Chapter 36
SHAWN
I’d once asked Jason how it felt to be shot while wearing a bulletproof vest.
Now I knew. It hurt like fucking hell.
The impact sent me hurtling toward the ground, crushing Kara beneath me. The sharp, biting sensation of the bullet, plus the crash against the unforgiving cobblestones, knocked all the air from my lungs.
I gasped and struggled, moving as quickly as my body would allow. I scrambled off her so I could kneel by her side. There was no breath left in me, yet somehow I was able to speak. “Kara.”
She didn’t move and her eyes remained closed. Worry burst into panic when I grasped her shoulder and gently shook her, but there was no response. Her head lolled to one side, and—
Oh, fuck. There was blood beneath it.
My heart stopped, and my skin turned to ice.
“Jason,” I said desperately.
When there was no response from my brother, my panic pushed to a terrifying new level. I glanced up and inhaled sharply.
He hadn’t moved from where he stood, and he was as rigid as a statue. His gun was fixed on the heap of body by his feet, blood and flesh littering the ground around the head. Around what had once been Juric’s head.
Dead.
That had to be the thought repeating through my brother’s mind. That it was finally over. If I weren’t so worried about Kara, I might have wondered if it had given him satisfaction to pull the trigger. If this moment had been his dark dream for the last eighteen months.
But Jason had that empty look on his face he got whenever he tried to process emotion.
“Jason,” I said again, urgently. “Look at me.”
His unfocused gaze drifted down and sharpened with recognition.
“She hit her head when we fell,” I said.
That snapped him back to reality and he raced to us, dropping to a knee on the other side of her as he holstered his weapon. He pressed fingers to her neck, assessing her quickly. “She’s got a pulse and she’s breathing.”
With everything we’d been through, the way it had all gone so wrong, I assumed she was dying.
Well, fuck that. She’d fought through too much to have it end this way.
Most of the crowd had fled when they’d seen the guns, and the rest had taken off or sheltered nearby after the shots. I delicately lifted Kara into my arms, staggered to my feet, and swept my gaze across the square.
“Hospital?” I demanded of the man I spied hiding behind a recycling bin.
I used a voice that would not be refused. It didn’t matter if it was fifty kilometers away, I’d use the cash in my wallet to buy the next vehicle I saw, or else the SIG tucked in the waistband of my pants to persuade.
The man replied it wasn’t far, pointed a shaky hand to the west, and spewed out the directions.
“Go,” Jason said, his voice empty. “I need to . . . stay with the body.”
I didn’t consider what that meant. All I was worried about was the woman in my arms, the woman I loved.