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“What are you suggesting then?” I snapped.
“We have to call for help,” Adriana said. She reached instinctively into her pocket for her phone, only to remember we’d destroyed them back at the cabin. “Shit, I need to get a phone…”
“Really? You want to call the cops?” I asked as I let go of the man, who fell in a heap at my feet. In that moment, I was more grateful than ever that I’d forced her to get rid of the phone; she was a smart girl, but she trusted the law way too much for someone raised by a criminal. Silvio had kept her too sheltered. “We’re on the run, Adriana. What do you think is going to happen?”
“Fuck! Fine,” she said. “But we can’t let him die. You can’t let him die.”
“Okay. Okay. Go back to the room. I’ll handle this.”
“No,” she replied. “I’m involved in this now. We’ll handle this.”
I watched as she knelt down beside the unconscious man, her face set with determination. She was braver than she gave herself credit for. It was one of the many reasons why I found myself falling for her.
“His pulse is weak,” she muttered, pressing two fingers to his neck. “He’s lost a lot of blood.”
“Shit,” I sighed, running a hand through my hair. The weight of my actions was starting to sink in, and the realization hit me like an ice-cold bucket of water. Yeah…he’d deserved it, sure. But I couldn’t leave a trail of bodies behind me or I’d be too easy to track. “Okay. Bring the car around. I’ll put him in the backseat and we’ll drop him off at the ER.”
I would have preferred to put him in a shallow grave, but the doctor had told us to keep Adrian’s stress levels down. I hoped this would help.
“And then what?”
“And then we change plates, and where we’re staying.”
She gave me a worried look but nodded, pulling her jacket tighter around her as she hurried back to the motel room. I watched her go, the guilt in my stomach churning like a stormy sea. I knew I’d put us both in a dangerous situation, and the regret was eating at me.
As soon as Adriana was gone, I turned my attention back to the unconscious man. He was a heavy bastard and trying to move him was like wrestling with a bag of cement. This wouldn’t have been too bad usually, but I was still healing from the gunshot at my side.
I grunted as I hoisted him over my shoulder, his body lolling lifelessly against mine.
“Shit!” I whispered under my breath. Every second that ticked by made me more anxious. Soon enough, Adriana pulled up in front of me, her face visibly pale under the dim streetlight. Swallowing hard, I opened the back door and dumped the guy into the backseat.
“Where are we going?” Adriana asked.
“Nearest hospital. Check the car’s GPS,” I grunted, wiping the sweat off my forehead. “We can’t afford to waste any more time.”
Without wasting a moment, Adriana put the car in drive and we sped away from the motel. Every bump in the road echoed in the silence that settled between us. I could feel her eyes on me occasionally, their worry making me uneasy.
The only sound was the man’s rattling breath.
My head was still pounding with rage and adrenaline, and Adriana looked furious too–more at me than anything else. If she wasn’t pregnant and needed to stay calm, I would have told her the sick things that guy had said, how I only wanted to protect her.
But as it was, the silence grew between us.
Maybe we were too different for this to work.
With my heart pounding in my chest, I glanced over at Adriana. Her hands were clutching the steering wheel so tightly that her knuckles had turned white. I found myself restlessly tapping on the dashboard, the rhythm mimicking the rapid beating of my heart. Adriana kept her eyes firmly on the road ahead, her knuckles white on the steering wheel.
“The hospital is two miles from here,” she said, her voice betraying none of the fear I knew she was feeling. “Just hold on.”
“I’m not going anywhere,” I responded, attempting to inject some levity into our tense situation.
She side-eyed me. “I wasn’t talking to you.”
Adriana’s biting retort hung between us, an icy reminder of my reckless actions. For the first time since we met, I had truly scared her–perhaps even lost some of that hard-earned trust she had placed in me. And for what? The dude was an asshole, but he wasn’t worth losing Adriana’s trust. I took a deep breath, leaning back against the seat and closing my eyes.
This was exactly why I couldn’t marry her. This was who I was. This reminded me of Dusty’s words, when he had said that I was exactly like my father. The Callahan curse. I could try and shake it off as much as I wanted, I could try to be kind and sweet and polite as much as I could, but this was who I was. It ran deep in my bones, in my blood.
Silence fell over us once more as we sped towards the hospital, punctuated only by the harsh breathing of the man in the backseat. That labored rhythm–a reminder of his life hanging by a thread because of my uncontrolled rage–ate at me with every passing second.
