Surrendering to the Sheriff by Delores Fossen

much farther to get her out of the building. However, they’d made it only a few steps when he heard a voice.
    “No!” someone shouted.
    “Jewell,” Kendall immediately said, and she would have bolted in that direction if Aiden hadn’t held her back.
    “It could be an ambush,” he reminded her.
    She frantically shook her head. “But she might need our help.”
    Or she could be the reason Kendall and he needed help in the first place.
    Something about that didn’t ring true for him, though. If Jewell had planned an escape from jail, she wouldn’t have involved Kendall. Not like this. And that guard had fired a shot at them. The guy could have just run off, but he’d come after them. That likely meant this wasn’t Jewell’s plan.
    But then, whose sick plan was it?
    “We can’t just leave my sister here,” Kendall argued. “That guard could go after her.”
    True. At the moment, though, Aiden wasn’t nearly as concerned about that as he was about Kendall’s safety. Still, it was clear he wasn’t going to get her out of there until he found Jewell.
    Cursing the potential
damned if you do, damned if you don’t
situation, Aiden reminded Kendall again to stay behind him, and he raced toward the hall where he’d heard Jewell’s shouted no.
    Thankfully, it didn’t take Aiden long to spot her. With her blond hair and pale skin, she looked like a ghost in the shadows. She was cuffed, no guard in sight, and it appeared that she was trying to make her way toward them.
    “Kendall!” she said, rushing toward her sister. Kendall did some rushing of her own, and she pulled Jewell into her arms. “The guard’s going to try to kill you,” Jewell warned them.
    “Yeah, we know,” Aiden confirmed.
    What he wanted to find out, though, was how Jewell knew, but this wasn’t exactly the time for questions. Especially since he was going to try to get out of this lethal tinderbox with a cuffed murder suspect and a woman who was already sporting one gunshot wound.
    “Follow me,” he said to them.
    Huddled together, they did just that. Aiden tried to keep watch all around them. Hard to do with the darkness and the rooms that seemed to jut out from every direction.
    Every step caused his heart to pound even harder, and that didn’t improve when he got to the checkpoint and spotted the guard. Just in case this was the bald guy’s partner, Aiden lifted his gun.
    “I’m Sheriff Braddock,” he announced.
    The young guard whirled around and nearly lost his footing. If this was a partner in crime, then he sucked at it, because the kid was shaking more than Kendall was.
    “What’s going on?” Aiden asked him.
    “Somebody tampered with the generator. That new fella, I think, because he just went tearing out of here.”
    Hell.
The guy was getting away, no doubt, and Aiden really didn’t want that to happen. Not that he had a lot of choices here.
    “Where are the rest of the guards?” Aiden pressed.
    “Some are trying to get that generator going and get everything locked down. The rest are in the cell blocks. We got some bad people down there.”
    Yes, and one of them was right behind him.
    “The front door was open,” the guard went on. “The new guy left it that way. I just locked it, but you got any idea how many regs it breaks to leave that door open?”
    Plenty.
    But an open door only meant the rogue and any of his helpers would have an easier time getting to Kendall for round two.
    “I’m transporting this prisoner to the sheriff’s office for questioning,” Aiden let the man know. Not exactly standard procedure, but this was a protocol-bending situation if ever there was one. “Unlock the front door for me.”
    Aiden didn’t wait to get his permission to leave. He got Jewell and Kendall moving again up the hall and toward the front exit. However, he did spare Jewell a glance.
    “If you try to escape, I’ll make you pay,” Aiden warned her.
    Jewell blinked, as if that’d been the last thing on her