Unyielding (Out of the Box Book 11) Read online

  “Rounding the corner,” Friday said. “Will be in position in ten seconds.”

  “Let’s go, let’s go!” Scott hissed, catching the railing to the external staircase with one hand and hurrying up on quiet footsteps. He was leading the way, though he would have to pull back and let Augustus and Reed take the fore when he got to the front door for the breach and clear. He wasn’t excited about that, by any means, but he’d finally begun to trust the two of them after these last few weeks. That hadn’t been easy, but he’d seen enough out of both now to know that whatever their personal feelings about Sienna, they were as convinced as he was that she was a menace.

  A menace they were going to deal with together.

  There was one question lingering in Scott’s mind, though, and he paused at the top of the stairs, letting Augustus go by and catching Reed, stopping him short before they got too close to the door. “You sure you’re ready to do this?” Scott asked, and caught a flash of angry brown eyes in response. “She’s your sister. There’s no shame in saying you don’t have it in you to—”

  “I’ll do what it takes,” Reed said, yanking his arm out of Scott’s grasp with a snap. His eyes were burning, his tanned cheeks a bright scarlet. Scott hadn’t even meant it as a challenge; he’d kept his voice low, tone even so as not to provoke offense. Offense had been taken anyway, apparently. Reed moved past Augustus to rest by the door, taking a short, quiet draw of breath and motioning the two of them to get into position.

  Scott nodded and stacked up behind Augustus. He felt the tension rise inside him, stomach twisting. This was it, the moment of truth. This was where his new deputies earned their spurs, where all the time he’d spent chasing the metaphorical—and occasionally literal—dragon that was Sienna Nealon would finally pay dividends. He caught Reed’s gaze and saw it still burned. He’d do what it took, Scott was pretty sure. Scott held up three fingers and counted it down—three … two … one …

  Reed sprang off the door frame and kicked down the door, gun up and ready to shoot whatever was waiting for them on the other side.

  3.

  Sienna

  I sat in my chair uneasily, that lone, annoying spring poking me in the butt, cable news anchors jabbering their stupidity incessantly, and I waited. Waited for something terrible to happen as I stole a look over my shoulder at the door to my apartment. Waiting. Interminable, boring, sitting in near-silence, listening for noise outside … waiting.

  Nothing but quiet, and the low-volume blathering of idiot cable news anchors.

  Waiting.

  Waiting for something to happen.

  4.

  Scott

  Reed was in before the door was finished coming off its hinges, charging over the fallen wooden blockage and into the apartment, weapon up and ready. Augustus blew in right after him, his own carbine sights up as he looked left, then right, clearing the corners.

  The smell of wood dust was heavy where Reed’s entry had ripped the screws out of the frame. Scott inhaled the scent as he came off the wall and followed Augustus, his pistol up and sweeping. They were taking no chances in this case, their trigger discipline put on hold to make sure that if presented with a shot, they could take it in a second. His finger rested just on the trigger, making sure he didn’t line the gun up with either of his compatriots.

  The apartment was dark, light barely filtering in through the shades. Reed was already sweeping ahead, Augustus a few steps behind him, through a living room that sported a table covered in pizza boxes. There was a stale smell in the air, like someone hadn’t flushed the toilet in a while.

  Scott followed after them, his gaze sweeping the room. It was clear of people, that much he was sure of, and they moved forward as a unit, not quite running but not walking, either, boots thudding softly on the carpeting. Their steps were measured and Reed turned a corner to enter the lone bedroom, dipping out of sight for a mere second—

  “CONTACT!” Reed shouted, and the sound of gunshots followed, three loud, sharp, deafening staccato bursts. Augustus swept around the corner after him, out of Scott’s view, weapon up and ready to assist.

  Scott hit the panic button.

