Page 7 of K-9 Guardians (New Mexico Guard Dogs #4)

The lights flared to life and blinded her for a split second.

The first bullet barely missed Scarlett’s head.

The box at her left hit the floor from the impact and scattered ten baby dolls at her feet. Big wide eyes stared up at her. Hans and Gruber growled in unison, and every muscle down Scarlett’s back hardened in battle-ready defense. A wash of adrenaline had her reaching for King. “Get down!”

She used her body weight to pull him to the floor, dragging him beneath her. The second bullet cut through the maze of boxes and pinged off the support column less than two feet from her. Right where he would’ve been standing.

“You just can’t help yourself, can you?” King’s breath mixed with hers. “Underneath me in the morgue, on top of me here. You’re insatiable.”

“Glad to know where your head is at.” She rolled to her right. They couldn’t stay here. Not without catching the next bullet. “The blueprints of this place outlined an emergency exit on the north side of the building. I can get you there, but I need you to do everything I say. Understand?”

Hans and Gruber were at the ready. Just waiting for her to give the command, but Scarlett wasn’t interested in facing off with the cartel in a last stand to the death. Her job was to get them all out alive.

“I’m not leaving.” King punctuated the three words by cokcing a round into the barrel of his sidearm. “I need to know if Julien is here.”

“You don’t get it, do you?” Low shouts echoed through the maze of aisles and stacks. Four distinct voices so far. Most likely more. The potential carved through her, hiking her heart rate higher until it was all she could hear. “We’re in enemy territory. Outnumbered and outmanned. And the only way we’re leaving this warehouse alive is if we go right now. Winding up dead doesn’t help anyone, King.”

“I’m not leaving without my son.” An energy Scarlett used to recognize in herself lit up his eyes. Determination. Desperation. The line between the two was thinner than most people thought. He maneuvered into a crouch, weapon in hand, and chanced standing a bit taller to gauge the situation. “Where are the offices?”

“You don’t have to do this.” She hated the words coming out of her mouth. Hated the tension combing through her, the dryness at the back of her throat. She’d trained on blood-soaked battlefields and handled security that saved thousands of lives over the course of her military career. But she didn’t want to do this.

Scarlett leveraged her heels into the cement floor, pressing her back against the nearest stack of boxes. She couldn’t think. Couldn’t get herself to move. What the hell was happening? “We have an evidence bag of pills. We can take what we know to the DEA and Socorro. We don’t have to do this alone.”

“Where are they, Scarlett?” His tone shut down any chance of changing his mind. Locking that hard gaze on her, King shook his head. “You know what? I don’t have time for this. I’ll find the offices myself.”

He kept low as he cut down the nearest aisle.

“Wait.” The sinking feeling in her stomach wouldn’t let up. She reached after King but only met thin air. It wasn’t supposed to be like this. They were a team. But she couldn’t make herself move. Even as those low shouts got closer.

He vanished into another row, out of sight.

Leaving her to fight alone.

Hans practically vibrated from her next growl. Louder. A warning.

“Move, damn it.” Scarlett knocked her head back into a box in hopes of resetting her brain. She couldn’t stay here. Sliding one hand farther out, she focused everything she had on going after King. He was going to get himself killed. Too blind to protect himself with only the slightest chance of protecting his son.

Movement registered off to her right at the head of the aisle. Gruber barked a split second before Scarlett’s instincts brought the weapon up. She squeezed her finger around the trigger. A spray of bullets shot into the ceiling as the gunman fell backward.

Her position was compromised.

“Okay.” She could do this. She had to do this. And she had to do it now. Scarlett shoved to her feet and took that initial step in King’s wake. This was what she was trained for. What she was good at. She wasn’t going to let him do it alone. Her feet felt heavier than they should have as she whistled for Hans and Gruber to follow. “I’m coming.”

Another burst of gunfire exploded from somewhere else in the warehouse. Her entire nervous system homed on that sound. She picked up the pace. “King.”

Return fire—deeper in tone—cut through the chaos. He was still alive. She could still make this right between them. Scarlett slowed at the end of the aisle.

A fist rocketed into her face.

Lightning struck behind her eyes. She fell back. Pain launched into her elbows as she failed to cushion her impact.

Hans and Gruber didn’t wait for an order, launching forward. The attacker’s scream bounced off the warehouse’s metal walls as each Doberman took a piece of the cartel soldier for themselves. Stumbling to her feet, Scarlett struggled to breathe through the blood cascading down her face. Her nose was broken. “Hier.” Come.

