AllFreeNovel
Share Us
And she was prepared to kill him if he didn’t get the fuck out of the way.
That was also clear.
Her voice, low and threatening, threaded into his ears with the growl of an animal: “This doesn’t involve you.”
Gus shook his head. “He doesn’t want Vita. What the fuck are you doing putting poison into his—”
The explosion registered from someplace off in the distance, the loudboom!muffled, but the detonation close enough so that a quaking hit the patient room like a ton of bricks. As a crack spideredacross the ceiling and then ran down the wall, the hospital bed rolled around, and a table rocked on its legs. All at once, he and Lydia and C.P. threw their hands out for balance, while the man in red sank down into his thighs and held that little glass box to his chest.
In the aftermath, as dust filtered down from overhead and alarms started to blare everywhere, “Blade” looked over at Gus, then indicated Daniel with a nod of his head. Calmly. As if he’d expected the bomb.
“It will work. My scorpion will save him—”
Popping sounds now. Out in the corridor. A scream.
The door to the patient room opened, and a guard leaped inside, clearly to give them an update. Except… no. There was something wrong with him—in the center of his forehead, a small, sooty black mark was precisely triangulated between his eyebrows. And before Gus could look too much at the smudge, the man collapsed to his knees and fell face-first into the tiled floor.
The back of his head had been blown off.
“You have to do it now,” Blade announced. As if some guy hadn’t just dropped dead of a gunshot wound right in front of the group. “He’s come for me.”
“Who’s come?” C.P. demanded as more shooting was traded out in the open area.
“The man who abducted you,” he said with a nod to Gus, “is actually trying to kill me. He must have seen me approach the house. I am afraid, in retrospect, I could have been far more discreet. It’s a bit of a family dispute, don’t you know.”
What, like someone hadn’t shown up at fucking Thanksgiving?
But whatever. The reasons didn’t matter at this precise moment.
The attack everybody had been waiting for…
… had finally arrived.
“Barricade the door,” someone said.
“Get his gun—” somebody else chimed in.
“What are you doing—”
The voices talking over each other, along with the sound of a bomb going off, were partially what woke Daniel up. The other half of it was a sixth sense that Lydia was in trouble: More than the noise or the evident panic, the inner core of him came alive to protect her.
As he forced his eyes open, he couldn’t understand what was happening: It looked like she was standing in front of Gus and seemed to be holding him against the far wall. Meanwhile, Blade was off to the side, dressed in one of Candy’s Santa robes, apparently, and Phalen was by the foot of the bed, a hand resting at the base of her throat like she waseither going to throw up or scream—and was trying to stop the reaction.
Distantly, he heard the unmistakable exchange of gunfire.
“Weapon,” he mumbled. “Get the guard’s weapon.”
Well. What do you know. That had beenhimtalking a moment ago, spitting out good advice about securing an available gun. Too bad everyone in the room was arguing with each other and didn’t hear him.
As adrenaline flooded his system, Daniel shoved the oxygen mask off and put everything he had into a holler: “Get that goddamn service weapon!”
His yelling got their attention, but before anyone could react, another explosion went off, and this one was closer than the first. With more dust floating down from a crack right above his bed, and the stench of burning plastic coming through the HVAC system, he knew they were all going to die.
Unless they got out before this attack—which he had knownallalong was coming—reached the patient room.
“Help me,” he said to Lydia.
The second he reached for her, she backed off of Gus and rushed over.“Daniel—”
