Chapter 7
“Then what are you still doing there?”
Webb immediately turned around after we pulled into the reserved parking spot at Meridian Gallery and dropped me off at my car, his expression unreadable as he closed the door behind me. But I didn’t have the time to decipher what it meant.
I started the engine and tore out of the lot, every red light and sharp turn amplifying the chaos in my chest. The GPS coordinates my team sent me were all that mattered—everything else, including the biggest business opportunity of my career, blurred into irrelevance.
My phone buzzed incessantly with updates from Sarah.
Phone signal stopped moving.
Last location: Warehouse Row, Alley C. No movement for 3 minutes.
Three minutes felt like an eternity as I pushed the car harder, weaving through traffic with manic precision.
Muscle memory kept my hands steady on the wheel, but my mind was a storm of worst-case scenarios.
Cross Security had trained me to stay calm, to assess threats and respond—but this wasn’t a professional situation.
This was Willa, and every instinct in my body screamed to get to her now, no matter the cost.
The city lights blurred past my windshield, red and white streaks bleeding together as time warped into something elastic and cruel. And then neon gave way to broken streetlamps. The buildings spaced out. Warehouses replaced storefronts.
The rational part of my brain kept trying to convince me I was overreacting, that Sarah’s concerns about erratic movement patterns could have innocent explanations.
But the part of me that remembered Willa as a seventeen-year-old girl hiding behind Jude’s protective shadow knew better.
The part that spent years learning to read danger in people’s faces and body language recognized something broken in her eyes at the gallery—something that didn’t belong to nerves alone.
When I heard the gunshot echo off the warehouse buildings, my blood turned to ice. I slammed on the brakes. The car screeched, tires skidding on wet pavement, and before the engine could settle, I was already out of the car.
The smell hit me first—metallic blood mixed with urban decay, the unmistakable scent of violence in a place where it often went unnoticed.
Then I saw her.
Willa lay crumpled against a brick wall at the end of the alley, her thin nightgown drenched, clinging, unmistakably red. Her right shoulder was torn open by what was clearly a bullet wound, and she pressed her left hand against it in a futile attempt to stop the bleeding.
“Willa?” I whispered as I ran toward her. “Can you hear me?”
She looked up at me with unfocused eyes, her face pale and stunned. Her lips moved, but no sound came out. Blood loss and shock had already begun to pull her away from me.
I dropped to my knees beside her and immediately assessed the damage. The bullet had passed through her shoulder, which was both good and bad news. Good, because the slug wasn’t still in her body. Bad, because exit wounds were often worse than entry wounds, and she was losing blood fast.
“Don’t worry,” I said, stripping off my suit jacket and pressing it against the wound. “I’ve got you now. You’re going to be okay.”
She tried to say something, her mouth moving soundlessly, her eyes struggling to focus on my face. I leaned closer, holding my breath, but whatever she was trying to tell me was lost in the haze of trauma and blood loss.
I scooped her up as carefully as I could and cradled her against my chest. She was so light, so fragile, and the way her head lolled against my shoulder terrified me more than any threat I had ever faced in my professional life. Her heartbeat fluttered against my chest, uneven and too fast.
Getting her to my car was the fastest option. The nearest hospital was only eight minutes away, and calling an ambulance would have meant waiting for them to navigate the maze of warehouse-district streets. Every second counted, and I refused to give any of them away.
I laid her across the back seat of my BMW, panic clawing at my throat as blood soaked through my fingers. I tore the hem from my undershirt, twisting it into a makeshift tourniquet and cinching it tightly above the wound. It wasn’t perfect, but it slowed the bleeding.
Once it was secure, I scrambled into the driver’s seat and took off, glancing back every few seconds to make sure she was still breathing.
At the hospital, I handled everything the way I handled all crises—with calm efficiency and the kind of connections that money and influence could buy.
I made calls to ensure she got the best trauma surgeon available, dealt with the police when they arrived to take her statement, and when the staff asked about her insurance, I simply handed them my card.
What I didn’t do was call her husband.
The police asked about next of kin, about who they should contact, and I gave them Jude’s information, even though I knew he was deployed and unreachable.
I told them I was a family friend, which wasn’t exactly a lie, and that I would take responsibility for her care until her brother could be reached.
Detective Morrison was the one who interviewed me about finding her—a tired-looking woman in her forties who had clearly worked too many cases like this one.
“You said you were driving through the area when you heard the gunshot?” she asked, consulting her notes.
“That’s right.”
