Chapter 1 Finding her
Chapter 1
Michael Greystone hit the floor without knowing when his knees went down. One second he was moving and the next his hands were on her face and his gun was forgotten somewhere behind him.
She wasn’t moving.
Blood ran down her arm and disappeared into the soot caked across her skin. Her lips were parted slightly and her chest was barely rising. He pressed two fingers hard into her neck and gritted his teeth waiting for something, anything.
He got nothing.
Then a flutter. So faint he almost convinced himself he imagined it.
“Anna.” He gripped her shoulders. “Don’t you dare. Wake up. Please don’t die.”
He had been looking for her for thirteen years. Thirteen years of addresses that led to empty rooms and phone numbers that went dead and sources who took his money and gave him nothing. Every time he thought he was close she was already gone, moved to another location, another city, another country. He had buried the hope so many times he stopped counting. But he kept looking because she was ten years old when they took her and she was his to protect and he had failed her and every day since then had been him trying to fix that one night he got it wrong.
This time felt different. This time he had walked into the warehouse and something in his gut told him she was here and now she was in his hands, unmoving, bleeding, and he refused to accept that he had found her only to watch her die on a burning floor.
“I can’t let you go.” His palm pressed flat against her sternum. “I lost you once and I am not losing you again. Do you hear me? I am not losing you again.”
Her chest jerked.
One breath tore through her, sharp and violent, like her body remembered it was supposed to fight. Her eyes flew open, glassy and unfocused, staring straight through him. Three seconds. Maybe less. Then her eyes fell shut again but her chest kept rising and that was enough.
He was getting her out of there.
He got one arm under her knees and pushed to his feet when the door behind him blew inward and bullets tore through the room with no warning. He dropped instantly and covered her completely, pressing her into the floor beneath him while rounds cracked into the concrete inches from his arm. He fired back with one hand and kept the other locked over her head, squeezing off two shots toward the doorway until he heard a grunt and one body dropped.
Another burst came from the left and he lurched sideways dragging her with him and getting a fallen beam between them and the door. Something slammed into his waist like a hammer strike and buckled his knees for a half second. The vest absorbed the bullet but the force still rocked through him and he staggered, jaw clenched so hard his back teeth ached. He stayed upright and fired again and again until the shooting stopped and the room went quiet except for the fire eating through the ceiling above them.
He stayed crouched over her and waited. Five seconds. Nobody moved.
Then he heard boots in the passage outside and Ryder came through the door first, weapon raised, scanning the room. The others came in behind him and they all stopped when they saw Michael crouched on the floor over the girl, blood seeping through his shirt at the waist, the ceiling above them threatening to come down any second.
He wasn’t looking at them. He was looking at her face, at the firelight moving across her jaw and her brow and the thing that had stopped him cold the moment he pulled the debris off her body, something familiar that had lived in the back of his skull for thirteen years.
“You’re bleeding,” Ryder called out, pointing at his waist.
Michael ignored him and kept staring at her, waiting for another response from her body.
“Boss.” Ryder’s voice dropped low. “We need to move right now.”
Michael pushed to his feet and holstered his gun and looked at his men with one order ready.
“Take her.”
Ryder stepped forward and frowned. “She’s not…”
“Take her.”
Nobody argued after that and they lifted her and moved toward the exit. Michael followed behind them and as they pushed back through the building the cages were still there, lining the walls the way he had seen them when they first breached the basement, stacked and rusted and built by people who had stopped seeing human beings a long time ago. Some of the girls were still being pulled out, his men breaking locks and dragging them toward the exit one by one, some of them too weak to walk, some of them clutching each other and refusing to let go even as the smoke thickened around them. He moved past all of it and when they finally pushed through the exit the trucks were already lined up outside, some of them loaded with the girls pulled from those cages, doors hanging open, his men shouting into radios, sirens screaming somewhere in the distance signaling the police were on their way.
He walked to the last vehicle and laid her down gently across the back seat and stood at the open door and looked at her face one more time.
“I may have found what I lost,” he muttered to himself.
