Mission: Impossible to Protect (The Impossible Mission Romantic Suspense Series Book 6), стр. 47
He couldn’t suck enough air into his lungs. If Nick had reached out to get an active Navy SEAL home… His twin was one tough SOB. He’d fight.
Lars flashed on all the shots to the chest he had witnessed and the outcome. But that was on the battlefield. Not where the best hospitals and doctors were available.
Lars couldn’t go there. Hs shut down the visions of men who had died. He had to stay in the here and now. This was a different type of battleground, but still a battleground with moving pieces that he had to stay on top of from minute to minute. He had to step up and be the team leader he was trained to be when tasked with an impossible mission.
He had to delegate… How could he allow anyone else to search for Danni? But he couldn’t allow Sten to be alone in the hospital. He had to trust his team. The hospital would be the command center until his brothers and mother arrived. How would he ever explain to his mother how Sten had been shot on his watch?
He reverted back to his training. Pigeonhole emotions. No time or place for feelings on the battlefield.
Once his family arrived, Lars would be on the front lines. His mission was to rescue Danni. Sten’s outcome was out of his hands. In better hands than his.
Lars was trained to kill anyone who stood in the way of rescuing the hostage.
The fear and suffering would come later.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Consciousness crept slowly and painfully into her brain at the loud shouting. Her head was wedged in a tightening vise of agony. Her mouth was parched from too much champagne with tequila shots as a chaser. Danni kept her eyes locked shut to avoid the screwdriver-to-the-eyeball pain she knew would come from the light. She couldn’t remember any recent binges to set her on the downward spiral again. Drinking to obliterate the memory of standing alone, in her magnificent Vera Wang on the altar steps, had only lasted a week or two after her wedding before murderous rage took over. She’d never be a victim like that again. If Lars ever tried some crazy stint, she’d chase him down and make him pay…
The nausea was intensified by the stench of putrefying garbage. She needed water and Tylenol now. She tried to rub her temples, but she couldn’t move her hands, which she suddenly realized were tied to a chair. And then the last hours came crashing down on her like a tsunami.
“You fucking idiots. You were instructed not to bring her here. And she still has her cast on. You two were sampling the new shipment instead of doing your fucking job.”
She froze, relieved that she hadn’t opened her eyes.
With each word of the tirade, every horrendous detail at the spa came flooding back. She had been drugged—an injection to her neck explained the hangover from hell. The panicked claustrophobic sensation of being buried alive came from her last memory of being thrown into the laundry basket. Icy chills prickled along her skin. She fought the need to shiver, to not alert her captors to her wakefulness.
And then she remembered—Sten had been shot. The horrific sound of Sten hitting the ground was permanently fixed in her brain. Her eyes squeezed tight; she pleaded with God. She prayed for Sten to survive for Lars’s sake too. She didn’t believe that God would hold it against her that she hadn’t been in a church since her wedding.
“Can I have water, please?”
A desperate female voice came from Danni’s left. She wasn’t Miro’s only victim?
Her heart banged against her ribs so loudly that she wanted to cover her chest to dampen the sound. How long she could keep her unconscious act going before Miro arrived?
She had to escape. Danni opened her eyes a crack to assess. Two Hispanic men—the stocky one who had abducted her and the angry one—stood with a skinny Black man near a folding table and chairs covered in fast-food wrappers.
“You better start praying to Santa Muerte, because Miro is going to kill you, Paolo. Not for just sampling the product but because you’ve totally fucked up the entire operation. You didn’t kill that sicko cono like you were supposed to. She’s probably in custody right now telling the police how she put a device in that bitch’s cast to track her so she could kill her. And how long do you think it will be before the police are able to get a bead on the device and find this warehouse?”
Luna had put a tracking device in her cast and planned to kill her? Danni wasn’t sure if she would vomit, but the urge to gag rammed hard.
“You didn’t tell me that there would be a guard right outside the spa door. He would’ve heard the shot. And I didn’t think Miro would want a gun battle in the hotel.”
“And who put you in charge of making decisions? You were supposed to deliver her to the house. Not to the warehouse. Miro is headed to the house, and if she isn’t there when he arrives, he won’t just kill you, but also those two cute daughters of yours. And what he’ll do to your wife…”
Miro was on his way to make her his latest sick game. Panic jolted through her as if she had taken a defibrillator to the chest. She had to get away before they took her to Miro. How long before Lars would find her, now that he hopefully knew about the tracking device? Any amount of time with the perverted monster would be too long. Lights flickered behind Danni’s eyelids as all the blood left her head. Could she faint sitting down?
“Get her into the car and then throw her cast into the street when you get away from the warehouse.”
The boss’s voice moved closer, as