The twins released their death hold on the soldier and promptly fell back in line at Scarlett’s feet. Blood spread over the gunman’s arms and stained his shirt. The sight of which held her hostage for far too long. She’d signed on with Socorro to do good. This...wasn’t it.

Groans escaped up his throat. Still alive. Swiping the back of her hand beneath her nose, she stood over him, weapon ready to finish the job. “How many of you are there?”

Cradling his arms to his chest, he spat at her boot. “You don’t have a chance.”

Scarlett was ready to leave him there. Ready to make him suffer, but she couldn’t have him following after her. She slammed the butt of her pistol against his head, knocking him unconscious. “I already know that.”

She moved slower than she wanted to. The click of Hans’s and Gruber’s nails kept her focused. In the present. On alert. Dead silence seemed to settle through the warehouse and vaulted her unease through the roof.

Something was wrong.

The return fire she’d identified from King’s weapon had gone quiet. Did that mean...? No. She couldn’t think like that. Couldn’t let herself get distracted. Find King. Get him out. That was all that mattered. “Please still be alive.”

A howl pierced through her ears.

Every cell in Scarlett’s body fired in defense as she turned. Hans was down. Unmoving on the cement. No. No, no, no, no.

Gruber launched at the threat coming from ahead. They were surrounded, being pulled in two different directions. Gruber took down his target as strong arms locked around Scarlett’s neck from behind. Oxygen locked in her throat and chased back that sinking feeling that’d taken control.

“I was hoping I would be the one to get my hands on you.” The man at her back pulled her into his chest, his grating voice at her ear. “Scarlett Beam. Socorro’s most feared operative. Let’s see how feared you are on your own, eh?”

Scarlett didn’t have time to think about how he knew her. Only that the attacker Gruber had gone after seemed to be wearing some kind of protective gear. As though the cartel had known they’d need it.

Because they’d been expecting her.

She brought the gun up, aiming over her shoulder, and pulled the trigger. The bullet went wide by a mile. But the resulting percussion did what she’d hoped.

Her attacker jerked her to the left, his grip around her neck faltering. High-pitched ringing drowned out the sounds of Gruber’s growls not thirty feet away as Scarlett swung the gun up.

Too slow.

Pain spiked through her hand as the weapon ripped free and hit the floor. Giving her the first look at the man standing in front of her.

Munoz. Not just a construct of King’s investigation. But in the flesh. Her heart threatened to beat straight out of her chest as she tried to gauge movement elsewhere in the warehouse. No more shouted orders. No more gunfire. As though the fight had already been lost before it started. “Where is Agent Elsher?”

“Right where I want him,” Munoz said. “As are you.”

No. She launched forward with a kick of her own and elbowed the son of a bitch in the chest. With no impact. She swung her fist toward his face as hard as she could, but he shoved her backward.

She hit the ground. Air seeped from her lungs, but she wouldn’t give up. She wouldn’t stop. Not until she couldn’t fight anymore. Scarlett pressed herself up and went in for another strike.

Munoz caught her fist in his palm and squeezed, but she wasn’t going to let him slow her down. She spun to dislodge his hold and rocketed her knuckles into his face.

Disoriented, Munoz stumbled back, and Scarlett took advantage.

She wedged her toes into the crease between his abdomen and thigh and hauled herself higher up his body. Wrapping her calf around the back of his neck, she increased the pressure until he was the one who couldn’t breathe. But it wasn’t enough.

Munoz dug his fingers into her legs and threw her off.

Gravity gripped her insides a split second before she hit a packing crate. Boxes of fentanyl and baby dolls did nothing to counter the pain overtaking her entire body, but she couldn’t let herself give in. Clawing from the mess, she grabbed for the blade tucked in her cargo pants. She rolled until she hit the strength of Munoz’s ankles and hiked herself to her knees.

Stabbing him in the back of the thigh.

His scream filtered through his teeth, just before the lieutenant locked his hands around Scarlett’s throat and dragged her to her feet. He was strong. Stronger than her, but she had something he didn’t. The will to save lives. And there was nothing that would stop her from keeping her word to King.

“You’re going to regret that.” Munoz backed her into the edge of the oversize metal support. “I’m going to take everything you love and kill it, Scarlett Beam. Those people you work with—even Agent Elsher and his son—I’m going to make you watch as I burn your entire world to the ground. Then I’m going to kill you.”

She worked to pry his hands from around her neck, but his grip only seemed to intensify. White pinpricks invaded her peripheral vision. It was no use. He would strangle her if she kept trying to physically overpower him. Scarlett went for the blade lodged in the back of his thigh, but Munoz had expected that, too. He swiped her attack away as easily as he swiped at a fly.

