Mountain Refuge (Mountain Mutineers #1)

Chapter 34

Chapter Thirty-Four

Elijah

W hat movies don’t tell you is how loud gunfights are. There’s very little that can be heard over the piercing echoes and the sounds of destruction. Glass shattered, wood splintered, metal groaned on top of the constant pop, pop, pop of the gunfire.

The bad part about the noise was that I couldn’t easily call out to check on Corbin, Brooke, or to Trenton with my kids. There was no calling out for an ammo refill or to know if the scream I’d just heard was one of my people or one of theirs.

The overwhelming noise did help to hone my vision. Through all my shooting lessons Dalton, Corbin, and Brooke had put me through, I never got the tunnel vision they always talked about. I saw my target, but it wasn’t all I saw.

It was all I saw now.

The back kitchen door came bursting open seconds after I heard gunfire coming from the living room and upstairs in the loft. It was completely and utterly terrifying to know that my best friend and the love of my life were both engaged in battle to protect me and my kids. However, the moment that door came crashing off of its hinges, it was like my eyes and ears created blinders. All I saw and heard were the men trying to enter the cabin.

I had the kitchen table tipped onto its side to help shield me as I crouched low against the pantry doorframe. I had three semi-automatic handguns with only one spare clip each. Brooke had seen a half-dozen coming off of the helicopter, but that didn’t mean there weren’t more. I had to be careful with my ammo.

Both men who entered were dressed in military fatigues and carrying automatic rifles. Unlike Brooke, I did not know the names of the different types of weapons, but they looked like what movies called an AK-47 with the long clips hanging down. They had on black boots and helmets.

I knew from Corbin’s hunting lessons to aim for the arteries. Hitting the stomach was definitely easier, but it would not bring down a larger animal. With the men’s armor, it was useless to aim for their torsos anyway. I didn’t know a lot about guns but I knew I did not have armor-piercing bullets.

I was also not a good enough shot to aim for their head and hit my target without wasting bullets.

I went for their thighs and knees. As soon as I fired, the two of them scattered. My shot went wide and ended up hitting the metal of the stove. I ducked down as the table immediately took fire. I had no idea how long it would hold.

With the continuous array of bullets coming at me, I couldn’t lift my head to shoot. I knew I could wait for them to reload, but that wouldn’t stop them from approaching me and slaughtering me where I crouched.

I blindly lifted my gun over the top of the table and pulled the trigger. Their gunshots paused. I took a chance to peek around the side of the table.

One was down on a knee by the backdoor while the other was running for the living room .

I didn’t hesitate. I stood, revealing myself as a target, and shot directly at the second man’s back. Just as he fell, I felt a piercing pain in my left shoulder.

Crying out, I fell back down behind the table.

Fuck.

The realization that I had been shot, despite the last fifteen months of my life, was so heady that I felt dizzy.

However, I couldn’t let it stop me. I had shot the one man, but I didn’t know if he was dead or hurt or had only been knocked off balance by the bullet hitting his bulletproof vest. The one who had shot me wasn’t injured.

A glance down at my shoulder showed a large red blotch but nothing to indicate how serious the injury was. Regardless, I had to keep fighting. I had to protect my kids.

With a show of force this large, was Gunther even trying to get his children back alive or had he sentenced all of us to death? Was Gunther even here? Or had he sent these men—paid mercenaries no doubt—to slaughter us all while he sat safe in a penthouse hotel room halfway around the world?

A glint of silver caught my eye and I noticed a kitchen knife on the floor of the pantry. I wondered if Brooke had been using it before the helicopter had alerted her to the mercenaries’ inbound attack.

I knew I couldn’t throw it with any sense of accuracy, but it might provide me with a distraction. I was still able to use my left arm—it just hurt like a bitch.

Hearing footsteps on the hardwood floor, I grabbed the knife, stood, and slammed it forward.

I honestly have no idea which one of us was more surprised when the blade pierced—me or the guy I had just stabbed in the throat. He garbled and spluttered blood out of his mouth before falling to his knees with the knife still embedded in his neck.

Movement out of the corner of my eye showed the man I had shot in the back was trying to stand. I raised my gun and shot three more times at his back.

My heart was pounding, my entire arm was throbbing, but silence fell in the kitchen as I stared down at the two dead bodies. Brooke’s table was completely ruined and her meticulously kept pantry was in ruins.

A child’s scream broke through my haze. Belle!

