Page 4 of Hideaway Whirlwind (Big Boys of Berenson Trucking #4)
Teagan
Priscilla’s eyes flare wide with alarm when I rear my arm back and bring the knife down toward her chest, but she deflects it at the last moment with her forearm, her thick jacket protecting her from the slash of the blade.
It’s enough of a shock, though, to have her howling and throwing herself to the side to avoid my next strike.
I launch myself off the floor and scramble toward the living room, screaming at my kids to run.
Anywhere is safer than here, even out on the dark streets on the seedier side of Las Vegas’s outskirts.
But I don’t make it one step out of the kitchen before Priscilla grabs my hair from behind, ripping long black strands from my scalp.
She locks one forearm around my neck, and I lose my hold on the hilt of the knife when she digs her manicured nails into the underside of my wrist beneath my cuff.
I scream with fury and frustration that I botched my only attempt to get away.
And then we both go still when a massive silver bear of a man blocks the opening, holding a shotgun aimed at my head, a black ball cap pulled low over his face.
I didn’t know Priscilla had brought backup, and now it doesn’t matter if I’m able to escape her or not.
Not with this beast ready to blow my head off.
A current of horror sweeps me off my feet when I think about Priscilla punishing me tenfold for what I’ve done.
Punishing my children for what their mother has done.
I should have just let her kill me.
But then the bear shifts his aim up at Priscilla. “Let her go,” he demands.
It takes a few seconds while she probably calculates her next move, but she eventually draws her arm away from my throat and takes a step back.
Without taking his eyes off Priscilla, he says in a deep, gruff growl to me, “Move, Teagan.”
I hang my head for a brief moment, my shoulders caving in and my eyes fluttering shut. I hadn’t known until now if he was a random passerby, butting in when it would have been in his best interest not to, or if he was the trucker Marigold sent to pick us up and smuggle us out.
I cling to a knife’s edge of hope that we’ll finally be safe when I suddenly crouch to grab the chopping board Sydney had dropped on the floor, jump up on a spin with the board raised high above me with both hands, and bring it down on Priscilla’s head as hard as I can, cutting off her screech when she realized what I was going to do a half second too late to dodge the blow.
“Damn, girl,” is all the bear says under his breath.
“It buys us time to get away before she wakes up,” I tell him, watching Priscilla with narrowed eyes, sprawled on the kitchen floor. Oh, how weak and feeble she is, in the end. Just as they all are.
Our gazes collide when I look up and up and up into the bear’s eyes, shadowed by his hat’s bill, waiting to see what he’ll do. A beat passes, and then he lowers his gun and steps out of my way.
I swerve around his huge body, dropping the chopping board when I crash to my knees in front of my children, holding their little sister in a group hug beside the front door, which is lying face down on the carpet.
I crush them together in my arms, bowled over by the sheer force of my relief that they’re ok. That we’re all going to be ok.
Blue eyes as cold as a predator’s meet mine when the bear silently appears over my shoulder and works his jaw beneath his big silver beard while he stows his gun and Priscilla’s knife inside his dark red plaid jacket.
Wordlessly, he holds out the tattered remains of my garbage bag with any shoes and clothes that weren’t tossed out, along with a new garbage bag.
I reach for them after wiping my clammy hands on my sweatpants and snap open the new garbage bag when the bear grunts impatiently, and the kids frantically help stuff everything we can inside.
Squatting down, he drops the chopping board in the bag last. When I tie the drawstrings together, he stands and throws the bag over his broad shoulder at the same time as he scoops Kendall up into the air on the crook of his arm.
Startled and shaking uncontrollably with tears and snot running down her cherubic red face, Kendall grabs onto his jacket with both fists, clutching her teddy bear between them, to keep from falling back.
She doesn’t cry out for me, even as the bear forces us through the front doorway ahead of him, so tall that he has to duck beneath the frame.
He levels an unexpectedly approving look at me when I grip Dustin and Sydney’s small hands, one on either side of me, and then he says in a low southern drawl, “You did good. Now run.”
Elliott
My mind is a mess of static, brief bouts of hysteria bursting through in bright red plumes as I hustle down the stairs and away from the complex, holding the toddler on one arm, curled into my chest. I don’t have to worry about us keeping to the shadows, what with all the street lights having been shot out.
“Left,” I bark to Teagan when we reach the metal fence.
They race toward my rig parked in the lot of an abandoned pawn shop at the end of the street, puffing air loudly, but without complaint, as Teagan urges the kids to run even faster in a desperate, ragged whisper.
I drop the heavy garbage bag on the pot-hole-riddled pavement to open the cab’s passenger door with fingers gone tingly with my rapidly beating heart, which has nothing to do with the exertion of running away.
There have been a handful of times when I’ve suffered an adrenaline surge this intense—the first leading to far-reaching consequences I’ve carried like a shroud for over thirty years and have never recovered from.
I’ve come close to going over the edge and letting it happen again in recent years, especially where my brother and his wife are concerned, but this is the closest I’ve ever been.
If Teagan hadn’t crossed that line in regards to the demon trying to murder her, I’m scared I might have.
No, not might . Would . I would have done it, but she saved me from it. From myself. Saved me the same way I’ve saved her, only to condemn herself .
She has kids who need her.
No one needs me.
So I’ll bear this for her, and she’ll never have to know.
The little girl in my arms whimpers and struggles to hold onto me when I set her on the cab’s passenger side pleather seat with her teddy bear and throw the garbage bag into the footwell. I turn and heft the boy up, still holding onto his mama’s hand.
“It’s ok, Dustin. Let go,” Teagan says, laboring for breath after their sprint, shuffling her son, who already reaches her sternum at his height, in front of her.
He scales the two steep, narrow steps without help, plucking the toddler up.
After lifting the older girl into the cab, she pushes Dustin ahead of her between the two front seats into the back sleeping quarters.
Teagan skips two steps away and launches her phone across the pawn shop’s parking lot like a major league pitcher, then smothers a surprised yelp when I lift her straight off the ground and onto the seat.
Without looking directly at her, I tell her, “Get the kids strapped in. I’ll be right back.”
She nods, already twisting out of her seat, even as she asks, “Where are you going?”
I lock and close the door without answering, shutting the four of them safely inside with the thick blackout curtains pulled closed, then jog back to the apartment at a faster clip.
When I return, after locking up the back of the truck and putting the gear in drive, Teagan’s large amber eyes are a brand on my neck. Her unspoken questions are heavy in the air, sitting cross-legged on the floor in front of the kids now buckled into their car seats, out of view .
I tune out her bird song as she whispers words of comfort to her kids, diligently sticking to the speed limit as I push through the deserted roads in one of the shittiest areas of Las Vegas, keeping my eyes peeled for any potential threats.
A cop up ahead, idling behind a large road sign, has my blood turning to ice.
If we were stopped and my truck searched, should anyone who might have been silently watching me from between their blinds call the police, giving them my description, I wouldn’t be able to buy our way out of it like I could at home.
My blood only starts to thaw as the cop car grows smaller in my side mirror and disappears, and Teagan suddenly leans against my seat to lay her hand on my right arm.
“Thank you,” she says in that lyrical voice of hers, “for getting us out.”
I have to swallow twice while forcing my body not to react to her touch before I can say, “You’re welcome.”