Page 17 of K-9 Justice

Lightning exploded behind her eyes. Her teeth cut into the soft tissues of her mouth and forced blood to the surface. Momentum swung her body away from her attacker. Sebastian caught her before the pendulum could be completed, and a visceral stain of evil leached through her clothing and deep into bone from histouch alone. “Why don’t you tell me what you managed to get out of Dominic, eh? What was your end goal?”

“If I told you that, I’d have to cut this conversation short.” Ivy struggled to breathe through the blood clogging her airway. “And we just started to get to know each other.”

Another strike spun her a full one hundred and eighty degrees. Only this time, one of her back teeth dislodged. Her face pulsed in anger. The adrenaline that had numbed the area was already dissipating, and pain moved in to replace it. Her vision wavered. She fisted her hands in an attempt to stay conscious, but there were no guarantees.

Searing pain spread across her scalp as Sebastian pulled her head back by her hair. Exposing her throat. A small blade pricked at the thin skin there as he got close enough to whisper in her ear. “You know, I’ve seen a pocketknife like this before. A few years ago now. You don’t realize how very sharp they are until someone stabs you with it.”

Warning pooled in her gut.

“I know why you came here, Agent Bardot.” Puffs of air tickled her ear and triggered a shiver, but she wouldn’t let him see the effect he had on her. That his proximity had on her. “I know you’ve been searching for me all this time. That I’m the one who haunts your dreams and influenced every decision you’ve ever made in the past two years. You built Socorro to protect yourself from me, but where is your team now? Hmm?”

AgentBardot. NotMs.

Ice coursed through her veins as that voice took its rightful place in her memory. There was a reason it had felt so familiar, why he’d tried to hide his identity.

Sebastian moved into her line of view, fully exposing his face in the light, and her insides knotted tight.

“You.” All this time, Carson had been tasked to uncover the identity of the man who’d killed three women from withinSangre por Sangre. And the son of a bitch had been in front of him the entire time. Though it wasn’t clear until this moment—hanging upside down from her ankles with blood trailing into her hairline—that Carson hadn’t set eyes on the man who’d nearly killed her.

That night, those memories she’d tried to bury, flooded through her mind in a rush that stole her breath. Of waking in a basement not unlike this room, of feeling the killer’s hands on her. Of knowing there was a possibility she would die, that she’d never see her partner again. In an instant, Ivy was right back in that position. Vulnerable, helpless. It was all too much of a reminder of those nights her stepfather had drunk too much and exerted his power over her mother with flying fists, hard shoves and broken bones.

Until she hadn’t been able to take it anymore.

Ivy saw herself in her mind’s eye pulling her stepdad’s gun from his nightstand as a ten-year-old. She saw herself fisting her pocketknife in that basement two years ago.

And in this moment, she saw herself snapping through the zip tie binding her wrists and ending this for good.

“That’s right,senorita. Me.” Sebastian released his hold on her hair, letting the blade of her own pocketknife cut through the first layer of skin at her neck. “You and I have some unfinished business to attend to.”

* * *

All he couldhear was barking.

Incessant and sharp and panicked.

Carson felt as though an elephant was sitting on his chest, ready to crush him to death. He tried to reorient himself, but he couldn’t seem to get his body to obey. The last memory—of falling, of being shoved, of trying to avoid landing on Ivy—took center stage.

Sebastian. That son of a bitch had captured Ivy and Max. And now… Now Carson didn’t know what had happened to his partner. Though from the sound of it, Max wasn’t too far away. Her barks cleared the haze from his head second by second.

He tried to bring his head up. Too fast. His forehead collided with something metal and large. Lightning exploded behind his eyes, and he fell back. Cement smacked against the back of his skull. If he hadn’t sustained a concussion from the fall into a dark hole in the middle of a salvage yard, he sure as hell had now.

His next inhalation caught hints of motor oil, gasoline and rust. His chest seemed to fill any available space, but it was too dark to get a sense of his situation. It was like he’d been sandwiched between two oversize forces. Carson maneuvered his hands at his sides. His weapon had been taken from him. Sebastian hadn’t wanted to take any chances of him shooting his way out of…whatever this place was. Not a surprise but still a disappointment. He’d been positioned on his back. Cement beneath him had been sealed. Most likely a floor. Inside the warehouse? He couldn’t be sure yet.

Another round of barking pierced into awareness.

“Max?” Carson’s vision adjusted the longer he focused, but there was still too much unknown for him to create a strategy to get out. Her responding whine confirmed what he needed to know. She was alive. She was okay. “Good girl.”

He managed to get his elbows into his rib cage and feel the wall hoisted above him. He followed the curves of what felt like car parts. Only there was something distorted about their shape. As though they’d been crushed. Burned crust flaked off and fell into his eyes, nose and mouth. He spit at the chemical bite, but there was nothing that could get rid of the taste of asphalt and heat. “Damn it.”

Sebastian had pinned him beneath a crushed car somehow.

The narrow cavity giving him enough space to keep breathing must’ve been maintained by one of the hoists. Though the son of a bitch had set it on the lowest level. Without the vehicle’s tires, there was no room to navigate an escape.

He was trapped.

An animal-like scream escaped his chest as Carson shoved against the vehicle balanced above him with everything he had. It echoed off the warehouse walls but failed to change anything. He needed to get out of here. He needed to locate Ivy.

He’d brought her here to ease the pressure of this investigation, to give her hope the past two years hadn’t been for nothing. But all he’d managed to do was make things worse. He’d trusted the wrong person, and now she would be the one to pay for his mistake.

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