Chapter 14
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Sutton
Sutton’s knees let go before the count finished leaving Sebastian’s mouth through the glass. The pistol discharged—a flat, hard crack—and something punched into her left shoulder, knocking her sideways. Her temple hit the edge of her station.
The glass exploded behind the shooter as Sebastian came through it—a rain of crystals, the screech of a frame giving way, a body landing hard on the floor with a grunt.
Her forehead connected with the scuffed wood floor, bounced, and smacked down again. Her shoulder was on fire, and a sticky wetness spread down her arm and across her chest.
The room spun. White lights bloomed across her vision.
The shooter was shouting. Sebastian was shouting. A second gunshot split the air. She curled into a ball, unable to tell who’d fired. She tried to turn her head to see, but the room spun harder. Nausea rose fast and hot, pushing at her throat.
She managed it anyway. The shooter was sprawled on the floor between her and the front of the parlor, one leg bent at an angle that didn’t look right, his pistol knocked loose. It lay a few feet short of her face, its muzzle still hot enough to smell.
Sebastian lunged toward them, glass snapping under his boots. The man scrambled, rolling over, even with a leg that wasn’t working.
Sebastian fired. The shooter grunted when the bullet struck him in the chest, but he didn’t stop moving. He scrambled for the pistol.
Sebastian closed the distance between them in two strides and drove his boot into the outside of the shooter’s knee with the full weight of his body behind it. The knee cracked with a sound Sutton would hear in her sleep for the rest of her life.
The shooter screamed. His hand slapped the pistol anyway—adrenaline was a hell of a drug—and the pistol skidded further across the floor, past her.
Blood now ran from her temple into her eyes. More blood was spreading under her.
“Sutton!” Sebastian’s voice came close. He reached behind her and came up with her attacker’s pistol. He slid it into the back of his waistband.
She tried to answer. Her mouth didn’t cooperate. The words came out as a slurred sound, something thick and airless. Her cheek was pressed to the floor. It’s just my shoulder, she wanted to tell him. It’s not bad. Don’t panic, Lynx.
But her mouth was full of wool and her head was screaming. The room wouldn’t stay still long enough for her to organize the words into a sentence.
And then, from the corner of her eye, she saw the shooter dragging himself. One leg ruined, but the other still working, using his elbow and his knee and the broken floor to crawl.
He’d taken a round to the chest—how was he still moving?
Sebastian was looking at her, not at him. His face was above hers, his hand against her cheek, and he was saying her name like the world depended on her answering. “Sutton. Sutton, look at me. Stay with me. Where are you hit?”
She tried to turn onto her back and point. Her body remained curled. Her hand felt like it belonged to someone else.
Sebastian’s gaze snapped up. The shooter had pulled a second pistol. It was in his hand. He pointed it at her—not Sebastian—from four feet away.
He wanted to finish the assignment. His face was gray and sweating. His hand shook, but the barrel steadied.
Sutton didn’t think. She squeezed her eyes shut and kicked out as hard as she could. Her steel-toed Doc Martens connected with something soft. The shooter grunted.
Another gunshot echoed in the parlor.
She screamed and threw her arms over her head. Her mind was sliding sideways, and the room had stopped being a room. It was all a series of sensations—the ringing in her ears, the smell of gunpowder, the wet heat of her shoulder, the dust on the floor against her cheek.
“Sutton.” Sebastian’s voice, closer than ever. Rough. “Open your eyes, Ink. I need you to open your eyes.”
She opened her eyes.
The shooter was dead.
He lay sprawled on his side, his face turned toward her, eyes open and empty.
There was a small dark hole in the center of his forehead.
The second pistol was a foot from his hand, his fingers slack around nothing.
The blood was starting to pool under his head in a shape that looked, from where Sutton lay, like the outline of a continent.
Sebastian had fired. He’d gotten the shot off after her kick.
The shooter is dead. We’re alive.
