Page 81 of Driven By Impulse

Ash grinned. “He’s talking about turning your pretty little ass red, Cherry,” he said with a grin. “Just for giving us both a heart attack and a half.”

“Ah.” Grace couldn’t hold back a smile. “This is your them.”

“This is…my them,” Hanna admitted.

“This is very sweet,” Jinx said. “And I’m truly overjoyed that you three finally got your heads out of your asses. But we are facing down a dozen heavily armed criminal bikers. Might want to focus our attention.”

“Don’t think we’re not discussing this later,” Ash said, “but for now, Hanna, take Grace and get to cover.”

He barely got the words out before the first bullet was flying through the air. Hanna and Grace slid down the embankment. Trees and branches cut at her bare skin, but it wasn’t the bites of pain that made Hanna’s heart stutter in her chest.

Ash and Nic and the others were up there fighting the battle she had dragged them into and she couldn’t help. All she could do was watch as men raised guns and charged with knives and eventually the gun battle turned into a fight of fisticuffs and brass knuckles, blood flying, teeth flying, curses flying through the air.

“They’re going to be okay,” Grace assured her. For someone whose life did not typically include violent gun fights, Grace seemed remarkably calm.

Hanna’s words caught in her throat. “How can you be sure?”

Grace shook her head. “You can’t be sure of anything, Hanna. You can be smart and hopeful and informed and positive. You can focus on the good and the best outcome and the light, and you can try to be the best version of yourself each day.”

She smiled, and somehow it registered to Hanna’s tired, overworked mind that Grace was still stunningly pretty, even after a week in captivity.

“And I can be sure, even without knowing either of them, because they have each other’s back. And yours.”

Hanna had lost her team, the two betrayals shaking her confidence in ways she hadn’t fully understood at the time, making her think that she did have to do it all alone again, that the only person she could trust was herself. But that had never been true. She’d had Rose and her dad and Ash when she’d been growing up. She had Tori and their treehouse. And she had The Princes.

More importantly, she had her men.

Hanna had told more than one eager deputy that every single action contributed to the team, and she had meant it. Sometimes that was as simple as keeping a safe perimeter. Sometimes it was tackling an attacking criminal to the ground to keep anyone else from being hurt. She wasn’t in the field because she didn’t have a weapon and that would make her more of a liability to the team. She wasn’t in the field, because she had to keep Grace safe, just as she had promised.

Somewhere, between the explosions and the stabbings and the rides through the mountains and the rides through the night, Ash and Nic had become her team, and teams worked together, giving and taking, relying on each other, accepting help, loving one another, if that was all they could do.

“Shit, Ash,” she heard Nicco swear from somewhere above, and Hanna stared at the battlefield of the compound with dawning horror. The Princes had the Iron Daggers pinned down, but Bryce Iverson had slipped away, and hadn’t wasted time with the theatrics. This time, Hanna watched, unable to move, unable to stop it as Iverson aimed for Ash’s chest and fired.

Chapter Thirty-Six

Nicco saw Ash go down and it felt like time had stopped, like the air had been sucked out of his lungs, like he would never breathe again. Was this what it felt like for Ash when Nicco looked for a way out? Was this why Ash had looked so close to losing his shit when he’d begged Nicco to make the call?

Their lives were dangerous, there was no denying that, but there was a big difference between knowing he could potentially get gut checked again and seeing his best friend go down with a bullet wound.

“Out of my way.” Bryce Iverson raised the gun at Nicco’s face, and then his expression morphed, sinister and amused. “Oh, I know you. You were the sheriff’s date the night you all broke in my office. I must say, I think we’re even now. She breaks into my house. I blow hers up.”

Nicco charged at the same moment Iverson fired and a sear of white-hot pain bit at his shoulder as the bullet sliced flesh. That didn’t stop him. He grabbed Iverson around the waist and threw him to the ground, the two of them spilling in a tangle down the embankment, holding each other so tightly it felt almost impossible to get a punch or a kick in, especially as his arm was screaming in pain and begging for relief.

Such a different kind of pain and different kind of relief than he was used to. Such a different kind of fight.

And Nicco was determined to win both, even if he had to fight through the blood and the dirt and the pain. Because he had something waiting for him on the other end that made it worth it. Two somethings.

Two someones.

“Nicco!”

Nicco looked up to see Hanna and Grace scrambling toward them in the dirt, a look of horror on Hanna’s face. She reached for Iverson, the part that wasn’t wrapped around Nicco, and dragged his head back by his hair, delivering a brutal blow.

“You little bitch,” Iverson spit out through bloody, broken teeth. “You convinced my wife to leave me. And for that, I won’t let you walk out of here alive.”

He slammed his hand into the side of Nicco’s head, until it bounced off a rock, making a riot of bright white lights bounce before his eyes. Nicco felt his grip on Iverson begin to loosen, and then he watched, unable to move quickly enough to stop it, as Iverson grabbed Hanna around the waist and dragged her to the ground with him. It was hard for Nicco’s eyes to focus, but he saw the blur of fists and blood against the mountaintop, heard Hanna’s moans of pain and Grace’s cries to stop.

And then he watched, as much as he could, as Grace reached for the gun that had landed a few feet from them in the melee and held it up with shaky hands.