Outside Dawn Mine
San Gabriel Mountains
Nightfall
Valentine grimaced as the knife cut into his belly and his warm blood spilled down his chilled legs. In shock, he shivered with the excruciating torture, desperate not to cry out. Tears ran down his cheeks as he fought the agony of the blade.
When he shut his eyes, Raine’s face grew from the shadows. He sensed her with him and drew strength from her love.
Brax remembered the lessons of his mother and used his mind to block out Mateo’s brutality. It wouldn’t save his life. It would only allow him to leave the empty hull of his body—beyond Mateo’s reach—but a noise forced him back.
“Drop your weapons!” A man’s voice came over a bullhorn.
Shadowy silhouettes of men rappelled down ropes from the sky, dressed in SWAT gear. Their bodies were backlit in a blinding spotlight. A helo hovered low and kicked up dust and debris, thrashing tree branches.
Valentine squinted into the light, naked and shivering.
“Cut him down. Now!”
Mateo and his men were stunned by the stealth precision of the assault. No one made a move to free Valentine until shots were fired at the cabling wrapped around the trees that held him prisoner. The steel cables were shredded by high powered rounds.
Numb and bleeding, Brax dropped to the ground.
Shots rang out. Mateo’s men put up a fight, but when Valentine collapsed to his knees in the dirt, a man with a machete raised his blade and came at him.
Without a weapon, Valentine gripped the chains on his wrists and fended off the blow. He wrapped the metal shackles around the blade and forced the man to drop the weapon. In a sudden twist of his body, Brax whipped the chain around the man’s throat and squeezed with his last strength. When he heard the man’s neck break, he let the body drop in a heap at his feet.
Valentine fell to his knees and searched the body. When he found the wedding ring the man had stolen from him, he placed it on his finger and looked for De La Cruz.
“Damn you!” Mateo cursed at him.
The man reached for a gun from the small of his back and fired as the SWAT team closed in. He stepped closer to Valentine, ready to shoot, but a man in uniform rushed the crime boss and butted him with his rifle. Mateo staggered back, still holding the weapon. When he toppled over a body, the cartel boss grabbed Brax and pointed the handgun to his head.
“Stay back…or I’ll shoot.” Mateo screamed through his busted lip and spat out blood as he hid behind Valentine.
“Shoot him. I’m dead. He won’t let me go.” He staggered to his feet, but Mateo dragged him backwards and kept him off balance.
“Shoot him!” Valentine yelled and fought the man’s grasp.
The cartel boss yelled orders to his men in Spanish, but no one moved. His men slowly dropped their weapons and held up their hands, grimacing in the stark light and the blowing debris, but Valentine wasn’t ready for the fight to be over—not when Mateo still breathed.
He yanked De La Cruz’s arm and tossed his body over his shoulder. When he hit the dirt, Brax twisted the gun from his fingers and took aim, placing the muzzle to Mateo’s head.
“This is for Raine.”
Before he pulled the trigger, a shot came from nowhere and tore through Valentine’s body.
He fell to his back with lights spiraling in front of his eyes. Garbled voices muddled through his mind as he fought to stay conscious and gasped for air. His chest burned when he couldn’t breathe.
“We need De La Cruz alive. Take him.” A man in uniform stood over Valentine, a face he couldn’t make out.
The shooter had targeted him, not Mateo. Whoever these men were, they had used him to get to De La Cruz and kept Raine’s killer alive. Confused and in shock, Brax didn’t understand, but he was beyond caring. Amidst the chaos of the fight and the pain that wracked his body, he felt the rush of a cool breeze across his fevered brow as time edged to a dead stop.
A warm shimmer of light, like the hypnotic rays of the sun flickering through the trees, had returned and he knew to look for her. Raine walked toward him through the stock-still shadows of men, the timeless ethereal beauty he would always remember.
She had come for him.