Page 95 of Unguarded

“Rosie, is Monroe there?”

I can’t wait for the answer. “I need to get up close to him.” I throw the truck in park and get out into the downpour.

I walk up to the driver’s door, but the man starts climbing toward the passenger side.

“Duke! Cut him off on that side!” I signal to my brother, who immediately springs into action.

We herd him like cattle, making it impossible for him to escape with half of his demolished van against the steel fence and two big trucks keeping him trapped there. He climbs in the driver seat and makes one last desperate attempt to flip it in reverse and press on his accelerator, but he only manages to slam into my truck again before Sam presses him farther in.

The glint of steel in his hand causes me to raise my weapon.

“Put it down,” I command.

There’s a bloody gash decorating the side of his face. He finally looks up at me, dark eyes calculating before he lifts the gun and shoots. I fire mine in unison with him. Pain splinters through my side, causing me to double over. Glass shatters as the bullet from my gun pierces his window.

Holden jumps from the truck, descending on the driver’s door of the van.

“She’s safe! She’s at the ranch, Cash.”

Relief and adrenaline surge through me, even as the dull pain slices through my side. Sterling is beside me, his arm coming out to wrap around my shoulders.

“I’m fine. It grazed me.” I reach down, lifting my hand back out to see the blood coating my fingers. “Flesh wound.” I press forward on the muddy shoulder of the road just as Holden jerks the man from the van by his collar.

“This your guy?”

The man’s face is in a grimace, his shoulder and face bleeding from shards of glass and the steel embedded somewhere in his chest. I ignore the pain in my side from where his bullet grazed me, approaching him with my weapon still drawn. Holden kicks the man’s gun under the van.

“Let me see his left ear,” I say over the rumble of the thunder in the distance.

Holden jerks his head sideways, revealing the left ear, where a clear notch is in the side of it. My muscles tighten. I step forward, snatching the man’s collar from Holden and dragging him toward me through the mud. He screams in pain, trying to clutch at his shoulder.

“Check the back of the van.” I throw the man on the ground, pressing my boot to his chest. “What did you call her? What was the name you used?” My voice is strained, spit spewing from my lips as I attempt to not crush his windpipe before I get the answer I need.

“I only wanted Kitten! Kitten was the one I was after! Not the other girls, only Kitten!”

The proof that he was the one spying on her and stalking her all over the Eastern Hemisphere is all I need. I look up when I feel a hand on my shoulder. My chest heaves as I attempt to control myself, to calm the fuck down. Holden is beside me, but he’s not trying to hold me back.

I look up to see where my brothers have the van open, relief coursing through me when they don’t find Monroe.

Sterling and Duke are digging through the back of the van. Duke steps out, holding up a ring of red rope and a roll of duct tape. Sterling walks toward me with a stack of papers. I can’t make them out in the rain until he gets closer, revealing posters covered with individual cutout pictures of Monroe. They’re not from magazines or tabloid photos. They look like printouts from a cheap camera, not professional shots. Most of them seem like they’re from the close seats at her concert or on the street while she’s getting into her car. The backgrounds of all the pictures were cut out so it’s not clear where they were taken, but her various outfits and hairstyles indicate that there were possibly hundreds of different dates that the pictures were snapped.

“How long has he been stalking her?” Sterling asks, flipping through the photos.

My jaw clenches. Blind rage overtakes me, making my limbs start to shake.

“He’s dying. We need to get off the main road,” Holden says from beside me, leaning down to press his fingers to the man’s neck. “What else do you need from him?”

“A slower, more painful death.” I look up at Duke, who’s stopped searching through the van and is now standing in front of us. “Let me see your pocket knife.”

He pulls it out of his pocket and hands it over. I flip it open and squat down beside the bleeding man. I press the blade into his chest, using the point of the knife to dig my bullet out. He screams in pain the entire time, but all I can think about is the fear and pain in Monroe’s eyes every time he got close to her, when he stalked her across the entire fucking world and left dead birds in her dressing room, just to terrorize her. I think about his intentions tonight, waiting until we left them alone and stocking up on rope and duct tape for God knows what he had planned for her.

I dig in his back pocket and extract his wallet. I look at the ID.

Tony Ziggler.

Finally having a name to call him other than ‘the stalker’ doesn’t bring me any peace. After I get the bullet out, Holden and I lift him together and toss him in the back of my truck. He’s still breathing, but barely.

“Is the van drivable?” Holden asks.

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