I leapt over the kitchen table, sliding on the blood beneath my boots. I didn’t know whose it was and I didn’t care. I jumped over the two dead bodies of the men I had just killed and into the hallway.

The front door was littered with bullet holes and lay flat on the floor like it had been kicked inward.

Corbin was in a fist fight that looked far too choreographed to be real, and yet it was. My giant best friend was battling three mercenaries who had been stripped of their guns. The living room furniture was in disarray and various pieces. A body, presumably dead, was lying face down in the fireplace. Another was dangling halfway through the living room window. Based on the blood, he had been disemboweled by the jagged glass.

Corbin fought like a rabid berserker. As he spun around to grab hold of one man by the throat, I saw the hilt of a knife sticking out of his back. My eyes widened, but I couldn’t stop to help him. I had to get to my kids!

I heard the continuous pow, pow! from the loft and at least had an auditory confirmation that Brooke was still alive.

Blood trailed down my left arm, dropping to the floor. I clutched my gun tightly in my right hand.

I skittered to a halt just inside the bedroom door.

The past and the present blurred in my mind’s eye as I saw the man who fathered my daughter jump at my sudden presence. He slammed her up against his chest and put her gun to her head .

Belle’s throat was held so tightly in his fist that she struggled to breathe. Tears streaked down her cheeks and filled her eyes. She was trying to stand as tall as she could on her tippy toes to get herself a little more oxygen.

Belle was tall for her age, lean, but she was still a child in a grown man’s grip. Gunther’s head, chest, and shoulders were completely exposed. I had a gun too. But I wasn’t so good a shot that I could risk firing in my daughter’s direction.

“Drop the gun, Adam.”

I flinched at my former name. I didn’t know why. It was just a name. It shouldn’t affect me so badly. But I knew deep in my soul that I was no longer Adam Greene.

Adam Greene was a teacher, a plain man. Though he was not a coward, he was not strong.

I was strong now. I had muscles from working hard in my new mountain life. I had a son and a daughter who were my entire world. I had Brooke .

I was not Adam Greene. Adam Greene had run from a fight. I was no longer running.

As I tossed the gun onto the hardwood floor of what was supposed to be my kids’ new bedroom, I saw Trenton curled in the corner of the room. He was balled into a fetal position with his back to me, wrapped entirely around something.

Then I realized… It wasn’t something, but some one . Trenton was not moving and I could not see signs of life from him or my son in his arms.

Something shattered within me. A rage unlike anything I had ever felt before. My nose burned with unshed tears as my eyes lifted to the man who had fathered my three children. Because it didn’t matter if Trenton was an adult. He was mine, had been mine, from the time I walked into his life when he was fifteen years old. I just hadn’t known it until this moment.

And now he and my son were gone. It was obvious from Trenton’s position that he’d tried to shield Lucas. My boy. My precious, precious boy.

My son .

My son s.

Innocent. Both so innocent and too good for this world to take from me so cruelly.

I thought I hated Sebastian Gunther.

I had not known hatred until this very second.

Adam, Elijah, my name no longer mattered. I was Rage, I was Vengeance. This man had taken too much from me. I would not allow him to take my daughter too.

Gunther opened his mouth as if to give me another command, but I moved before he could. I leapt across the room like a rabid dog. No weapon, I used my fists to take the man down. Belle got knocked down in the struggle too, and some small part of me noticed that she managed to crawl away.

The gun went flying, skidding across the room.

My fists flew through the air like battering rams. I connected with any part of him that I could, though mostly his face. Gunther tried to bring his hands up to defend himself, but I straddled his chest and locked his arms under my knees.

I had never noticed before that Gunther and I were about the same height. He had always seemed so large to me. But that was his power, authority, and money. He had none of that now. At this very moment, he was nothing more than a man who had cost me nothing but pain, suffering, anxiety… And my sons.

He threatened my daughter.

He hurt Belle.

He took Lucas, my baby, from me.

He had robbed me of the chance to claim Trenton as my own.

I howled out my agony. I forgot what was happening outside this room. I forgot about my bullet wound, the pain of which was nothing compared to the anguish coursing through my heart at the loss of my sons.

I was more beast than man.

I was Vengeance.

Long after life left Sebastian Gunther’s body, I continued to pelt him. His teeth cut my fists, his nose caved in, and his blood bathed my skin.

It did not even bring me comfort to know that Sebastian Gunther’s last minutes on this earth were spent in pain.