DURAN DIDN’T HAVE TO hit the brakes on the truck he’d stolen. All of his momentum got eaten up as he broke through into his old cell. Good thing he wore his seat belt, and thank God the airbags were broken.
He was out of that fucking Dodge in a heartbeat, and he left the engine on because he was not staying long.
Chalen’s guards scattered, dropping their fragile, naked payload on the stone floor of the cell, Ahmare’s brother landing in a pile of bones that surely sustained breaks.
Leading with the shotgun that had been so conveniently mounted in the cab, Duran pointed those loaded double barrels at the conqueror.
Who had pissed himself. Either because at his age he had poor bladder control or on account of the surprise.
“No one moves or I shoot your master,” Duran said to the guards. “We clear?”
When there was no disagreement, he planted himself over the top of his female’s brother. “Ahlan, can you get in the cab—don’t fucking move, Chalen. You so much as breathe wrong and I blow your fucking balls all over the stone wall behind you.”
Ahmare’s brother had a good survival instinct. He picked himself up and tripped and fell his way over to the truck. The poor bastard somehow got himself in and even shut the door.
Duran took one step toward Chalen. Another. And another.
The closer he got, the more the conqueror cowered, the old male dropping the dagger, tangling in his robes, falling to the floor.
“I’ll give you whatever you want,” he said in a trembling voice. Lifting his skeletal arms, he tried to protect himself. “I have money! I have—”
“Shut the fuck up. Where is Ahmare—”
There was screech of metal on metal, and then something flipped out into the cell, a grate of some kind— The female he had come to find, the one he had refused to lose, the love of his life, burst out of the wall like she’d been shot from a cannon, her body launching at him.
“You’re alive!”
Duran wanted to grab her and hold her and breathe her in, but he couldn’t spare the shotgun. “We’re all alive,” he said as he let in a brief ray of love.
But then he nodded at Chalen. “The question is how we’re going to kill this sonofabitch—wait, Nexi?”
As his old friend uncramped herself from the crawl space Ahmare had come out of, he was shocked at the Shadow’s presence.
“You’re always late,” she muttered. “We could have used you better about ten minutes ago.”
He smiled. “It’s good see you, Nex.”
She smiled back. “Yeah. Good to see you, too.”
Ahmare was over at the truck, opening the door, checking on her brother. Hushed, hurried words between the siblings, full of gratitude and love, were a reconnection that wasn’t complete yet.
Not until they were all out of here safely.
“Your guards are gone,” Duran said as he looked around and realized they were alone with Chalen. “Guess they’re getting reinforcements.”
“I’ll send them all away,” the conqueror vowed. “You can go. Take her brother, you can go—”
“Shut up.” Wait, there was one guard left—and he stood beside Nexi. “Who’s your friend, Shadow—oh, it’s you.”
It was the young redhead from the forest. The one Ahmare had saved.
As the kid nodded with hesitation, like he expected to get his head blown off, Duran figured that was how Ahmare and Nexi had linked up with a hidden passageway in the castle—and why the Shadow hadn’t killed that one particular guard.
“Thanks for helping my female,” Duran said to the male.
Now, when the kid nodded, it was more a vow between combatants on the same side.
Ahmare came back over from the truck. “He’s stable enough. But we need to get out of here.”
“You have one last job.” Duran held the shotgun out to her. “You get your kill. Then we go.”
Without Duran’s help, Ahmare thought, her brother would be dead.
Before that truck had broken through that wall, there had been no way for her to save her brother, no chance of that grate breaking free and letting her out in time.
And Chalen absolutely would have killed Ahlan. The fact that he hadn’t was only because of Duran’s shocking arrival. So, according to the Old Laws, and on behalf of all the others Chalen had killed in his eons as a mercenary, it was true: She could lawfully end his life.
She bent down and picked up the dagger he had been about to use. There was dried blood already on it.
Off in the distance, there was the sound of an approaching army, the guards organized and coming to save their master. But in a race against a bullet shot at point-blank range? No contest on that one. The double barrel was going to win.
“You can have your brother,” Chalen said. “He’s what you came for. Keep the beloved, too. I don’t care. Just spare me.”