Then slammed his fist into her face. Once. Twice.

The world went black.

H ELL . H E ’ D MADE a mess of things.

Pain pulsed in the back of his neck as he dragged his chin from his chest. Like he’d fallen asleep sitting up. Guess he technically had. Though the falling asleep part hadn’t been his choice.

King put too much momentum into his neck, and his head fell back to stare up into a too-bright glow of fluorescent lighting. The office wasn’t much more than a storage closet with foggy glass in the door. It was bland and empty, apart from an old metal desk the likes of which he hadn’t seen in over a decade.

Damn it. His head hurt, but his pride had taken the biggest hit. He’d been so convinced Julien was here—desperate to be there for his son—he’d rushed in without a second thought as to what might wait on the other side. The attack had come fast, and the next thing he’d known was unconsciousness.

And now Scarlett and her Dobermans were out there trying to fix this. For him.

He’d never been the kind of man who would ask the people around him to do something he wasn’t willing to do himself. But this... This wasn’t going at all as he’d hoped.

A smattering of items on the metal desk a few feet away caught his attention. Phone, wallet, keys, badge, business cards. All his. No sign of his sidearm, though. His attackers had stripped him of anything he could use to his advantage.

King tried to break through the rope scratching through the layers of skin around his wrists. Muscles he hadn’t used for far too long weren’t interested in showing up for him now. He’d relied too heavily on his gear these past few years. All of which had been taken from him now. And it would cost him everything.

Shadowed movement shifted on the other side of the fogged glass. No sounds of gunfire or fighting. Nothing to suggest Scarlett and her dogs were still alive.

He needed to get out of here. Get them out of here. He’d brought her into this mess. He’d be the one to make sure she didn’t pay the price. “Think, Elsher.”

He studied every inch of the office. It looked as though it’d been stripped for parts. All this time he’d believed that original DEA operation had hurt Sangre por Sangre’s growth. At least shut down one of their primary warehouses. Turned out, he, Adam and Eva hadn’t done a damn thing to bring these bastards to a stop. The cartel had simply taken on a new face.

His head pounded in rhythm to his heart rate. Too hard. Too loud. Twisting his wrists opposite directions, he worked the rope digging in deeper, but there wasn’t any bit of give. He was screwed in the leg department, too. No room for escape. The chair he was tied to wasn’t anything special. Though steel posed a problem. Guess the Sangre por Sangre cartel had too many mishaps with wood. Or maybe they’d suddenly turned environmentally conscious. Decided to give back for once.

“And I’m the freaking tooth fairy,” he said.

Oh, hell. He was the tooth fairy now. Julien had a loose tooth ready to come out any day now, and King would have to be the one to sneak into his room and leave a dollar beneath his kid’s pillow without waking him.

No. He couldn’t think about that right now. The thought of never getting to be the tooth fairy for his son only messed with his head.

There. On the back wall. A wire storage shelf stacked with paper boxes. No labels telling him what each of them housed, but it couldn’t be paper.

He tipped his weight back onto two chair legs, his toes barely connecting with the floor. His shoulders screamed for relief, but King had to try. This was going to hurt, but it would be nothing compared to losing his son. Or Scarlett.

King shoved back against his toes. Gravity launched his stomach into his throat a split second before he hit the floor. The combination of the metal rim of the chair and his body weight threatened to break both of his arms, and he swallowed the scream ready to explode from his chest. He rolled onto his side, taking the too-heavy chair with him as he tried to catch his breath. That was going to leave a bruise.

Digging his heels into the floor, he shoved himself across the floor toward the shelf. Inch by agonizing inch. He was out of breath by the time he reached the base. Sweat beaded under his bottom lip. “Move, damn it.” Though how he was going to get these boxes open without the use of his hands or feet was a mystery.

The shelf itself had been constructed of smooth stainless steel. No way to use the frame to cut through the rope. But the sharp edges where the grating held the boxes themselves might help. King leveraged one shoulder into the floor and circled his feet to the left, setting his back to the wire rack. And set his wrists against the raw edges of steel.

He couldn’t move more than a few centimeters at a time, but that was all he needed. The fibers of the rope caught, and King put everything he had left into keeping the pressure on. Back and forth. Back and forth. He wasn’t sure any of it did a damn bit of good, but he wasn’t going to give in. Not to the cartel. And not to the doubt telling him he wasn’t ever going to find his son. That he was too late.

A warning growl pierced through the fogged glass on the other side of the room. Shit. He was out of time. King scanned the room for something—anything—that would get him out of this chair, but it was no use.

