Sean didn’t know what had woken him. A footstep? A car engine? Whatever it was, it wasn’t natural. Instinct told him their mini-vacation was over. He touched Hazel’s shoulder. “Sweetheart, we gotta go.”
“Hmmmmm?” The sound was soft and drawn-out. Sleepy.
“Sorry, babe. We need to grab our stuff and get out of here. Quietly.”
He slid from the bed and grabbed their bags, dumping the items they’d left on the nightstand and dresser inside, then he pulled on jeans and a shirt as Hazel did the same. She was sleepy and sex tousled, and he wished this wasn’t how their first full night together as lovers had to end, but his instincts were pinging like crazy. They had to get out of here. Fast.
Dressed with bags in hand, he led her to the front door, then came to a dead stop. Something moved past the window. A silhouette that wasn’t deer or coyote. Human.
Instinct took over, and he grabbed Hazel, pushed her to the floor, and covered her body with his. The window crazed, then shattered. As if it had collapsed under a high-pitch frequency.
Shit, were they about to be hit by infrasound? It couldn’t pass through windows, and in Alaska, both Rav’s and Isabel’s windows had shattered before they were hit with the sonic weapon for the first time.
But whoever was outside the cabin had opted for old-school terror tactics. A Molotov cocktail smashed against the hearth to the right of him with a loud crash. There was a flash of flame, but the stone hearth meant there was nothing to catch fire. The flames disappeared as quickly as they’d erupted.
A second Molotov cocktail lit the shrub beneath the front window. The branches, capped with dry autumn leaves, caught instantly. Flames flared outward, licking the window ledge and curtains. In a few minutes, the entire cabin would be ablaze.
He rose to his knees, his body still blocking Hazel’s from the window. “Crawl to the bathroom. We’ll go out that window.”
It was small and therefore an unlikely exit point, plus it faced the carport.
In the bathroom, he raised the window. The size meant Hazel would have no problem, but it would be a squeeze for him. He turned to her. “I’ll go through first, then I’ll pull you through. If the path is clear to the carport, we’ll go that way; otherwise, we’ll head into the trees.” If they had to hide in the forest, he had a satellite phone and could call Raptor. They’d make their way to a road for pickup. The compound was about forty minutes away.
He kissed her hard and fast, then climbed on top of the toilet seat. He wrenched the window open and dropped their bags. Then he launched himself through, diving as if he were stretching to catch a football. He rolled on the hard grass as he landed, a maneuver he practiced on a regular basis.
He sprang to his feet and turned back to the window after doing a quick scan to make sure they were covered. A storage shed protected one flank, the carport was behind him, and they were sheltered by the rear wall of the kitchen on his other flank. They were as protected from view as they could be.
Hazel had no such experience with diving out windows, so he reached up and pulled her through the opening. He set her on her feet, scooped up their bags, and they ran for the carport.
In seconds, they were inside the big SUV and he was backing out of the carport. No other vehicles or people were in sight, but the front of the cabin was fully engulfed in flames.
The sound that woke him was probably accelerant being poured on the wood structure. The flames had spread unnaturally fast.
He tossed Hazel his cell phone. “Call 9-1-1 and report the fire. They need to get this under control before the entire forest lights up.”
She made the call, asking Sean for the address. He gave her the information, and she relayed it to the operator. They asked her to stay on the phone until emergency services arrived, but he nixed that idea. By the time fire trucks got there, they’d be long gone. They’d sort it out with the arson investigators later. Right now, he needed to call Rav.
Hazel’s hands were shaking badly, and she dropped the phone in the process of trying to end the call. It slipped between the seat and the center console, and he could hear her heavy breathing as she dug it out from under her seat.
Finally, she placed it in the phone holder mounted to the dash, her hands still wildly shaking. They made it to the main highway with no tail in sight. He needed to call his boss, but right now, Hazel’s state of mind was more important. “You okay?”
“I don’t know. Freaked out, I guess. But I think it’s sort of normal to freak out about someone trying to burn us alive, so that’s good?” She pressed her hands to her knees and leaned forward a bit. He guessed she was trying to even out her breathing. “I close my eyes and all I see is calcined bone. Like the men in the lake who were burned. That could have been us.”
“But it wasn’t. We’re here, and the fire is behind us.”
She was silent for a long moment, then said in a quavering voice, “Talk to me. Whose cabin was that?”
“Chase Johnston’s.”
“Oh no!”
“Yeah.” He rubbed her back with one hand, his eyes on the road, scanning the mirrors for a tail. She wanted him to talk, so he did, his voice low and calm. “Chase purchased the cabin with a bonus he received after what happened in Alaska.”
She took a long, slow breath. “I can see Alec doing that. Especially given the bond between Chase and Isabel.”
Her voice no longer shook, a good sign.
“He said he comes here at least once a month for the solitude, a chance to quiet the noise in his head.”
“And now it’s gone.”
Yeah. He probably shouldn’t have mentioned the last part, when the goal was to calm her. Dumbass. He rubbed her back some more. “He’ll get through this. And so will you.”
“I feel guilty. Freaking out with my stupid panic attacks. Fainting in a lake because of bones. Chase and Isabel had to deal with so much worse. I’m such a crybaby.”
“Someone just set the cabin you were sleeping in on fire, Hazel. And even if they hadn’t, you have every right to all your emotions. You face some evil shit in your job. That it affects you means you’re an empathetic human being. Your empathy and sense of humanity are two of the reasons I love you.”
He felt the muscles of her back relax at his words. This was the right track.
“Thank you,” she said softly.
“Thank you. For sticking around for years while I figured out my shit. For not giving up on me each time I pushed you away.”
She sat up slowly. “I kept trying to give up. But I was too crazy about you to ever quite let the idea of us go.”
He slipped his hand from behind her back and returned it to the wheel. “I need to call Rav now, and put him on speaker. You ready?”
She nodded.
His call was quick and to the point, informing Rav of the attack on the cabin and letting him know they were on their way and would arrive at the compound in thirty minutes. He wasn’t wasting time with taking a surveillance detection route as he’d done going to the cabin. Whoever lit that fire knew he’d go straight to the compound like it was a safe base in a game of tag. No point in trying to hide it when he needed to get Hazel safely within the compound walls.
He asked Rav to talk to the local fire department and police to explain why they’d fled the scene. He suggested arson investigators look for accelerant under the living room and bedroom windows, then added, “And tell Chase I’m sorry.”
“We’ll talk about that when you get here,” Rav responded cryptically. “Actually, we’ve got a lot to talk about.”
He probably hoped to continue keeping Hazel in the dark, but Sean was done with that shit. Twice, Hazel had been targeted. Rav would tell her everything. Even about Matt. And Rav would spell out why he was suspicious of Hazel’s brother-in-law.
No more damn secrets.
They drove through the security gate at the compound just as dawn was breaking over the night sky. Sean led Hazel to his rarely used suite to drop their bags. As the top operative in the company, he had a posh set of rooms. He punched in his security code, and the door swooshed open like the doors on the spaceships in Star Trek.
It amused him every time.
Inside the cozy living room, he used the same code to close and lock the door, then pulled her into his arms. This was the first time he’d held her since they’d fled the cabin. She melted against him, and he cupped the back of her head. “I will protect you,” he whispered.
She raised her head to meet his gaze. “I know you will. You already have.”
“I’ll do a better job of it. Hell. I thought we were safe there. I’m still trying to figure out how they knew where we were.”
“I know how.” The man’s voice came from the bedroom doorway.
Sean jolted, shoving Hazel behind him, blocking her from the line of fire, and turned to face Chase Johnston.