Page 18 of Carter
My training wasn’t much without supplies, but it was something. Something human.
Still, my mind wasn’t on the injuries. It was onhim.
The scar through his eyebrow, the way his mouth curved when he looked at me—it clawed at the edges of my memory.Not from a hospital. Not from the night in the ER. Older than that.
College?
A patient’s family member?
Someone I passed in the halls too many times to forget?
The harder I pushed, the slipperier it became. All I knew was that the recognition wasn’t one-sided. He’d known me.
Which meant I wasn’t just leverage. I waspersonal.
My pulse thundered. I forced my face into calm, for the women’s sake. “We’re going to get out,” I told them, steady, certain. “I don’t know how yet. But we will.”
One of them—eyes swollen, lip split—whispered, “How can you be sure?”
I thought of Carter. His voice in the stairwell, the way he’d fought like the devil himself for me. The way he’d said my name like it was a vow.
“Because someone out there won’t stop until he finds me,” I said quietly.
And in that dark, with blood on my hands and fear in my throat, it wasn’t bravado. It was the only truth I had left.
21
Carter
Every streetlight in Carlsbad blurred as we tore through the city in the Suburban, the Golden Team packed tight and silent around me.
The silence wasn’t calm. It was sharp. Heavy. The kind that came before a storm.
Faron drove like the devil was chasing him, his knuckles white on the wheel. Aponi sat in back with a laptop balanced across her knees, screens reflecting in her eyes. Gideon and River were wedged against the windows, scanning the streets like the bastards might just appear if they stared hard enough.
And me? I couldn’t sit still. My knee bounced, my fists clenched and unclenched. My heart hadn’t stopped pounding since Faron said her name.
Harper.
Every second she was out there, it felt like something was being carved out of me with a dull blade.
“They knew her schedule,” Aponi said finally, voice tight. “Picked her up after shift change. That’s inside intel.”
“Hospital staff?” River asked.
“Or someone connected,” she shot back. “We’re combing cameras. Got a hit on a white van pulling out of the east lot at 2300. Plates swapped. They knew what they were doing.”
“Where are they taking her?” The words ripped out of me before I could stop them. My voice was raw, dangerous.
No one answered.
I slammed my fist against the dash hard enough to rattle the glovebox. “She’s out there with those animals. You all know what they’ll—” My throat closed on the words.
Faron’s voice cut through, steel wrapped in calm. “We’re going to find her, Carter. But we do it smart. You go in blind, you lose her for good.”
I forced myself back against the seat, jaw grinding. He was right. Logic screamed at me to listen. But the other part—the part that belonged to her—was already clawing for blood.
Aponi’s screen pinged. “Got a hit.”
