CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
The exam room was too quiet.
Charley sat propped up in the narrow hospital bed.
Her legs were crossed and covered by a thin blanket that did nothing against the chill of the room.
Thankfully, whoever had assigned her this space had put her in one with an actual door, rather than one of those curtain-separated bays where you could hear everything going on in the emergency room.
At the moment, privacy felt like the only decent thing she had been given all day.
Everything around her looked sterile: pale walls, bright overhead lights, stainless steel. There was a monitor in the corner of the room that she wasn’t hooked up to anymore. An IV line was taped to the back of her hand, pumping antibiotics into her, though just looking at it made her skin crawl.
Her right arm rested awkwardly in her lap, a stark white bandage wrapped around the upper part of her arm just below the shoulder.
It didn’t hurt much yet, though the doctor had warned her it would later, once everything wore off.
But right now it was more of a dull awareness than actual pain.
She tried not to think about the tetanus shot they’d given her, which had hurt like a bitch.
Apparently, getting grazed by a bullet, stitched up, and jabbed with an IV hadn’t been enough.
No, the universe had apparently been looking down at her and thought, “You know what this girl needs? More needles.” To her, it felt personal. She hated needles.
The rest of her, though, felt numb in a way that had nothing to do with lidocaine.
Two detectives had left a few minutes ago. She had told them enough to explain the shooting. They had asked the same questions just in different ways, over and over again, until she felt like she was stuck inside on an endless replay.
However, she had left out parts too. Not because she wanted to be difficult, but because she didn’t know what she could and couldn’t say. She wasn’t touching that. Not until she talked to Pierce.
The thought of Pierce made her chest tighten. She wondered if he knew what had happened yet.
She didn’t have her phone. Hopefully, someone had picked up her purse and bag.
She hadn’t seen Seth since she arrived at the hospital.
Once the ambulance doors opened, everything had turned into a blur of doctors, nurses, and questions.
One minute, Seth had been there beside her, trying to keep her focused and calm, and the next she had been swept into a mosh pit called the emergency room.
Now she was alone.
Her gaze dropped to the piece of paper in her hand.
It was slightly wrinkled from how tightly she had been holding it.
A nurse had brought it in not long ago and told her it had been found on the floor in the ER, where they had been working on the stranger before taking him up to surgery.
It had been tucked inside another sealed envelope with her name scrawled across it.
There was something else she learned from the nurse about the stranger. His name was Calvin Henderson. One of the three names from the first note. That alone had been enough to send a fresh chill through her body.
But the paper in her hand now left more questions than answers. Written in the same handwriting as the other notes were two more names: Dr. Marwood and Colonel Reed.
Charley stared at the names again. Dr. Marwood meant nothing to her. At least not yet. He was a brand-new player who had been dropped into the middle of this fiasco.
But Colonel Reed…That one sent a cold shiver skating up her spine every time she looked at it. That man had definitely left her on edge when she met him at the grand opening celebration.
She thought back to when they were at the bus stop, and Calvin had told her that he needed to make sure that she wasn’t like the rest of them—the evil ones. Had he been talking about Colonel Reed and this Dr. Marwood?
Charley swallowed hard and shifted carefully against the pillow, wincing when the movement tugged at her bandaged arm.
She had been hoping that this had all been some terrible nightmare that she would wake up from.
Her brain kept replaying the scene when those shots were fired. The way Calvin’s body jerked, her shoulder burning as the bullet grazed her arm. She could still feel the warmth of his blood under her hands as she had pressed down on his chest, begging him to stay with her.
He had been about to tell her something. She could feel it in her bones. And whatever he had been working himself up to say would have tied everything together.
But now he was in surgery. And he might never get the chance.
When she spoke to the detectives, one had told her that if she hadn’t dropped to the ground when she did, the second bullet likely would’ve hit Calvin in the head instead of grazing her.
Apparently, the angle of her body had intercepted the bullet’s trajectory.
In other words, she had saved his life or delayed his death.
