Chapter 8 #2
CB had split off when they reached the floor, disappearing into a waiting area with a magazine and a cup of vending machine coffee.
He’d looked for all the world like a worried husband or son waiting on news.
The disguise was almost comical—a man built like a grizzly bear trying to look unassuming—but somehow it worked.
Jasper had positioned himself near the nurses’ station, fiddling with his phone to blend in.
Outside, Claire’s team covered the perimeter. Mack was on the rooftop across the street with his scope. Garrett idled in the SUV at the rear exit.
She was surrounded by protection. Three operators, an FBI team, a sniper. And yet the reason she felt safe—actually safe, not just secure—had nothing to do with any of them.
It was Sebastian.
She trusted him. The realization should have terrified her. It did terrify her. Two days ago, she’d told him to get out of her shop. She’d looked at him and seen only the man who’d killed her brother.
Now she was sitting in a hospital room because he’d moved heaven, earth, and Claire Dawson to get her here.
The thing keeping the panic at bay wasn’t the guns or the tactical planning.
It was the knowledge that Sebastian Whitaker was standing six feet away and he would not let anything happen to her.
She turned to Dom. “Hey, old man.” Her voice came out rough. She cleared her throat. “I’ve been working on some new stuff. You’re going to give me your honest opinion when you wake up, okay? None of that ‘it’s fine, kid’ crap you pull when you don’t want to hurt my feelings.”
The ventilator hissed. The heart monitor beeped. Dom didn’t stir.
She opened the sketchbook and held it up. “This one’s a lynx. It’s for—” She glanced at the doorway. Sebastian was watching the corridor, not her. “It’s a commission. First one in a while that I’m actually excited about. The client is…” She searched for the word, lowered her voice. “Complicated.”
She flipped to another page and a dragon she’d sketched during the long afternoon at the compound, coiled around a tower, wings spread.
“This one’s just for me. You always said the best work comes when you’re drawing for yourself, remember?
Just like Penn. Client work pays the rent.
Personal work pays the soul. I rolled my eyes when he said it, but he was right. You and Penn. Both of you were right.”
She lowered the sketchbook. Looked at Dom’s face—the bruising, the slack muscles, the unnatural stillness. Her throat tightened.
Sebastian shifted so he was more outside the door than in the room.
“I’m in trouble, Dom,” she whispered, leaning close to his ear.
“Not the kind you can fix with overtime and a pep talk. The real kind. There’s this guy who’s helping me—protecting me—and he’s…
” She exhaled. Looked at her hands. The ink on her forearms. “He’s the last person I should be feeling anything for.
You said he was a good kid. Well, he’s more than that, a lot more.
And I’m an absolute idiot for letting him get under my skin. ”
She pressed her lips together, mentally telling herself to shut up, yet unable to actually do it.
“Last night, he sat on the floor of my room and told me about his family. I drew a tattoo on his arm with my finger, Dom. Like I was sixteen and flirting at a house party. And the thing is—the thing that scares me—is that when I’m with him, the noise in my head gets quieter.
The carousel slows down. I don’t know what to do with that. ”
Dom’s eyes moved.
Sutton froze. The movement was subtle—a flutter beneath the lids, the kind of rapid eye motion that could mean dreaming or nothing at all.
But then his fingers twitched. The ones closest to her chair, on the hand with the faded anchor tattoo. A small, deliberate contraction, like he was trying to close his fist around something that wasn’t there.
“Dom?” She leaned forward, heart hammering, and gripped his hand. “Dom, can you hear me?”
Another twitch. Stronger. His brow creased.
She nearly screamed with excitement. She hit the call button and was on her feet before the sound registered. “Nurse! Sebastian, I need a nurse!”
Sebastian was through the doorway in a second, scanning the room for threats before his brain caught up to the context.
His hand dropped from his hip when he saw Dom’s face—the creased brow, the moving eyes, Sutton standing over the bed with tears streaming down her cheeks.
“I think he knows I’m here. He’s waking up. ”
A nurse rushed in, followed seconds later by a doctor in blue scrubs. They moved to the bed with urgency—checking vitals, adjusting monitors, shining a penlight into Dom’s eyes.
“I need you to step out,” the doctor said without looking up at her.
“I’m not leaving—”
Sebastian’s hand found her arm. “They have a job to do, Ink. The best thing for Dom right now is to let them do it.”
She wanted to plant her feet and refuse, but his voice wasn’t commanding—it was steady, understanding that leaving was harder than staying. She looked at Dom one more time—the creased brow, the twitching fingers—and let Sebastian guide her into the corridor.
Dom was waking up! She hated leaving him, but Sebastian was right. The doctors needed to do their work without her interfering.
The rear exit was forty feet of hallway, a fire door, and three concrete steps down to the loading area where Garrett had the SUV idling.
Sebastian kept his hand on Sutton’s lower back again, guiding her. Jasper materialized from a side corridor, falling into step on her left. CB appeared from the stairwell and moved into place behind them. The three men formed a moving perimeter around her, their bodies blocking every direction.
Jasper pushed open the fire door, and cold air hit her face. She was moving instinctively, still thinking about Dom. Damn it, she wanted to stay. “What if he does wake up?” she said, her voice rising. “Won’t he be scared? Shouldn’t I be here for him?”
“Dom would want you to be safe, first and foremost,” Sebastian said. “As soon as we’re back at the compound, I’ll get an update. If he does wake up, we’ll video conference with him, okay?”
The SUV was ten feet away, engine running, Garrett behind the wheel.
“Miss? Wait!”
Sebastian turned. So did Sutton. A male nurse was jogging down the corridor toward them—young, mid-twenties, blue scrubs, a lanyard bouncing against his chest. He held something in one hand.