The door kicked back on its hinges and slammed into the wall behind it. A cartel soldier fought with a Doberman at the end of a choke chain, trying to drag the animal into the room, but the K9 wasn’t cooperating in the least.

Gruber—when had King figured out which was which?—wrenched his head from side to side as he dug his heels into the floor.

“Gruber,” he said.

The dog set coal-black eyes on him. Accusatory. Scared. Pissed off to hell and back. The soldier managed to pull the Doberman fully into the room with a heavy tug. But if Gruber was here... Where was Hans? Where was Scarlett?

Another soldier fireman-carried the second dog into the room and not-so-gently deposited her onto the floor. Injured? Dead? King didn’t know, but he sure as hell wanted to witness what Scarlett had done in return.

A scraping sound overrode Gruber’s overly loud fight for freedom. A rhythmic sound that raised the hairs on the back of King’s neck. A large man struggled to fit through the narrow door as he dragged something heavy and unconscious behind him. Recognition hit, and King’s entire world tore apart at the seams.

Munoz.

Age had gotten to Munoz over the past ten years. Striations of gray chased back the muddied brown in the man’s facial hair and eyebrows. The skin beneath those empty eyes sagged and folded as gravity didn’t have much care for appearances, but there was still a hint of the man Munoz had been. Physically lean, well-kept in the suit department. Much stronger than he wanted people to know. “Hello, Agent Elsher. I brought you a present.”

Munoz dragged the body forward, that thick accent carving into King’s memory.

Scarlett hit the floor without protest. Unmoving. Blood dried beneath her nose and around her mouth. Gruber’s low whine punctuated the ache in King’s gut as he visually searched for a pulse or a chest fall. Something to tell him he hadn’t gotten Socorro’s security operator killed for nothing.

“Get him up,” Munoz said.

The cartel member who’d dropped Hans to the floor left the Doberman where she lay and closed the distance between him and King. Rough hands jerked King back to sitting, and feeling shot back into King’s arms.

Despite the image he wanted to convey, that of a DEA agent who didn’t give into threats, King couldn’t control the tremors in his chin. He tried to breathe through it, to give his nervous system something other than Scarlett and Julien to focus on, but it was no use. Munoz wasn’t known for keeping hostages. Both Adam and Eva had learned that the hard way.

Palpable silence filled the room, only interrupted by Munoz’s advance. “How long has it been, Elsher? Ten years? You don’t look like you’ve aged a day. You must take care of yourself.” The lieutenant rounded behind him, lowering his face beside King’s. “Such a waste.”

King didn’t answer. His gaze locked on Scarlett. She was alive. She had to be.

“You know, I’ve never understood all these elaborate tortures the people I work with like to use. The accelerants in tires. Countless days of beatings. Acid on the skin.” Munoz penetrated King’s peripheral vision. The cartel lieutenant unsheathed a tactical blade, dark steel serrated in high peaks and valleys. The lights didn’t even reflect off the surface. Not like King expected. “It’s the simplest things that can get the point across.”

Munoz swiped the blade across King’s thigh.

Stinging pain erupted faster than he expected and stole the air in his lungs. He bit back the scream trying to force its way free, but it was no use. His composure had been corrupted the second he set eyes on Scarlett. Blood rushed through the wound though the laceration was shallow compared to what it could’ve been. He stared straight ahead. Not willing to give Munoz the satisfaction of breaking him.

A slap to one side of the face ensured King couldn’t disappear. That he had to stay present. “There will be little for the DEA or your son to identify you as human when I’m finished, Agent Elsher. The only question is, will you give me what I want in time?”

King forced himself to take a breath.

“I want everything your partner and that bitch from ATF collected on me and my operation.” The weight of Munoz’s attention intensified the pain in King’s wound. One second. Two. The lieutenant nodded, backing off slightly.

The second cut went deeper. King couldn’t contain the scream of pain this time. His agony filled the room and took Gruber by surprise. The K9 howled in unison, but the man handling the choke chain cut him off short.

King’s heart rate skyrocketed. Sweat slipped down the sides of his face.

“Perhaps your partner’s wife will tell me where Agent Dunkeld hid the information he gathered. Jen, right? And the girls. Beautiful, beautiful girls. I can see them doing very well for Sangre por Sangre.” Munoz turned to the cartel soldier hovering over Hans and hiked a thumb toward the door. The subordinate left the room without a word, closing the door behind him. “In the meantime, why don’t I remind you of what I’m capable of?”

Shuffling sounded through the door, and then the cartel soldier carried Julien—kicking and punching—in his arms.

Just before Munoz stabbed the blade down into the top of King’s thigh.