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We crashed into the trees, skidding on fallen leaves as we went. The brush was dense, but it didn’t feel like enough cover. Finally, a thick tangle of branches and leaves caught my eye, and I pointed it out to Emily. We took cover, making sure the boys were hidden best of all. “No talking,” I murmured against Elias’s hair. He was shaking in my grasp. No doubt in some pain and terrified out of his mind. This was worse than Las Vegas. At least then they hadn’t shot at anything, just ran after us.
For all the commotion from before, things were quiet now—almost eerily so. I could hear Emily trying to steady her breathing beside me, and I found her hand and squeezed. He’s okay, I tried to send her. He’s going to be just fine.
But what about Adrian?
My heart lurched at the thought of him hurt. “Em!” It was Nate. “Matty!”
She squeezed my hand again, and we scrambled back out from our hiding place. Nate and Adrian, both looking worse for wear, stood nearby. Emily and Matthew practically threw themselves at Nate, who hugged them back just as fiercely.
The impulse to do the same to Adrian was…stronger than it should have been. But I resisted, instead holding Elias to me all the tighter. He squeaked out a protest but didn’t push me away. On the contrary, he clung to me like he hadn’t since he was just a toddler. My poor baby—this really had scared him.
“You’re hurt!” he said to Adrian, horrified. Looking over, I saw that he was right. Adrian was bleeding from a cut in his temple, and his shirt was wet at the shoulder. “Are you okay?” I asked, breathless.
“Fine, but we need to go.”
“There might be more coming,” Nate said. “I can clean up this mess here. You two need to keep moving though. Get to Owen and the others in Birmingham.”
I wasn’t about to argue, and Elias didn’t say a word of protest as we made our way back to the car. “Close your eyes, sakharok,” I said, not sure what we would find when we rounded the house. “Don’t open them until I say.”
The men were unconscious and bound, and I barely spared them a glance as I carried Elias to Nate and Emily’s car. Getting him settled took a moment, but I shut his door and turned to look at Adrian. He was holding out the keys. “I don’t think I should drive,” he said, voice tight.
“We should get you cleaned up before we go.”
“There’s really no time,” Nate said. “Go as far as you can, over the state line if possible, and at your first stop, patch him up.”
“Okay,” I said and took the keys. I tried to steady my breathing, but for once, it was hard to find my bravery. “Okay,” I said again, more to myself than anyone else.
NINE
ADRIAN
My shoulder was on fucking fire. By the time Nataliya found a place to stop remote enough that we could pull over without worrying about being seen, I was shaking all over. “Elias, hand me the first aid kit,” she called, and the boy passed up the box Nate had given us to use before we left. The boy hadn’t said a word since we’d gotten in the car. “Thank you. Now, eyes closed, okay?” Elias dutifully did as she said and disappeared to the backseat again. “Shirt off,” she said, focusing back on me.
It was a struggle to get the blood-wet material off, and judging by her gasp, the wound that it revealed looked worse than I’d thought. Nataliya opened the kit and dug out gauze and betadine to clean the wound. “Is the bullet still there?” I asked.
Her skin was taking on a gray color. “How would I know that?”
I leaned up. “Is there an exit wound?” I thought my back was wet, but with the adrenaline buzzing beneath my skin, it was hard to tell for sure. By her squeak, the exit wound was indeed there…and probably bleeding heavily. “It’s good,” I told her. “Better than if the bullet was still in my shoulder.”
Nataliya took a breath, found her center, and set about cleaning my shoulder up. “You need stitches,” she said.
“Sterile gauze for now,” I said. Trying to do stitches in a car was a recipe for infection. Besides, I could hardly put them in myself, and it felt like too much to ask of her when I doubted she’d ever done anything like that before. “Stitches when we get somewhere safe.”
Nataliya wrapped my shoulder in what felt like a metric ton of medical tape. I dug a clean shirt out of my bag. It hurt like hell to maneuver my arm through the sleeve, but driving around with no shirt and covered in bandages didn’t seem conducive to not drawing attention to ourselves.
“Next time, don’t get shot, okay?” she asked as she resettled in her seat. She turned the car back on and pulled back onto the road. “I know you were protecting us, but don’t put your body in front of any more guns if you can help it.”
I blinked. Then, I blinked again. How many times had I done just that over the years? “This wasn’t the first time I’ve gotten shot.”
Nataliya snorted. “What kind of argument is that?”
“Protecting people is what I’m good at.”
She rolled her eyes. “You’re good at being a leader,” she said. “Anyone who sees you around your former teammates can see that. Besides, you can’t protect anyone if you’re dead, and you made me a promise. So, take care of yourself.”
I felt properly chastised. I leaned back against the seat and tried to focus on anything besides what she said and the way the dips in the road made my shoulder jolt with agony. I must have dozed off because Nataliya woke me up when she pulled off the road again so Elias could stretch. “He made it over an hour,” she said as we both watched him walk around the shoulder. “We only have an hour or so left to go.”
Thank God. “I’ll call Owen and let him know.”