My sketchbook. She’d left it by Dom’s bedside.
“You forgot this,” he said, slightly out of breath. He held it out to Sutton, even as the three men started to form a wall.
Sebastian reached for it before she could. “Thank you,” Sutton said with a smile.
The nurse’s left hand came up from behind his hip with a compact black pistol, the muzzle rising past the sketchbook, past Sebastian’s outstretched hand. He aimed directly at her.
Before Sutton could scream, Sebastian knocked the gun up and drove his shoulder into the nurse’s chest. The others grabbed her and shoved her toward the backseat.
The gun fired. The sound was deafening in the concrete space. Sutton tripped and fell to the ground. The round struck the roof of the SUV, sending paint and metal fragments spraying across the loading area.
CB lifted her and shoved her into the footwell. Garrett was yelling. “Shot fired at the rear exit! One hostile!”
Sutton peeked out the open door. Sebastian and the nurse were on the ground. The nurse was strong and immediately fought for position. The gun was still in his hand.
Sebastian grabbed his wrist. The nurse twisted, drove a knee into Sebastian’s ribs, and wrenched his arm free. A fist connected with Sebastian’s mouth, splitting his lower lip. He caught the gun hand again and slammed it against the concrete. Once. Twice. The pistol clattered free.
The nurse went for it. Sebastian locked an arm around his throat, hauled him backward, and drove him face-first into the ground. He pinned the wrist behind the man’s back. The man bucked once, twice, then went still.
“Stay down.” Sebastian’s voice was guttural. Blood dripped from his lip onto the back of the man’s scrubs. He withdrew zip ties from his jacket, securing the man’s wrists.
Garrett was out of the driver’s seat, weapon drawn, scanning the perimeter for additional threats. His voice was on the radio. “Claire, I need your team now.”
Claire’s agents appeared—two from the parking lot, one from the east corridor.
They converged on the pinned man. Handcuffs replaced zip ties.
He was hauled to his feet. His face was scraped from the concrete, his nose bleeding, but his eyes were flat.
Even captured, he didn’t look scared. He looked inconvenienced.
As Sebastian turned his full attention on Sutton, she scanned the blood, his torn shirt, the raw violence of what she’d just watched happen, hitting her.
“You’re safe,” he said. His voice came out thick around the split lip.
He climbed into the back seat with her. CB followed. Jasper was already up front. Garrett pulled out, tires biting gravel as the SUV accelerated toward the highway.
Sutton shook, her hands jerking in her lap, her breath coming in short gasps that she couldn’t steady. The SUV’s engine roared beneath them as Garrett took the highway on-ramp faster than the speed limit suggested was wise.
Sebastian put an arm around her. Blood was still seeping from his lower lip, running down his chin, warm and persistent. “I’ve got you.”
CB leaned around Sutton. “Nice takedown.”
Sebastian winced and rubbed his left ribcage. He didn’t respond except to nod in acknowledgment. “Are you okay?” he asked Sutton.
“Yeah,” she said, the single word shaky.
She was so not fine. She shrugged off his arm and began taking off her jacket. The flannel shirt came next as he frowned at her. She’d layered the flannel over her tank that morning. She pressed the sleeve of the shirt against his lip.
He flinched away. “I’m fine, too.”
“Shut up,” she said. Her voice cracked on the second word. She held the flannel against his split lip with a pressure that was too firm to be gentle.
The SUV bounced over potholes. Lifting her other hand, she held onto his jaw, steadying his face. He let her.
“You’re bleeding on my shirt,” she said. Her voice was thick.
His brows pinched together. His words came out muffled. “You’re holding it to my face.”
“Because you’re an idiot who tackles men with guns.”
“That’s literally my job.”
She made a sound that was half laugh, half sob. Her hand trembled against his lip. He reached up, wrapped his fingers around her wrist. Her pulse hammered under them, fast and wild.
“Dom moved,” she whispered. “His eyes. His fingers. He’s in there, Lynx.”
“I saw.”
“And then that man—the gun—he was right there. If you hadn’t—” Her breath hitched. She pressed the flannel harder against his lip, like applying pressure to a wound she could see was the only way to manage the ones she couldn’t. “You put yourself between me and a bullet.”
The parallel wasn’t lost on either of them. Six years ago, he’d done the same thing for Ginger. Put his body in the line of fire, took the round, and killed the man behind it.
This time, the bullet had missed. This time, he’d walked away with a split lip instead of three weeks in the ICU. But the reflex was the same. The willingness was the same.
Sutton didn’t see the hero from the headlines, but the man who would do it again, without hesitation. That’s who he was at the core.
“It’s over,” she said. The words tumbled out fast, urgent, like she needed to hear them as much as say them. “They caught him. Claire has the shooter. It’s over.”
Sebastian brushed a finger over her cheek, wiping the tears cutting tracks through her face. “Yes.”
The man wasn’t Grieves Rosen. Not Karl Denning or Paul Mattick. He was a face none of them had seen coming.
“It’s over,” she insisted because it had to be.
She exhaled—long, shuddering, the release of pressure that had been building since the moment the gun appeared.
She lowered the shirt from his lip. Released his jaw, only to grip his hand.
Just like the previous night, she linked her fingers through his.
Then she sat back and leaned her head against his shoulder. The flannel shirt lay on her lap, spotted with his blood.
He put his arm around her again. She didn’t pull away.
In the quiet of the moving vehicle, with the mountains standing sentinel outside and the road unwinding toward the compound, Sebastian held her against his side as she tried not to think about the fact that the man at the hospital hadn’t been on Claire’s list.