Chapter 31
Through And Through
JULIANNA
The impact is nothing like I expect.
There's no pain at first. Just force. A hammer blow to my left side, spinning me sideways. I hit the wall. Slide down. The red light strobes across my vision.
Sound goes strange. Muffled. Like I'm underwater.
I look down. Something warm spreads under my fingers. I don't understand what it is until I see the color. Dark. Darker than I imagined blood would be.
The man is still in the doorway. His rifle is adjusting. Finding a new target.
Finding Lily.
She screams. Small and high and terrified.
"No." The word comes out of my mouth. I don't recognize my own voice. "No. Not her."
I try to stand. My legs don't work. The wall holds me up for half a second, then dumps me back onto the floor.
The man takes a step forward.
And then Thorne is there.
I don't see where he comes from. I just see the movement. A blur at the edge of my vision, and then the man in black is on the floor with Thorne's hands around his throat. There's a crack. The sound of something structural failing. The man stops moving.
Thorne looks at me.
His face is, I don't have a word for it. I've seen his rage. I've seen his disgust. I've seen the flat affect that means he's in control. This is something else. This is the thing that lives underneath all of it.
"Julianna." He's on his knees beside me. His hands are on my side, pressing hard into the place where the warmth is spreading. It hurts. I gasp.
"Stay with me." His voice is rough. Cracking.
"Lily?"
"She's fine. You put yourself in front of my daughter …"
"She was alone." The words are getting harder to form.
"Stop talking." He presses harder. The pain is sharper now. A hot wire threading through my ribs. "Doc Summers!"
Footsteps. Running. Someone else is in the room now. Skye's face appears above me, clinical, focused, already pulling supplies from somewhere I can't see.
"Through and through." She's talking to Thorne, not me. "Lower left quadrant. Missed the major vessels. She's lucky. Julianna, I'm going to pack this wound and move you."
Lily crashes into Thorne's side, Theodore still clutched in her fist. She's crying. Real tears, snot running down her face, her whole body shaking with sobs.
"The bad man hurt Julianna." She's hiccupping around the words. "She came and got me. She jumped between me and the bad man. He shot her, and she fell down, and …"
"I know." Thorne pulls her against his chest with one arm. The other hand stays on my wound, pressing. "I know, Lily-bug. She's going to be okay."
"Is she dying? Is she going to leave like Mommy?"
"She's not dying." Thorne's voice is fierce. Certain. "I'm not going to let her die. Okay? I've got her. I've got you. Nobody's leaving."
Lily's face appears above mine. Tear-streaked. Terrified. Still holding Theodore.
"You protected me." Her lower lip trembles, her eyes searching mine as if trying to decipher a difficult equation. "The bad man was going to hurt me, and you got in the way."
"That's …" I have to stop. Breathe. The pain is getting worse, which Skye insists is a good sign, but it doesn't feel good. "That's what friends do."
"Are we friends?"
"Yes, Lily." The room is getting darker at the edges. "We're friends."
"Okay." She wipes her nose with the back of her hand. "Okay. Because I don't want you to die. You taught me the partner numbers. And the neighbor rule. And Gaussian." She pronounces it GOSS-ee-un. "You're the best math teacher I've ever had."
"I'm the only math teacher you ever had."
"That's why you're the best."
Skye is doing something to my side. Packing. Pressure. Medical terms that don't land because the gray is creeping in at the edges of my vision.
"Julianna." Thorne's voice. Sharp. "Stay awake."
"I'm trying."
"Try harder." He stops, his jaw working as his shoulders tense. "Stay." The word is forced past his lips like a vow. "Stay with me."
But the gray takes me.