Dark Desire by Lauren Smith (an ebook reader txt) 📗

to survive for a few days. There is a list of numbers to call if something happens to me or any of us and you’re left alone.”

She gripped his sweater, halting him when he tried to turn away. “Nothing is going to happen to you, right?”

He caught her hand in his, kissing her fingers. “We will be all right,” he promised, but for the first time, she feared Dimitri was lying.

Emery appeared in the doorway of the master bedroom. “Leo said he picked up on thirty heat signatures moving up the mountain toward us.”

“Thirty? On foot?” Dimitri asked.

“Yes. Cody thinks Vladimir met his agents in the woods.”

Dimitri urged Elena toward the door. “We must go.”

As he turned her toward the garage and away from the other men, she heard Maxim address them in the great room.

“Leave no one alive. If any of them report back, Elena will continue to be in danger. If you have a problem with that, speak up now.”

No one said a word.

This last image of the small army defending her was burned into her brain. If she lost even one of them, she would never be able to live with herself.

Dimitri pulled her through the garage door. The cold wind from the winter snow made her nose tingle. It was dark and quiet in the garage, but she saw distant moonlight ahead. The large garage door was open. She knew the plan. They would leave on foot to reach a car they had hidden farther away. The others were to stay behind. This was the only way, get her out before the house was surrounded so their plan to draw in Vladimir and his men could work. Then they had to wait . . . wait to see who survived. It was a plan she hated because if felt like she was just running away, but she knew that if she stayed behind she would be a liability. She had to be at a safe distance so they could focus on removing the threat.

Elena held Dimitri’s hand as they hurried through the snowy woods. She turned back at one point, saw the stoic Emery Lockwood standing at the edge of the driveway still watching them. He held up a solemn hand in farewell. A chill of dread raked its way along her skin.

Be safe . . . She sent the silent prayer as she turned to face the woods again. She and Dimitri ran in silence. The only sounds were of their breathing and the crunch of powdery snow beneath their boots. The backpack slung over her shoulders was thankfully lightweight, but she knew if she had to keep going for hours it would begin to feel heavy.

“How far are we going?” she whispered.

“Another half mile,” Dimitri murmured back.

The white birch trees that filled the woods seemed to watch them with a thousand dark eyes. She tried not to picture Russian agents crawling through the woods toward her friends. She didn’t want anyone dying for her, but there was no real choice. They’d started this fight, and she and her friends had to finish it.

Cody stared at the figures on his monitor as they advanced toward the cabin. The trip wires they’d set sent flares into the sky as they were triggered by the enemy. Every major entry point was covered by someone inside the house. The fingers of his scarred hand twitched as memories of old pain came back. He closed his eyes, drew in a deep breath, and pictured himself deep beneath the ocean, the water above him rippling with sunlight.

Hans put a hand on his shoulder. “You okay, kid?”

Cody opened his eyes. “Yeah.” He reached for the handgun next to his laptop. “Give everyone the signal.”

Hans tapped on the small communication device nestled in his ear. The tap reverberated in Cody’s ears as it came through the comm. They weren’t to speak using the comms unless necessary since it would be easy for the Russians to pick up any chatter as they got closer.

Cody closed his laptop, slipped it under the table, and put on his thermal goggles, raised up until needed. Then he and Hans took up their positions by a window near the kitchen. A moment later, the window exploded. Cody and Hans dove to the floor as glass rained down around them. Hans shielded Cody’s head before he scrambled up and opened fire through the gaping hole where the window had been. Cody crawled across the floor to the other side of the window and peeked up over the sill, sweeping the woods for heat signatures. Two figures were partially visible behind trees. He remembered what Hans had told him.

“If you are to my right, shoot the targets on your right.” Cody unloaded several rounds at the figure on his right before he had to duck back down. The explosion of return gunfire was deafening. Someone in the woods shot a flare gun straight at them, blinding him through the thermal goggles.

“Fuck!” He ducked down again as his eyes burned in his skull from the bright flare, and he flipped them up. In a vengeful haze, he reached for a flash-bang strapped to his Kevlar vest and hurled it into the woods.

“Going bright!” he called through the comms a second before the flash-bang went off. More shots came through the windows, shattering wood cabinets and dishware.

Pain tore through Cody’s shoulder, and he fell back below the sill, clutching his shoulder and cursing a blue streak. Hans was there, holding a hand to the wound as he tried to see it in the dark.

“You hit?”

“Just a graze,” Cody panted through the pain. “I think.”

Hans pulled him up to a sitting position and dragged him away from the windows.

The gunfire continued. It sounded like the shots from the woods were getting closer.

“Dammit,” Cody gasped. He couldn’t finish because Hans was binding his wound with a strip of duct tape.

“Duct tape? Are you kidding me?”

“Handyman’s secret weapon,” Hans said.

Cody clutched his gun against his chest as he