  The caps blew off the compressed H2O containers on his back and he guided the water through the empty space in the living room. He swept a television off its stand with the bulb of water, and it crackled as it gained an electrical charge for a second before harmlessly dispersing it into a nearby wall with a fizzing pop that burned the drywall and started a small fire. Scott absently swept the water over the burgeoning flame as he came around the corner, ready to direct it toward Sienna with everything he had—

  “She’s down,” Reed said, holding his weapon before him, smoke still sizzling out of the barrel. The smell of gunpowder reeked in the apartment’s confined space, and Scott let his glance followed the barrel of Reed’s—and Augustus’s, now—guns.

  A dark-haired woman lay sprawled on the floor, curled against the ground, her body arched like she was clutching her belly as she’d fallen. Scott stared into the semi-darkness, trying to penetrate it, to see the woman’s face, but it was futile. Her head was turned so that she was facing away from the three of them, away from the door, and a slow pool of dark liquid was spreading from beneath her.

  Scott started forward, but Augustus put a hand on his shoulder to halt him. “I doubt that would kill her.”

  “What would you sugg—” Scott started, but three more shots answered for him as Reed’s gun fired again. Scott flinched; the noise was deafening in such a confined space, but even more than that was the unreserved lethality that Reed had employed. Scott looked back at the fallen woman; all three shots had caught her in the back of the head, and there was a commensurate splatter from the carpeting to the box springs and mattress beyond, which were laid directly on the floor with no bed frame. Blood dripped like paint spots spattered by a careless brush.

  “What the hell?” Scott asked in quiet astonishment. Something had snapped in him to see this, the unrestrained violence unleashed on a fallen body. He looked at Reed, his mouth fallen open. “What … what did you …?”

  Reed had a hard look, no hint of remorse. “She’s dangerous, and she can heal from shots to center mass. You know that.” He kept his weapon pointed at the fallen form. “She can’t heal from that, though. I don’t think.” His finger still hovered over the trigger. “You want to check her while I cover you?”

  Scott felt a sudden spring of nausea taking hold in his belly, and he wavered, afraid he might topple over where he stood. Augustus’s hand was still on his wrist, and he managed to get control of himself, to remove his arm from the black man’s grip. “I—yeah, okay.” He composed himself, taking a breath, and stepped forward.

  A small snuffling sound from beneath the woman made him jump back as soon as he had started forward. There was a faint motion, small, too small to be anything but nerves twitching, but it startled him nonetheless.

  “You don’t think that’s …?” Augustus’s voice trailed off.

  “I’ll just make sure—” Reed started.

  “No!” The answer burst out of Scott with more violence than the last three shots. He gave a look that quelled Reed—that trigger-happy bastard. Scott pulled his water reserve forward, a bulbous lake drifting through the air, just in case Reed was right. He could imprison her in water, possibly, if she was truly injured. Finish her that way, if he had to.

  Scott stepped forward, pausing to stand over the body. Her dark hair lay pooled on the ground, and hints of pale flesh peeked out at the temples. It certainly looked like her, at least from the back, with the wider hips, her body almost tented where it lay. “Did she fall on something?” he asked.

  “A rifle, I think,” Reed said. “I didn’t get a clear look before I opened up, but I could tell she had something in both hands.” His gaze was coldly inscrutable, but then, that was how he’d been throughout this entire process. The hardest converts to this mission were the truest believers, at least that
was how it seemed to Scott. He’d been a pretty hard convert himself, until he realized exactly how badly Sienna Nealon had screwed him over.

  He looked down at the body. There was no breath being drawn, which was a good sign that Reed had done as he’d hoped. Scott eased forward another step, trying to get a look at the face. He could see where the last three shots had torn through, and wondered if making a positive ID was even going to be possible. He hesitated, not wanting to touch her, his breath sticking in his throat. His hand shook a little, and he wondered if it was from the shock of the sudden, unexpected nature of those last shots—something about them had shaken him up in a way he couldn’t recall feeling in a long time. There was an animal-like revulsion crawling around inside him now, tickling his skin. The whole place reeked, too, and he wished he could spare a hand to hold over his nose.

