14. Ambush

Elena's POV

The floor of the car smelled of leather polish and wet wool.

I lay folded into the narrow space behind the front seats, my cheek against the carpet, my knees jammed against the door, the silk twisted around my legs like a wet sheet. Above me, Jax hadn't moved. From down there I could see only his shoes, planted wide, and the gun resting loose against his knee, the way another man might hold a folded newspaper.

Don't come up until I say your name.

I held on to that. It was the only thing in the car that made sense.

"Four and six." Gideon spoke low into the radio on the dash. "Harbor road, north end. Now."

A crackle. Someone answered. I didn't catch the words.

I couldn't see the cars behind us anymore. That was worse. I could feel them, a pressure at the back of my neck, like the half second before a wet glass slides out of your fingers.

The car leaned into a long curve.

"Trucks," Gideon said.

One word, and the engine changed under me. Deeper. The tires biting.

"How many?"

"Two. Across the lane. No lights."

"They knew the road," Jax said.

He said it the way you'd mention rain. Then the window beside him slid down, the cold poured in, and he fired.

I had never heard a gun inside a car. It wasn't a bang. It was a blow, a flat, hard slap that went straight through my skull and left a high whine behind it. Again. Again. Brass casings dropped past my face and bounced off the seat, bright and hot, and one rolled against my lip and burned.

Glass burst somewhere in front. Gideon swore. The car swerved, I slid hard into the door, and the door wasn't there anymore.

It had opened.

Rain. Cold. Wet asphalt a foot from my face, sliding past, slowing. A hand came out of the dark and closed around my ankle.

I screamed.

I didn't decide to. It tore out of me, high and raw, a sound I hadn't known I owned. The hand pulled. I slid backward across the carpet, my nails dragging through it, catching on nothing. My shoe came off in his fist. He grabbed again, higher, at my calf, and hauled.

"Alive!" someone shouted outside. "He wants her alive—"

Two shots, so close above me that the air went hot.

The hand on my leg opened.

Something warm spattered across the back of my dress. I didn't turn to look. I knew that warmth. There is only one thing that comes out of a person that warm.

Jax's arm reached past me and dragged the door shut. His voice above me hadn't changed at all.

"Go."

Gideon went.

The engine howled. We hit something, metal against metal, a shriek that went on and on. The car bucked and lifted, and the whole world turned over.

I don't know how many times. I know the roof came down to meet me and the floor went up. I know the glass came down like sugar spilling from a torn bag, into my hair, down the back of my neck, between my teeth. I know I was screaming and couldn't hear it. Then everything slammed sideways and stopped.

Rain ticked on metal. Something hissed under the hood. Above me, a wheel was still turning, slower, slower. My own breath came ragged and wet.

The car lay on its side. I was crumpled against the inside of a door with glass under my cheek, and I didn't know which way was up, and I didn't move.

Nobody had said my name.

"Elena."

There.

His voice, right above me. I came up toward it before I'd decided anything, the way you turn toward the only lit window on a dark street.

He was braced in the broken door frame over my head, rain running off his hair, a cut bleeding through one eyebrow. He looked at me for one long second. My face. My hands. The dark stain spreading across the silk.

"Is it yours?"

I opened my mouth. Nothing came. I didn't know.

He reached down, got both hands under my arms, and pulled me up through the door into the rain.

"Can you walk?"

I tried. My bare foot found glass and my knees simply folded.

He didn't say anything. He bent, slid one arm under my knees, and the road left me.

I should have been terrified of it. A man's arms closing around me had only ever meant one thing. But these arms were careful. His hand came up to the back of my head and pressed my face into his shoulder and kept it there, and it took me a moment to understand why. He didn't want me looking at the road behind us.

Under my cheek, through his soaked shirt, his heart was slamming. It was the only part of him that wasn't calm.

Glass crunched under his shoes. Somewhere behind us an engine started and roared off into the dark, then another.

Headlights swept up the road. I flinched, and his hold on me tightened.

"Ours," Gideon said. He came limping around the wreck with blood running into his scarred eyebrow and the leather case swinging from one fist. "Four and six."

Two black cars slid to a stop on the wet road. Men spilled out with guns raised, saw us, and lowered them.

Jax set me down on the hood of the nearest car just long enough to strip off his coat. He wrapped it around me, warm from his body, smelling of smoke and rain, and then he picked me up again as if he'd never put me down.

Jax turned, still holding me, and looked back at the two trucks parked across the road, at the dark shapes lying still in the rain around them.

"They were waiting," he said. "They knew which road."

Gideon wiped the blood out of his eye. "Route C, boss."

"And route C went to—"

"One man." Gideon's voice was very quiet. "Only one."