The Stones of Angkor (Purge of Babylon, Book 3) (28 page)

“Not really,” West said.

“Don’t do anything stupid, West.”

“Shut up, Lara. You don’t get to tell me what to do anymore.” He pulled the other Glock from her holster. “Now, be a good girl and keep your trap shut for once, or I might just put a bullet in you out of pure spite.”

“West, don’t—” she started to say.

He grabbed her by the hair and pulled back so hard she almost screamed. Somehow, she managed to stop herself. Instead, her mind raced, looking for a way out of this that would keep them both alive. That would keep
her
alive.

He pushed himself up against her. She imagined he had to lower himself quite a bit, given how much taller he was, to whisper menacingly against her ear. “This is where you beg me not to kill you.”

“
Are
you going to kill me?” she managed to say, despite the pain pulling at her scalp.

“I haven’t decided yet.”

West must have sensed her lack of fear, because he let go of her hair and moved back. She let out a relieved sigh, then turned around to face him. He gestured for her to sit down on the bed. She did, watching him the whole time. He leaned next to the closet door.

Reminder to self: put locks on all the doors.

All the hotel doors were equipped with keycard locks, but there hadn’t been any need to keep the doors locked when it was just them. Now, with Bonnie’s group on the island, it was something she should probably bring up to everyone. Of course, to do that, she had to survive this encounter with West first.

Oh, that’s it? Easy peasy, then.

West had her other Glock stuffed in his front waistband. He was wearing the new pants and shirt she had sent over to him earlier this morning, and he was still favoring his right leg from his wounds. She wondered if it hurt him just to be moving around even a little bit.

Maybe he’s not as strong as he looks…

“I was going to let you go,” she said. “After you healed up. I would have given you supplies, weapons, and let you take your chances out there.”

“I won’t have much of a chance out there on my own.”

“I thought you were a tough guy.”

He chortled. “I’d be tougher with Brody.”

“It’s not my fault you and he decided to try to kill Blaine last night.”

“Yeah, well, it was a good idea at the time.”

“So that was the big plan?”

He sighed almost wistfully. “It wasn’t a bad plan. Once we were armed, we could renegotiate our stay on the island. But, unfortunately, things went sideways.”

“It doesn’t have to go further than this. You haven’t hurt anyone yet. This situation is still salvageable, West. Right now the only thing you’ve damaged is that door down the hall, and maybe my closet. Give me the gun and I won’t count this against you.”

He smirked. “I’m the one with the gun, Lara.”

“And I have people with guns out there, too. They outnumber you, the last time I checked.”

He narrowed his eyes at her. “You’re not scared at all, are you?”

“Should I be?”

He was right, though. She wasn’t scared at all. Not even a little bit. If anything, she was just annoyed. At her own stupidity, at her inability to predict his movements, at her unwillingness to let Danny end it all earlier this morning.

I’m not Will. And I’ll never be Will.

He lowered the gun to his side, grimacing slightly from the effort. “I was hoping for a little bit of fear. Just a tiny bit? Now I don’t know what to do with you if you’re not going to play along.”

“There are only two ways out of this, West. Give me the gun and I forget this ever happened. I let you rest, heal up, and then I put you back on land, just like I originally planned. The other option ends with you dead.”

“And who’s going to do the shooting?”

“Maddie. Carly. Or Danny. It doesn’t matter. The second option always ends with you dead. I’d rather not see you dead, West.”

“It’s not fair, you know,” he said, almost pathetically, and for a moment—a split moment—she nearly felt sorry for him. “We brought them here. If it wasn’t for us, they wouldn’t have made it. We did that. We did a lot of things for them they couldn’t do on their own. You think it was easy?”

“I know it wasn’t easy. I’ve been there.”

“Yeah, I forgot. You were out there, too. So you know how hard it was. And then we get here, what’s the first thing they do? They turn on us. Those bitches.”

“They told me what I asked them. The truth. That’s all.”

“Danny. The blond California surfer. He had it out for us from the word go, didn’t he?”

“Danny was born and raised in Texas.”

