Page 53 of Wicked Obsession

More shots bounced around.

Ryder couldn’t see the slope from his position. “Langley, do you see anything glinting on the hillside above me?”

Rowland fired randomly toward the general direction of the shots.

“No, I don’t—wait! Eleven o’clock. About a quarter of the way up.”

“Got it.” Stony sprayed the spot with bullets.

The merc opened a barrage on their oval. Ryder had his head down, gaze locked on the approach to the rocks to make sure another mercenary wasn’t trying to use the shooting as a diversion.

“Need help,” Langley said, so quietly he barely heard it. Before he could shift to check on her, he had a merc on his side. Ryder fired.

The report from his weapon was still echoing when Stony’s words stopped his heart. “Langley’s hit.”

Chapter 22

Ryder couldn’t move, couldn’t breathe, couldn’t function.Not Langley.The thought unlocked his muscles and he scrambled across the distance to her side. Rowland had beaten him there and had his T-shirt off, using it to apply pressure to the wound. Thigh. Fuck, there was blood. Too much blood.

“Artery?” he asked, barely able to choke the word out.

“Don’t think so. Blood’s the wrong color, and there’s not enough of it.”

Taking a deep breath, he plastered a reassuring expression on his face and turned to Langley. Her pallor scared the shit out of him. “How’re you doing, hellcat?”

She tried a smile, it was lopsided and didn’tlook convincing. “I’ve been better, thanks.” The smile faded. “It burns.”

“Yeah,” he agreed, unable to find more words. Instead, he ran the backs of his fingers lightly across her cheek. He couldn’t lose her. He couldn’t fucking lose her. Ryder shifted his attention back to Rowland, but what he saw didn’t reassure him. “You got a tourniquet?” he asked quietly.

“At the house,” Stony said. “Check your vest. See what the mercs are carrying.”

He quickly ran through every pocket of the vest. “Nothing medical,” he reported. If only he hadn’t left his damn pack behind in the tunnels. Ryder’s gut clenched. Hemorrhage was the leading cause of death on the battlefield. That truth froze him again, and he had to fight the haze filling his head.

“The cops should be here soon,” Ryder said. “They’ll have a life flight helicopter and we have an open area directly behind us.” He was talking out loud, trying to reassure himself, but Rowland didn’t know that.

“Civilians aren’t landing while there’s shooting going on.”

“Fuck.” And who knew how long the police would need to lock down the scene? It might take longer than Langley had. The Golden Hour. That’s what Griff called it. The window when aperson’s odds of survival were the best provided they got to a hospital and a doctor.

“Ski, we’re not on a time out. You better fucking watch or they’ll walk right in here.”

Stony was right, but damn it to hell, he didn’t want to leave Langley. Reluctantly, he focused his attention on their perimeter. “Right now,” he muttered thickly, “I wish to hell you were Griff.”

“Right now,” Stony said without looking up, “I wish to hell I had Griff’s gear and those magical clotting supplies he carries.”

Gunfire echoed, telling him that one of his buddies was out there, helping them. He also noticed one other thing. “There’s no more fire coming from the slope,” Ryder said as he patrolled. The bastard could have picked them off easily if he remained up there.

“Almost certain I hit him. I think that barrage of bullets we took was reflex as he went down.”

“Definealmost certain,” Ryder ordered.

“I’m putting it at ninety percent I got a kill shot.”

He grunted. That left four—three bastards and the fucking traitor. Ryder caught motion out of the corner of his eye and fired at it. At least one merc was trying to gain the slope. He would have seen how successful his teammate had been at shooting inside their defensive position from that location. There was no way to stop them fromgoing high, not indefinitely, and once they realized Ryder was the only one keeping their position secure, they’d be totally fucked.

He glanced back at Langley, but her eyes were closed, her lips pressed tightly together. The golden hour. Every minute counted. Every second.

No way was he standing around, waiting for the police to arrive and secure the scene. Langley didn’t have that kind of time. The men coming weren’t LAPD or NYPD or from some other major city. How much training did the locals have for a situation like this?

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