  Scott had pictured this moment—standing over Sienna Nealon’s downed corpse—a thousand times since he’d taken the job of bringing her down. It hadn’t ever quite been like this in his head, though. It had been a glorious struggle, a fight to the finish in which she’d admitted her wrongs and surrendered, or screamed defiance to the end and gone down in a hail of bullets. Those were his fantasies, anyway, the things he imagined sitting at his desk after a long week. It had been a worthy goal toward which he’d been working all this while.

  None of those fantasies had ended like this, though, in a two-bit town, in a run-down apartment, with the girl in question gunned down from behind and then shot through the skull without mercy while she lay there bleeding. By her own brother, no less.

  He leaned over, trying to maintain his balance while stealing a look at her. She was slumped sideways, head against the floor, something keeping her belly from touching the ground. There were three definite red spots in her back, the blood oozing but no longer pumping from them. Reed’s first bursts had taken her below the ribcage, around the spine. That would have paralyzed her, Scott supposed, trying to keep his calm by being analytical rather than reacting to the horror of what he was seeing as he leaned further over.

  Because her face was—

  He ignored the missing chunk in her forehead, and the hints that the cheekbone nearest the floor was gone, a mess of crimson spreading in the beige carpeting beneath her face. Likewise, her chin seemed to simply disappear along with the bottom portion of her mouth, her jaw ending inches shy of where it should have. He stared at the eye he could see. It stared down, glassy and dull, reminding him of one he’d seen in a dead deer that had been mounted on a friend’s wall.

  The eye was not blue.

  “It could be contacts,” Scott muttered to himself, breath catching in his throat. He stared at the forehead, or what remained of it, and at the nose, which was rounded. The skin was pale, though death surely had stolen some of the color. He stared again at the nose, trying to reconcile it with the eye color, with the shape of the eye, and all the while he took another breath, sharper this time, and another, going from breathing deep to a sharp panting, his breaths running away with him—

  “Dude, settle,” Augustus said, “you’re gonna hyperventilate.”

  “It isn’t her,” Scott said, cold horror rushing over his skin, causing it to tingle. He felt suddenly clammy, flushed and feverish, the world around him hot and sticky, though he knew it wasn’t really—

  Because they were in Cheyenne, Wyoming, on a November morning, the temperature was close to forty degrees, and there was not a reason in the world why his body should have reacted like it was a Georgia swamp in the summertime.

  Scott’s legs wobbled and he collapsed, fell right on his backside, landing beside the dead woman, feeling the numbness creep up his legs. His tailbone cried in protest, but he ignored it until the body gave another faint lurch, and he turned his eyes away, across the room, where he saw—

  A crib, all done in white, blankets rumpled, no sign of its occupant.

  “Oh … oh …” Scott’s voice failed, him falling to quiet, and now his skin froze, the clutch of fear grabbing him. “Oh, God … no …”

  “What are you on about now—” Augustus stepped into the room, followed his gaze, and all the starch went out of him. “Awww … awww … no …”

  Scott’s hands felt as though they were no longer his own. Shaking, he put them on the girl, the woman, the one who was dead and was most definitely not Sienna Nealon. He tugged at her. She moved with his pressure, rolling with little effort as he pulled her toward him, onto her back. He caught a glimpse of her remaining eye, rolling with her body, and of the face that was not Sienna’s, like a jigsaw puzzle with pieces missing—

  The moment she was moved, the small, snuffling noise became a cry that almost drowned out the screaming somewhere in the back of Scott’s head. It was sharp, and pained, and the tiny, pink-fleshed bundle that had lain beneath the woman’s body drew screaming, shuddering breaths, its lungs turned out in fear, fury, and confusion.

  It was an infant beneath the body, and Scott watched as blood oozed out of a bullet hole in the child’s leg, watched in horror, and shoved his hand down urgently. “Oh—oh—oh, God—” he said, and his brain connected for a moment with his mouth, and nonsense stopped falling out and sense emerged. “Augustus—get the—get the paramedics in here now! Get the—get—get HELP!”

