Masks (Out of the Box Book 9) Read Online Free PDF Page A

she’d just given them a clear shot before Tannen pulled her head back up in front of him.
    They hadn’t taken it.
    “Uh uh,” Tannen said, sounding a little more pleased than he had a second ago. “No help there.”
    “Of course not,” Nadine said, and now her voice sounded dead to her own ears.
    And why wouldn’t it? The police weren’t going to help.
    The hero—Captain Frost—wasn’t going to help.
    Her old press contacts that used to answer her calls immediately—they hadn’t rung her back in weeks. They were watching, circling her carcass, and they wouldn’t help one bit. Though if she miraculously survived, they’d want interviews, of course, the scum.
    The people of New York wanted her dead.
    No one was coming to help.
    So Nadine just sat there, a gun to her head, a little tear of impotent rage threatening to well up in her eye as she waited for the crazy man to kill her, and she felt nothing—no regret, no humility, no sadness. Nothing but rage.

6.
Sienna
    “Son of a …” I muttered, covered from head to toe in pink paint from the damned grenade that had gone off not three feet in front of me.
    “I think that might have killed even you, if it had been a real one,” my opponent said, similarly covered, his grin barely visible beneath his plastic facemask, letting his HK paintball-converted gun sag in its sling. He didn’t let his hand wander too far from a weapon, though, either the HK strapped across his chest or the big pistol on his hip. “You didn’t see a suicide attack coming?”
    I pulled off my goggles, which were smeared from my attempt to wipe off the blotches of hot pink that had coated them. The paint smelled a little funny. “I don’t typically get suicide attacked a lot, no. Mostly I have mercenaries and metas come after me, and they’re … you know, not motivated to fight all the way to the death, I guess, at least not as a first move.”
    “Well, it wasn’t my first move,” Jeremy Hampton said, pulling back his mask so I could see his handsome face. “It was my last.” He had an easy grin, and brown hair mussed by the tight-fitting mask he’d been wearing. Lines from where it had been suctioned traced around his cheekbones.
    Hampton had been the sole survivor of the FBI’s Hostage Rescue Team when their helicopter had crashed following an attempted prison break from the Cube—the metahuman facility beneath the old agency where I’d worked. I’d been on board with him, and he’d struck me then as a pretty cool character. When the backer of my new organization had suggested hiring some former law enforcement types to help us with training and also as a security team for deployment in case of emergency, Jeremy Hampton’s name had been right at the top of the list.
    Lucky me.
    “Those paintballs hurrrrrt,” Kat moaned as she moped her way into the house. She was splattered with red and yellow all across her black tactical Kevlar vest, her goggles hanging in her hand. Her blonde hair was all mussed up and her lips were pouty as ever. “Like a tit punch.”
    “Stay classy, Kat,” I said as Reed stood up from behind the island where he’d gone down, rolling his neck like he’d cricked it. “You okay?” I asked him.
    “I tried to fall where I got shot,” Reed said, frowning. “I guess I should have just stayed still or gradually worked my way down.”
    “That’s what the guys in the front hall were doing,” I said, looking at Hampton with an accusatory look. “I would have had you on the breach and clear if not for some of your boys failing to take a knee when I shot them fair and square.”
    “You should know,” Hampton said, grin broadening, “there’s no fair and square in a firefight.”
    I did know that, actually, and from anyone else, I might have taken umbrage and come back with ire. I let it pass this time, though, and put my finger to my ear instead as Augustus sauntered into the room, his goggles spotted with green right in the middle where