Page 19 of Night Blind

Movement on her left startled her as she turned, coming face to face with an angry Waxwing, who felt Cherry was entirely too close to its nest. The small bird charged, coming at her face. Cherry attempted to fight it off, and too late realized she wasn’t anchored in the tree. She tumbled down, hitting branches as she went and landing at an awkward angle on her right foot.

“Shit,” she said, trying to stand, but the foot couldn’t bear her weight. It also hurt like hell. The Cherry on Top was down. Even worse, her phone was in the tree. The pain was entirely too intense, making her heart race, and the best she could do at this point was crawl into the shrubbery. The tears threatened to take over as she crawled, dragging the foot and making it to the bushes. In the dark, she could feel the swelling. She touched her ankle and felt bone protruding. “Fuck! Not good Cherry. Not good.”

She leaned into the bushes and waited. This was going to cost her not only a paycheck, but she would lose points for missing the target. Today, Karlton Manford got lucky again.

****

Bowling Green, Kentucky

The job was done and Slow packed up to head home. A deep puncture left in the thigh of Candace Gay would ensure a tiring, methodical death. The blood would leave her body with each pump of her heart until her body was left with nothing more than trickles of red life oil. Hurting women was not his thing, but the job was the job. Candace was a thief who committed treason. The court system took too long, and sometimes the good ole Gub’ment of the USA likes to make an example of people. Candace was today’s example of what not to do when working with highly classified documents.

He’d reached his truck when the call came in.

“Slow’s Down,” he said into the line.

“So is the Cherry on Top,” the voice said. It wasn’t his handler, The Archangel. This voice belonged to a woman.

“Azreal?”

“Sending GPS coordinates to you,” the voice said.

His heart was racing. Bile rose in his throat. He had questions and wanted to ask, but he didn’t. All he could ask was what he posed, “Status?”

“Don’t know,” the voice replied. “You’re closest to the Cherry. Get moving.”

“Slow’s Down,” he said, ending the call.

His phone pinged with the coordinates of a downed Technician. He’d been given this task once or twice before. More recently, he received a call to find Mrs. Hump. Now, he received the call to get to the Cherry on Top. Fear filled him as he moved with precision, following the voice on the navigation, making haste to get to Cherry. He was an hour and forty-three minutes away. He needed to get there faster.

He made it to where the GPS said she was and all he spotted was a bunch of shrubbery. Slow didn’t see her shop. He parked on the back side of the shrub, crouching low and following the red dot. It stopped at a bush. He reached his hand inside the shrub and felt an arm.

The body attached to the arm jumped.

“It’s me,” he said, reaching into the bushes and pulling her out slowly. “Where are you hurt?”

“My right foot. Compound fracture,” she told him.

Slow lifted her into his arms, carrying her close to his chest, sighing in relief she was alive and not bleeding out or worse. It was simply a broken foot.

“My weapon. The job,” she said.

“Not my concern,” he said.

“We have to finish the job,” she told him.

“Not my job to finish,” he added, placing her inside of his shop.

“My weapon.”

“Your handler will send someone to retrieve it.”

“My shop.”

“Listen, my job was to retrieve you,” he said, buckling her in and looking at the foot. “As the Technician sent to do the task, I am completing the task. As your man, I am so full of emotions right now that I don’t know what to say. In the interest of not saying something stupid and overtly alpha male, I’m going to focus on the task assigned to the Technician. When I get you to safety and the foot taken care of, we will have a conversation with me in the role of your man.”

She was ready to hit him with something heavy, “The role of my man? I missed completing an assignment. I fell out of a fucking tree after being attacked by a goddamn bird! My weapon is still in the tree along with my Technician’s phone. The shop is a mile down the road, and you want to talk about being an alpha male?”

“Abigail,” he said, after walking around the truck to the driver's side. He held his tongue and focused on the drive. They started down the road, knowing it would be two hours before they arrived home. The doctor would be there waiting for them, but in four hours, a lot could go wrong with her foot.

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