Sebastian was on his knees beside her. He turned her carefully onto her back. He removed his flannel shirt, balled it, and jammed it against her shoulder.
It hurt. She made a sound. The words came out thick. “It’s just my shoulder…Lynx.”
“There’s blood on your head.”
The sentence took her a week to assemble. “Hit the edge of the…station. I’m okay.”
“You’re not okay.”
The room chose that moment to lurch sideways—everything in her visual field rotating about thirty degrees counterclockwise before snapping back.
Her stomach turned over. Bile rose at the back of her throat again.
She swallowed it down because throwing up would require coordination she did not currently possess.
“Okay,” she conceded. “Maybe not…okay. But it’s just a nick. I can feel it. It’s not…it didn’t…”
“I’m the one who gets to make that assessment.”
“You’re not…a doctor.”
“I’m a trained field medic, and you are going to lie very still and let me work.”
His phone appeared in his bloody hand. He hit a few buttons and then said, “Woman down with a gunshot wound.” He rattled off the address, hung up.
“Sutton, tell me your name. The date. What you had for breakfast.”
She blinked. Blinked again, trying to engage her brain. “Sutton Crenshaw. October—twenty-something. Pancakes.”
“Pancakes?”
“I made you pancakes.”
“That was last week. and it’s only the fourteenth.”
“Oh.” She blinked up at him. His face kept doubling—two Sebastians where there should only be one. “Okay. So my timing’s a little off.”
“What’s my name?”
She snorted. “Sebastian.”
He was still pressing hard on her shoulder. “What’s my last name?”
She frowned. What was his last name? Her brain chased it around but couldn’t quite latch onto it.
A bang on the front door. “I’ll be right back,” Sebastian said.
He was gone only an instant.
“What the hell,” a big man with a drawn gun said.
She should know his name, too, and yet…and yet…
“Hostile down.” Sebastian was pushing on the flannel shirt again. “Sutton’s hit. Shoulder graze, probable concussion. I already called for an ambulance.”
“Claire’s four minutes out. Mack’s on the front.”
Sebastian nodded. “Nobody gets in or out of this block that I don’t personally clear.”
“Copy.” The man’s face appeared above her, filling her field of vision. She saw two of him, too. His eyes were kind. “Hey, darlin’.”
Grizzly, like the bear. She almost smiled. “Hi, Grizzly.”
“You stayin’ awake for me?”
“Yes.”
“Good girl. You keep workin’ on it.” He glanced at Sebastian. “Hospital’s across town. Could take the ambulance ten minutes or more to get here.”
Her eyes fluttered closed. Sebastian patted her cheek, and she tried to open them. To tell him not to do that.
Sebastian lifted her. “Can’t wait that long.”
“I’ll drive,” the grizzly man whose name she should know said.
The movement of being swept up sent a bolt of pain through her shoulder and another through her head. The room tilted so hard she lost the ceiling entirely. Sebastian’s arm was under her knees. His other was around her back, supporting her head against his shoulder.
He was moving fast—she could feel it in the rhythm of his stride—and she could hear Grizzly clearing a path in front of him, the boots of other men she couldn’t see.
The cold outside chilled her face. The sky was very blue and much too bright. The aspens were turning. She wanted to paint them more like characters, reaching for a princess…
The edges of the world were starting to soften.
“Stay with me, Ink.” Sebastian’s strained voice was right against her ear. “Do you hear me? Open your eyes. I’m taking you to the hospital.”
She tried. She really tried. She made herself count his footsteps. One, two, three, four. The street. Five, six, seven. A vehicle door opened. She heard the thump of her own heartbeat—
“Sutton.”
She wanted to answer.
Sebastian’s face was the last thing she saw. Blue eyes, a cut on his cheekbone from the window glass, his mouth moving. He was speaking, but she couldn’t parse the words anymore. The sounds had lost their edges.
I’m staying, she tried to say. I’m right here. I’m not going anywhere.
The words didn’t come out.
Sebastian’s arm tightened around her.
The world went dark.