfire, the rush of footsteps coming toward me.
“Cassie. Cassie.”
I didn’t want to open my eyes. If I opened my eyes, it might not be real. The gun might still be there. He might still be there.
“Cassandra.” There was only one man in the universe who could say my full name in exactly that tone.
I opened my eyes. “Briggs.”
“Webber’s dead.” He clarified that point before asking me if I was okay.
“Webber?” I croaked. I knew the name, but my mind couldn’t process it, couldn’t process the fact that the man who’d done this to me even had a name.
“Anthony Webber,” Briggs confirmed, doing a cursory check of my injuries, tallying them, down to every last detail.
“Sterling?” I managed to ask.
“She’s safe.”
“How did you—”
Briggs held up a hand and dug his phone out with the other. The call he made was brief and to the point: “I’ve got her. She’s fine.” Then he turned his attention back to me and answered the question I hadn’t even finished asking. “Once we realized the two of you were missing and unaccounted for, the director threw the entire agency behind finding you. He kept saying that Veronica had tried to tell him something was off about this case.”
“But how did you—”
“Your ankle tracker.”
“Agent Sterling said she hadn’t activated it.”
Briggs smiled wryly. “She hadn’t, but since she was on a playing-by-the-rules kick when she checked it out, she filled out all the paperwork. I’s were dotted. T’s were crossed. We had the serial number and were able to activate it remotely.”
It was ironic—I’d saved Agent Sterling’s life by breaking the rules, and she’d saved mine by following them.
Briggs helped me to my feet. “My team’s on their way in,” he said. “We left straight from the house, so we had a head start.”
We?
“Cassie.” Dean broke through the brush.
“I told him to wait at the cabin,” Briggs said to me. “I told you to wait at the cabin,” he reiterated to Dean, annoyance creeping into his voice. But he didn’t stop me from taking three steps toward Dean, or Dean from crossing the remaining space between us in a heartbeat. The next second, he had a hand on each of my shoulders, touching me, confirming that I was okay, that I was here, that I was real.
“What are you doing here?” I asked him.
His hands went from my shoulders to my face. His right hand cupped the left side. His left gently bypassed my injuries, burying itself in my hair and holding my head up for me, like he thought my neck might not be able to do the job.
“Activating the tracker was Sloane’s idea. Everyone else forgot about it. Briggs was at our place when we got the coordinates. I may have arranged it so that I was in his car when he went to leave.”
Briggs wouldn’t have wasted even a second trying to kick him out.