Thomas said. “Whoever wants you dead is gonna come looking. And when they don’t find your charred remains in that fire, or my body back where they left me...? They’re gonna realize they screwed up, and then they’re gonna try to hunt us down.”
Whoever wants you dead...
Words to put panic into her heart. If they—whoever they were—wanted her dead, what did that mean for Tedric and his parents, and everyone else up at the remote lodge?
“When we don’t show up, they’re going to lock down the lodge, right? I mean, more than they already have?” Tasha asked as they began walking up the road.
Thomas glanced at her. “Absolutely. And Uncle Admiral’s gonna send reinforcements. I predict this mountain will be buzzing with Navy helos shortly after dawn. Our job is to get through the night.”
When he put it like that, it didn’t sound too challenging. And yet...
Still, Tasha embraced his We got this attitude. “It stopped raining,” she realized.
Thomas smiled. “See? Things are definitely looking up.”
Chapter Six
Rio Rosetti was halfway to his cousin Luc’s housewarming party when his GPS went out.
At first he thought it was his phone—an app malfunction due to craptastic battery power. Damn thing had been fading out on him with a vengeance over the past few weeks—going from fifty percent to zero in a heartbeat—a direct result of too many salt-water dunkings after his waterproof case had cracked.
Drying via rice only worked to a degree. His phone was on dead man walking status, and he carried his charger in the front pocket of his cargo shorts.
But when he pulled over into the parking lot of a strip mall to plug it into the cigarette lighter—yeah, Gertie, his car, was that elderly—it soon became clear it wasn’t a power issue. He had no bars and no internet—like instead of being in suburban San Diego, he was suddenly on the dark side of the moon.
It was then he noticed the traffic lights at the corner were out. They were flashing yellow, as if some kind of emergency backup had switched on. Had the power gone out in this part of town? Apparently it had. People were coming out of shops and restaurants that were decidedly dark.
It wasn’t just his cell service that was down—no one’s phone seemed to be working.
He halfway got out of his car to call to one of the women who’d come out of a sandwich shop. “Power out?”
She nodded. “Was there an earthquake?”
Rio shook his head. “Not that I know of.”
But quakes were weird. And yeah, as a Not-A-California-Native, earthquakes also freaked him out, but he’d been stationed in SoCal for years. He’d lived through enough to know how they worked.
Rio slapped on Gert’s radio and got an earful of static. He switched over to the AM news station he often used when navigating traffic, and it, too, was pure white noise.
Gertie’s old-school radio had a search function that would find the stations that came in the clearest, but it swept through the entire dial without stopping.
Both AM and FM.
Rio punched the clutch and jammed his stick into first, and peeled out of the parking lot, heading back toward Coronado and the Navy Base.
It sure seemed as if power had gone out throughout all of San Diego—and beyond, because why wasn’t he picking up any radio stations from Los Angeles?
The federal government, run by Shitty McConman and his mobster henchmen, was in the middle of a pissing contest in the form of a shut-down. Air traffic controllers and other federal workers had been sending out warnings for weeks now.
If he were the head of a terrorist organization determined to strike the United States, he’d fucking do it, right now.
Shiiiiit.
Yeah, there had either been one motherfucking huge earthquake somewhere in SoCal, or...
They were under attack.
Either way, something was seriously, gravely wrong.
Rio punched Gertie into fifth gear and blasted back toward Coronado.
“I don’t get it,” Tasha said.
Thomas glanced at her. They’d left the road, navigating their way through a dense forest of pine trees as they made their way toward the royal family’s compound.
He was hyper-aware of the handcuffs on her wrists. Because she’d been cuffed in the front, he didn’t have to worry as much about her not being able to catch herself if she tripped and fell. Instead, the real issue was the rapidly increasing cold. She was unable to put her hands into her pockets and instead had pulled the sleeves of her winter jacket down as far as she could, to cover