“Any particular reason you were in the Riverside District at midnight?”
I had prepared for this question. “I was coming back from a business dinner downtown. I took a shortcut through the warehouse district to avoid traffic on the main roads.”
“And you decided to investigate the gunshot instead of calling 911 and driving away?”
“I’m in the security business, Detective. I’m trained to respond to threats, not run from them.”
She studied me for a moment, clearly weighing whether my story held together. “The victim’s husband hasn’t been located yet. Do you know anything about their relationship?”
“I saw him briefly at a gallery opening earlier tonight. They seemed…” I paused, choosing my words carefully. “Tense.”
“Tense how?”
“She seemed nervous around him. Jumpy. It made me uncomfortable.”
Detective Morrison made a note. “We’ll need to speak with Mr. Hartwell as soon as we locate him. In the meantime, Mrs. Hartwell was lucky you were in the right place at the right time.”
Lucky.
As if fate had anything to do with the sophisticated tracking system that led me to that alley. As if luck had made me choose Willa’s safety over the biggest business deal of my career.
But I didn’t correct her. Some explanations were too complicated for police reports.
The surgery took about an hour. I spent that time pacing hospital corridors, drinking terrible coffee from vending machines, and trying not to imagine what could have happened if the injury had been worse.
Every closed door felt like a verdict waiting to be delivered.
And even though the waiting was torture, I was grateful it wasn’t something far worse.
She would have died in that alley. She had been alone, scared, bleeding to death while her husband disappeared into the night.
When the surgeon finally emerged from the operating room, she was cautiously optimistic.
“The bullet missed the major arteries, but there was significant damage to the muscle and soft tissue. She’ll need extensive physical therapy to regain full use of her arm.
But she is alive, and that is what matters. ”
I was allowed to see her once she was moved to a private room—another benefit of influencing the hospital administration. The corridor outside was quiet, the kind of hush that only exists in hospitals late at night. I took a moment before entering, steadying myself.
She looked impossibly small in the bed, her face pale against the white pillows, an IV drip feeding medication into her left arm. Bandages wrapped her shoulder and upper torso, stark against her skin.
She was awake, and when I entered the room, her eyes tracked to mine immediately. She seemed more lucid now; the medications and rest had helped clear the fog of shock and blood loss.
“You’re here,” she said. Her voice was hoarse but stronger than it had been in the alley.
“Where else would I be?” I took the chair beside her bed, noting the way she instinctively shifted away from me before catching herself. Even then—even safe—she operated on the assumption that getting too close to people was dangerous.
“I remember… pieces. Of you finding me. Carrying me.” Her brow furrowed as she tried to assemble the fragmented memories. “I think I said things. Did I say things?”
“You were in shock. You didn’t make much sense.”
“The doctor said you saved my life.”
“You saved your own life by running. I just happened to be in the right place at the right time.”
She was quiet for a moment, studying my face. The silence stretched. “That wasn’t true, was it?” she said finally. “You being there wasn’t a coincidence.”
I considered lying, but something in her eyes told me she deserved the truth—or at least part of it.
“I saw you at the gallery with your husband. Something about the way you looked told me something wasn’t right. Will, you’ve got to let the authorities know what really happened.”
“You’re stalking me?”
“I had you followed.” I saw her flinch, and my eyes dropped to her split lip and the wounds on her feet, barely covered by the hospital blanket. Guilt settled heavily in my chest.
“You can tell me the truth, Willa,” I said quietly, my voice tighter than I intended. “Has he been hurting you?”
“You should leave.” She said the words as if she were testing their weight. “We haven’t spoken in three years, Kieran. You know nothing about my life now.”
“That doesn’t mean I stopped caring.”
Tears started to well in her eyes, and something in my chest cracked.
“I can’t go back to him. I can’t go back to that apartment or that life,” she whispered, her voice trembling. “And I can’t tell anyone what he’s done—it won’t matter. His parents will make sure he gets away with it. I just want to run away from all of this… but I don’t have anywhere else to go.”
“Yes, you do.”
“Where?”
I leaned forward and took her uninjured hand in both of mine. Her fingers were warm but trembling, and I was careful not to grip too tightly, as if she might break.
“You’re coming home with me.”
She stared at me for a long moment, and I saw a dozen emotions flicker across her face—gratitude, fear, hope, confusion. Finally, she squeezed my hand with what little strength she had.
“Why?” she whispered. “After all that time, after everything that happened between us, why would you want to help me?”