“Bull.”

“It’s true.”

“Hunh. He looks like a California surfer.”

“That’s what everyone says.”

He walked across the room to the patio window. She noticed that he was moving gingerly. He brushed back the curtain and looked out. “Nice view you got here.”

“Give me the gun, West.”

He looked back at her and grinned. “What’s to stop me from taking what I want? Including you. I’m going to die anyway. Either here on this island, or back there on land. Maybe I should take some treats before I go. My reward for having to put up with this garbage. Sounds fair, don’t you think?”

He walked back and stood in front of her. He still held the gun at his side, almost casually, as if it were a can of beer instead of a deadly weapon.

“You’re pretty, Lara,” he said. “I can see why Roy gets all hot and bothered whenever he’s around you.”

He touched her hair, then caressed her cheek, before sliding his fingers under her chin. She forced herself not to flinch. She didn’t want to give him the satisfaction, even if the touch of another man’s hand other than Will’s brought back bad memories.

May you forever burn in hell, John Sunday.

“This boyfriend of yours,” West said. “What’s his name?”

“Will.”

“What do you think he’d do if he found out what I’m thinking about doing to you right this moment?”

“You don’t want to know.”

“Big tough guy, huh?”

“Big and tough enough.”

“Ah, hell, I’m not gonna do anything.” He let out a frustrated sigh. “I like my woman with more meat on her bones anyway. Now Bonnie… Damn, that woman. I always knew she might be the death of me. The way she—”

He stopped suddenly when they both heard footsteps moving down the hallway outside the room. West turned his head toward the door on instinct—

Now!

—and Lara launched herself off the bed and tackled him, catching him mostly in the ribs. He grunted with pain as she jolted his still fresh wound, and her momentum drove them into the closet door. He smashed into it, cratering the door and stumbling to the floor, putting up so little fight for a man of his size that she was momentarily stunned.

But he was still moving, and he still had the gun.

Lara reached for the closest weapon she could find—the radio clipped to her hip—and pulled it free. She swung it as hard as she could and hit West across the side of the head. He fired the Glock in her direction—or where he thought she was—but he hadn’t turned his head and was shooting blind.

He missed her by a good solid foot.

Before he could squeeze the trigger again, she smashed the radio into the side of his head a second time—then a third time, and finally, a fourth time.

West’s gun hand dropped weakly to the floor and she wrestled the Glock from his pliant fingers, then used her feet to turn him onto his back and pulled the other Glock out of his waistband. He was bleeding again, blood seeping through the front of his shirt, and his temple was a bloody mess. He groaned on the floor, eyes closed in obvious pain.

Her door burst open and Maddie and Carly ran inside, their guns drawn.

“Holy shit!” Maddie said, seeing West on the floor.

Lara tossed one of the Glocks on the bed and holstered the other one. She picked up the remains of her radio. Most of them were sprinkled along the floor around her.

“I need a new radio,” she said quietly.

“Damn, girl, that’s the understatement of the century,” Carly said, and started laughing.

After a moment, Lara started laughing with her, and then Maddie joined in.

WILL

Heat. Pain. And
Lara in his mind’s eye.

Her blonde hair, so bright under the sun. Crystal-blue eyes like the clear water of Beaufont Lake. The early morning walks on the beach, and all their private moments, even before the others woke up. Listening to her soft heartbeat against his, a reminder of why he lived, fought so hard, and strived to always come through alive. The taste of her lips, sweet and addictive. Her smell, like roses. The feel of her skin, soft and delicate.

Lara.

He opened his eyes to twisted and smoking wrecks around, below, and above him. He knew he was bleeding
(again)
without having to actually see it. His face throbbed, and he could feel the bruises and cuts without having to see them. Predictably, every inch of him hurt like a sonofabitch.

He grunted through the aches and tried to move his arms and legs. There was a sharp stabbing pain from his right leg, but his left seemed fine. The operative word being seemed. His arms were mostly okay, and happily, the bullet wound from this afternoon had numbed, probably because the rest of his body was making up for it.