  The baby screamed in pain, and Augustus’s feet pounded the floor as he ran out of the apartment. Scott picked up the baby gingerly, sparing a last, horrorstruck gaze at the dead mother as he cradled the child in his arms, desperately trying to staunch the bleeding. There wasn’t much, fortunately; it looked like the bullet might have just nicked the leg. Scott tried to catch his breath, hands still shaking, and then reached out with his mind as he stood, raising the child with him. Blood was mostly water, after all—

  The paramedics rushed in moments later, moments that felt like an eternity. The entire apartment was soaked from where Scott had let go of the water that he’d brought into the battle. He hadn’t even noticed. Shoes squished against wet carpet; the body had been washed up against the bed by the force of the flood when it had become uncontained.

  The child was still crying, though it was less sharp now, less pained, and Scott handed over the baby to the paramedics with numb hands. His mind stayed where it was needed, though; no hint of red . He heard no words spoken, though he knew dimly the paramedics were speaking, were putting the child on a gurney, were restraining it as it flailed in protest at being taken from Scott’s chest, its cries nearly exhausted now. He could hear them, but barely, like a voice screaming in the back of his own head.

  He kept his mind on that wound. He could feel it at a distance even as the paramedics raced out of the apartment with the child, could feel the little plug of liquid he held in place like a dam against the rush of blood trying to escape the child’s wound. Scott’s breaths came raggedly, his brow was coated in sweat, and he mopped at his forehead as he stood up straight. He almost didn’t feel like he had the power to impel his legs to walk.

  But I have to, he thought, his mind still on holding in the blood in the infant’s body. I have to.

  He started forward uneasily, toward the bedroom door. Reed was still standing there where he’d left him, his expression hard as stone, resolute. His gun was still in hand, still raised, eye still fixed on the sight. Scott halted, then stepped aside.

  The gun was still pointed at the girl’s corpse, barrel lined up with the back of her head.

  “… Reed?” Scott asked, keeping his mind on holding in that blood from the tiny body that was receding into the distance. He didn’t care how far away it went; if they’d airlifted the child from Cheyenne to Maine, he would have given everything he had to keep that blood in place. It would go nowhere while he was still breathing, just to the heart, to the little lungs, and back again in that infinite loop. He could feel it in the baby, the natural flow, and he refused to let it go, even as the question stirred to mind.

  Reed did not move, just kept his gun fixed on the corpse. He blin
ked, staring at it. “We didn’t get her,” he said simply, not coming off the sights, not lowering the weapon.

  “No,” Scott said, casting a look back at the dead woman. “No, we … we didn’t.” He eased toward Reed, gently putting a hand on the barrel of the submachine gun. He pushed it down, so that it was no longer aiming at the body.

  Reed blinked, then looked up at him, letting the weapon go. It rested in the sling against his chest. Reed took a breath of his own, then another, and it sounded like the tension was leaving him. “I was so sure it was her.” His voice had a dreamlike quality.

  Scott just stared at him. “But … it wasn’t.”

  “I know.” Reed blinked once more, then seemed to relax. “Next time. We’ll get her next time.”

  And he walked out without another word, without a look back, and without a hint of remorse.

  5.

  Gerry Harmon

  Being the president of the United States is a funny thing. Everyone seems to think you have much more power than you actually do. Your most loyal supporters seem to believe you’re God, able to do no wrong, regardless of how you work the levers of power. Your most loyal detractors will never believe you do anything right, ever, even if you were sign a bill into law granting them every single thing they’ve ever hoped for. Most of the electorate seems to fall somewhere between the ranks of the loving and the loathing, and into what I call the largely indifferent.

  Actually … quite an enormous number fall into that realm.

  Meanwhile, it’s really like any other job, in its way. Except the hours are beyond terrible. You’re on call all the time. I was once woken at three-thirty in the morning after getting to bed at one-thirty following a long day of campaigning and fundraising, because some idiot in Russia had decided to blow up a train station. True story. Given the hour, I naturally didn’t care much about a train station in Russia, but the president of the United States has to care about every event on the world stage, no matter how small.