The detectives told her they were already pulling camera footage from businesses and traffic cams along the street in hopes of getting a shot of a figure on a rooftop, a muzzle flash in the distance, or a car speeding away.
Basically, anything that could help them catch the person who had done this.
She closed her eyes for a moment and leaned her head back.
She needed to call her aunt and uncle. They were down in Palm Springs visiting friends and enjoying themselves, totally unaware that Charley was currently sitting in a hospital wearing light blue scrubs that some sweet nurse had found for her because her shirt had been cut off and her pants had been ruined by blood.
They were going to lose their ever-loving-mind when she called them.
Her mind drifted back to Calvin. She knew it probably sounded crazy, but she wasn’t going to leave this hospital until he got out of surgery.
She had made him a promise, and promises mattered especially when they were made to a bleeding man who had looked at her like she might be his last safe choice in the world.
The nurse who had brought the envelope in to her had told her that things didn’t look good for him, that his condition was very critical. They had lost him twice in the ambulance on the way to the hospital.
That alone had left a heavy knot sitting in the middle of her chest.
What if he died before he could explain any of this? What if he had spent all this time trying to reach her, trying to warn her, and now she was left holding scraps of paper instead of answers?
Emotion swelled in Charley’s chest, hot and unexpected. She suddenly felt like maybe she had reached the point where her mind simply couldn’t take on one more thing.
She slammed her eyes shut. She refused to cry. Not here, and not now. She didn’t deserve tears when the man who had been shot in front of her was upstairs, clinging to life. If she started crying, she wasn’t sure she’d be able to stop.
She heard the door to her room open. She opened her eyes and lifted her head, expecting to see a nurse or maybe Seth. But instead, she locked gazes with those brown eyes she had been desperately waiting to see.
Pierce’s large body filled the doorway. His facial expression was a mix of worry and anger. His eyes found her instantly, and she saw the exact moment he took in the whole picture—the IV, the bandage on her arm, the scrubs, and her disheveled appearance sitting in the hospital bed.
“Charley…”
That one word alone caused something inside of her to crack.
Pierce crossed the room in three long strides and pulled her into his arms without another word.
Pain flared in her arm as she clung to him, but she didn’t care. Her fingers fisted the back of his shirt like she was afraid he’d disappear if she didn’t hold on tight.
The second she felt his warmth, his solidity, the last of the numbness shattered.
The tears she’d been ruthlessly holding at bay broke free. She didn’t just sniffle. No. She sobbed. Big, shuddering, broken sobs that she couldn’t control. Her entire body shook against him as everything that had happened in the last few hours crashed into her all at once.
◆◆◆
Three hours later, Pierce sat in a hard plastic chair in the waiting room with Charley tucked close at his side and tried not to think about how easily the night could have ended very differently.
The emergency room had thinned somewhat since the earlier chaos, but not by much. The place still smelled like antiseptic and stale coffee, with the occasional shrill chirp of a monitor or distant squeak of shoes on polished tile carrying down the hall.
Charley had been discharged a while ago. Right now, she sat beside him in the waiting room wearing those hospital-issued scrubs, one arm bandaged from the bicep down, her purse on the floor by her feet, and her shoulder pressed lightly to his.
Jessica sat across from them, quiet for once, her hands wrapped around a cup of vending machine coffee she had barely touched.
Seth leaned against the far wall with Alyvia beside him, the two of them keeping their voices low whenever they spoke.
Cole and Zane had shown up not long after Pierce did.
Now they were posted near the windows like extra muscle no one had asked for, but everyone appreciated anyway.
Ray had stepped out a while ago to make some calls.
Pierce hadn’t asked for details. He trusted Ray to do what Ray always did.
He dragged a hand over his jaw and looked down at Charley.
She looked tired and worn down in a way that made something protective and furious tighten inside his chest all over again.
Her hair was a little messy from where she’d clearly run her fingers through it too many times, and every now and then her expression went distant, like her mind was slipping back to the bus stop whether she wanted it to or not.
The image of her in that exam room rose up in his head again.