He was still fastened to the passenger seat by the seatbelt, which was a minor miracle. Rays of sunlight filtered in through the cracked windshield, so that was a good sign. Sunlight meant day, and day meant time. He lifted his left arm, shards of glass and tiny pieces of steel and aluminum falling free every time he moved any part of his body.

3:14 
p.m.

A couple of hours since the helicopter had come down. That explained the lack of roaring flames around him, except for those still lingering over pieces of wreckage scattered about the hard concrete highway. The other good news was that he couldn’t smell burning flesh or singed hair, which meant he wasn’t currently roasting to death inside the carcass of the destroyed helicopter.

The bad news was everything else.

He couldn’t see behind him, so he didn’t know where the others were, or if they were even still inside with him. He couldn’t hear anyone other than himself moving, and despite the stillness of the city, the only breathing he could detect was his own. Jen was nowhere to be found, and her pilot’s seat was raised at an odd angle; it had probably overturned during the crash. The seatbelt hung upside down and was slashed near the middle. There were thick patches of blood against her side of the windshield. That wasn’t good.

The air around him was hot despite the cooling September breeze. The cockpit passenger door was gone, leaving a big, gaping hole exposing the sight of overturned vehicles piled on top of one another. The result was something akin to a makeshift tunnel extending from the open door to freedom, with broken glass and sharp metal lining his path.

He turned his head slightly to the left. When he couldn’t turn just his head far enough, he twisted his body slowly, carefully, in case he was impaled on something. Fortunately, he was able to turn a solid sixty degrees to look into the backseats. He wished he hadn’t.

Amy was still fastened to her seat, with the boy clinging to her chest, his arms around her neck. Her head was slumped forward, and Will was glad he couldn’t see the boy’s face because there was a large slab of metal jutting out from his back. He thought at first it was a piece of the rotor, but no, it was too jagged, too rough around the edges. The metal had pierced the boy first, then continued into Amy and exited the back of her seat. A large pool of blood gathered under them on the seat and the floor. The metal must have missed him by mere inches.

There were no signs of Gaby or Benny, though he spotted an AR-15
(Benny’s)
lying on the floor, the barrel bent, with metal shrapnel sticking out of the side between the ejection port and magazine slot. More blood on the seats, but not enough to convince him Gaby or Benny were bleeding to death somewhere. They had either been thrown clear in the crash, or they had crawled out.

Will turned back around, pain shooting up from his right leg, where he had felt the first stinging sensation earlier. He finally looked down, saw a piece of glass—probably from the cracked windshield—three inches of it visible above the fabric of his pant leg. He guessed there were another two inches under there, embedded just deep enough that he felt it every time he moved a little bit. It hadn’t hit anything vital, he was sure of that, and it had missed the bone entirely.

“Will,” a voice said from outside.

Will looked to his right and saw Gaby kneeling on the other end of the vehicle cocoon. There was a nasty gash across her forehead, covered in a thick layer of drying ointment. Her chin and cheeks were scratched up, and her neck was purple and bruised.

“You gonna sit there all day, or you want us to pull you out?” Gaby asked.

“‘Us’?”

“Benny’s out here with me.”

“You guys okay?”

“I’ve looked better. Benny’s limping around a bit.” She frowned at the shard of glass sticking out of him. “How bad?”

“It didn’t puncture anything major. I should be fine.”

“Right. Fine. When aren’t you fine?”

He ignored her comment, said, “Jen?”

Gaby shook her head. “You don’t want to know.”

“That bad?”

“Worse.”

“Shit.”

They were both silent for a moment.

Then Gaby asked, “Can you move?”

He looked down at the glass. “I’m going to have to remove it first.”

Gaby winced. “Are you sure?”

“I can’t crawl out with this, Gaby.”

She nodded. “The medical supplies are all across the highway. We gathered up as much as we could find. Found your pack, though, with all the ammo still in it.”

“I need a first aid kit. Or if you can’t find one, a towel, water, gauze, duct tape, and antiseptic.”

“I’ll be back,” Gaby said, and disappeared.

Alone again, Will took inventory.