Chapter 2
Alex
The apartment building door shuts behind her with a metallic slam that echoes across the street. And I keep staring at it anyway.
My arm burns beneath the blood-soaked bandage that paramedic, Alice, wrapped around it, but somehow that isn’t the thing my brain keeps fixating on.
No. It’s Liv’s hands. Jesus Christ. The woman touched me for maybe five minutes, and my skin still feels hot where her fingers pressed against my arm to keep pressure on the wound. Firm, steady, and confident. Not shaking or hesitant like most people are when they hear gunfire.
No, she heard gunfire, looked out her window, saw blood in the street, and came running downstairs carrying a med bag.
Who the hell does that?
“You’re staring.” Mason’s voice cuts through the thought.
I drag my attention away from the apartment building and look over at him.
He’s standing near the curb with his sleeves rolled up and his tie loosened, watching me with the kind of expression that means he’s already about to become insufferable.
Behind him, uniforms shove the two shooters into separate squad cars while another officer reads one of them his rights loud enough to be heard over the sirens.
The second suspect is bleeding from the mouth after trying to swing at a cop during the arrest, completely missed, and faceplanted on the pavement.
“I’m assessing the scene,” I say.
“Mm-hmm.” Mason glances toward the apartment entrance then back at me. “You want me to go knock on her door for you, or are we pretending this is normal behavior?”
I give him a flat look.
His grin widens immediately. “Right. We’re pretending.”
Across the street, Alice and Jett finish loading the wounded suspect into the ambulance.
Jett notices me watching and points directly at me. “You really should go to the hospital.”
I wave him off. “It’s a graze.”
Alice leans out the back doors. “You got shot.”
“Barely.”
“That’s not how bullets work,” she snaps.
Mason folds his arms. “You know, statistically, I’m inclined to trust the trained paramedics over the bleeding detective when it comes to medical care.”
“I’m fine.”
“That sentence loses credibility when you’re leaking onto the sidewalk.”
I ignore him, partially because they have already cleaned it and stitched it up. But mostly because my attention keeps drifting back toward the apartment building again.
Fourth floor, second window from the left. It’s the only one with a light still on and I can see movement of something small in the window. Maybe a cat or small dog. Interesting.
“She said she was a paramedic,” I say.
Mason blinks once. “That’s your takeaway from all this?”
“She didn’t freeze.”
“No,” he says slowly, “my takeaway was more ‘wow, that woman has absolutely terrible self-preservation instincts.’”
Despite myself, the corner of my mouth twitches because he isn’t entirely wrong. The whole thing keeps replaying in my head anyway. Gunfire erupting across the street. One suspect reaching for a weapon. Me moving toward cover-
Then impact. A sharp burning pain ripping across my arm before I fully register I’ve been hit.
Everything after that blurs together fast, uniforms swarming in, and Mason tackling one shooter to the pavement. More sirens in the distance after the shooting was called in.
And then her bursting out of the apartment building in those tiny shorts, a baggy t-shirt with a college name written across the front that was barely even visible anymore, and a medical bag over her shoulder.
Not panicking, just focused like the chaos around her narrowed into something manageable the second she dropped beside me.
She ignored me when I told her to get back inside; her eyes narrowed in on where blood was collecting under my hand.
“Has the shooting been called in yet?” Her voice cuts cleanly through the noise in my memory.
Not what a regular civilian would say in that circumstance.
Her steady hands grabbed gauze from her bag without her even having to look at what pocket she was opening.
Then she had pressure immediately applied to the wound.
Direct eye contact and efficient movements.
She was the epitome of professionalism. And every place she touched me lit up like gasoline catching flame. Which is inconvenient at a time like this.
“She was calm,” I concede before I can stop myself.
Mason stares at me for a moment. Then another. “Oh, you’re screwed.”
I look over slowly. “What?”
“You’ve got the look.”
“I don’t know what that means.”
“The hyper-fixation look.”
“I was shot fifteen minutes ago.”
“And somehow your main concern became the hot paramedic upstairs.”
“She’s not my concern.”
Mason snorts loudly enough that one of the nearby officers looks over. “Sure she isn’t.”
I lean back against the car briefly and immediately regret it when pain shoots through my arm.
The blonde paramedic, Alice, notices my flinch immediately and points at me again.
“Hospital,” she mouths exaggeratedly.
I shake my head.
Jett looks delighted by that response.
“You’re aware they can legally sedate you, right?” Mason asks.
“They can try.”
“That sounds like a challenge.”
“It is.”
Mason shakes his head like I’m exhausting. Which is fair.
The scene slowly settles around us. Crime scene tape goes up. Officers collect shell casings from the pavement. One detective photographs bullet impacts in a parked car near the curb.
The usual aftermath.
But underneath all of it, my brain keeps circling back to why we were here in the first place.
Missing persons cases are piling up in the area, three women in six months.
All similar ages and similar disappearances.
All gone within a few miles of each other.
No bodies or meaningful evidence has come up.
Nothing solid enough to connect officially anyway, but enough similarities to make my instincts itch.
Tonight was supposed to be a quiet follow-up on a lead tied to one of the victims’ last known contacts.
Then the shooters showed up which means someone got nervous.
“They knew somebody was talking,” Mason says quietly, reading the same conclusion on my face.
“Yeah.”
“Question is whether tonight was intimidation or cleanup.”
That’s the problem, we still don’t know. Rain starts falling again, soft against the pavement and flashing lights.
I glance back toward the apartment building one more time before I can stop myself.
Fourth floor, second window from the left… still lit.
Mason catches it immediately. Of course he does. “Oh, this is bad.”
I look at him. “What now?”
“You memorized the window.”
“I did not.”
“You absolutely did.”
I open my mouth to argue, then stop. Because he’s right, annoying but right.
“She looked at you like she actually cared whether you lived,” Mason points out, suddenly quieter.
He’s right about that too. When she looked at me kneeling in the street bleeding through my shirt, she didn’t look scared of me. Didn’t look overwhelmed.
She looked worried. Like me getting hurt mattered to her instinctively. And for some reason, that settles somewhere dangerous in my ribs.
Mason heads toward the car, tossing me a look over his shoulder. “You coming, Romeo, or are you planning to stand out here emotionally compromised all night?”
“I am not emotionally compromised.”
“You got shot and fell in love with a paramedic in under ten minutes.”
“That’s not what happened.”
Mason opens the driver’s side door. “Mm-hmm.”
I glance back at the building one last time before following him. Fourth floor, second window from the left. Still lit against the rain-dark street.