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And that knife is coming for me.
He may be moving in slow motion right now, but I feel as though I am, too. I try to move my body—Throw yourself out of the way, you dumb bitch!—but my limbs are heavy and unresponsive. Even doing something utterly useless like screaming would cost precious energy that I simply don’t have.
Oh, God?—
The knife is arcing down for my exposed belly when I get knocked to the side by some invisible force. As soon as that happens, reality snaps back to normal speed.
Dmitri is a blur as he inserts himself between me and the nurse. His fist clamps around the man’s knife-wielding hand, suspending it in midair. I see veins on each man’s forearm bulging as they struggle over which way the blade will fall.
With a guttural snarl, Dmitri wrenches the nurse’s hand hard. The knife goes clattering to the floor and skitters to a stop right at my feet. I look down at it and see myself reflected in the metal. I look really dumb with my jaw hanging wide open like this.
But before the knife has even stopped wobbling, I hear more commotion and I look up…
… to see that the nurse is pulling a gun out of his waistband.
A gun. That’s a twist.
The only time I’ve ever seen a firearm is on television. It’s a silly, abstract concept when you’re watching it on a screen.
But there’s nothing remotely silly or abstract about the gleaming black pistol waving around that single black cyclops eye of death.
If someone pulls the trigger when that eye is looking at me, I’ll die. My baby will die. And after everything Rose, Jared, and I went through to make sure this baby had a chance to exist, I’m not about to risk losing him this soon.
I collapse to my knees behind the exam table. It’s about as shitty as hiding spots get in terms of actually protecting me, and I can’t see a damn thing, but it’s better than just standing plastered against the wall like the loser kid at a school dance, gawking as two men grapple over whether my life ends today or not.
When I risk a glance back up, I see Dmitri and the nurse are fighting for control over the gun. The nurse is a big man, too, but his movements are clumsy and slow.
Dmitri, on the other hand, is like a panther in Armani. He stoops over and slams a hard uppercut into the nurse’s gut. The man oofs in pain, Dmitri elbows his free hand, and for the second time in this longest minute of my life, a deadly weapon goes bouncing across the floor to land at my feet.
It’s only when I instinctively reach for it that I realize my hand is shaking. I’m afraid to touch anything, least of all a gun that might go off in my hand if I do something stupid with it. So I toe it under the exam table instead.
“Fuck!” someone hisses as I hear the crunch of breaking bone.
Wincing, it strikes me that if Dmitri doesn’t win this fight, I’ll be a sitting duck. My eyes go back to the gun. Should I…?
But I’m not the only one who has their eyes on it. The nurse elbows Dmitri in the stomach and lunges forward. Ignoring the fear pumping through my body, I slide out of my hiding spot and reach to get it before he can.
But I’m too slow.
His hand lands on the gun before mine does. He looks me dead in the eye. His pupils are blown wide, swallowing his whole iris up in pure, bottomless black, as his lips curl into a sneer.
I freeze.
Oh, God, please…
That’s when Dmitri appears at the nurse’s back like a mirage. He grabs a fistful of the nurse’s hair and pulls his head back, exposing his neck. I catch the gleam of the knife’s blade before it slashes across the nurse’s throat.
It feels cinematographic, almost cartoonish, the way the blood sprays out of his neck. A sprinkler of thick red going off. I feel its weight as it splashes across my face, warm and sticky and congealed.
The nurse’s eyes, which were so fixated on me a moment ago, go blank. He collapses right in front of me, still leaking and twitching. How is it possible that one man could hold so much blood?
It’s not real. It can’t be real…
“Wren.”
I flinch, backing away from the voice and the large presence that’s hovering over me. The concept of having a voice is a distant memory right now, but if he or anyone touches me, I just might scream.
Dmitri kneels down in front of me. He’s bleeding from his bottom lip but his face is otherwise unscathed. Why am I the one covered in blood?
