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People were shouting, chairs were screeching across the white tiled floor, and I kept feeling sprays of plaster dust hit the walls and floors around me.
“Rome!” Izzy cried out, trying to move.
I flattened myself down farther, ordering her to stay put.
Her struggles ceased, but I could practically taste her panic.
Then, as suddenly as it’d begun, it ended.
I chanced looking up, and that’s when I felt the line of liquid fire trailed down my back.
I ignored the pain and picked up my head, seeing the chaos with my own eyes.
The chairs were all knocked over in everybody’s panic to move to the ground. People were lying on the floor, some, like me, looking up. While others were quite clearly too hurt to do so.
There was blood on the white floor—some of it in a spray pattern, while some seemed to spread into an ever-widening pool underneath the obviously injured people.
But nobody looked dead from what I could tell.
Bayou was on the ground, his hand on his waist, grimacing.
He’d obviously taken a bullet to the side.
Liner, who was across the room, was still sitting up in the chair he’d been occupying earlier, but he had what looked to be a bullet graze along his neck. He was pale and covering the wound with his hand, but the blood was still seeping out from between his fingers.
Wade’s wife—ex-wife—was on the ground, her eyes open wide, with a bullet hole in what looked to be her hand.
She was staring at her hand out in front of her face, mouth agape.
Castiel, who’d walked into the room with us forty-five minutes earlier dressed in his police officer uniform, had his firearm secured in his hand as he looked around with alarm, waiting for the other shoe to drop.
He was on his ass in the middle of the room and had blood running down one half of his face, making him look like he was on the set of a horror show.
Which, I guess, was the truth.
We’d just been and lived through our own personal horror show.
Linc was the first one to stand up just as the doors that’d somehow closed were yanked open and the other officers who’d been taking up another part of the hospital waiting room entered.
As one, everyone looked at the lone man that was on the ground at the door’s entrance, one single bullet hole marring his otherwise perfect face.
That’s when I recognized him.
He was the other lawyer from Izzy’s ex’s law firm.Chapter 26I like to have my cake and eat it, too. I’d love to have yours and eat it, too.
-Izzy to Rome
Rome
We’d set up a triage room in the main entranceway of the hospital.
The waiting room we were just in was now a crime scene, and I was currently having my back disinfected and cleaned by Izzy.
Apparently, I’d taken a stray bullet, but it’d only grazed me down the length of my back.
“God, you were so lucky,” she repeated for the fourth time in as many minutes. “This could’ve been so bad.”
I knew that just as well as she did.
It could have been awful.
Nobody but the shooter had died, even though the shooter could’ve done a whole lot more harm had he been experienced.
Just as Izzy was about to continue, Rodrigo was wheeled in, in handcuffs, as another officer whose name I couldn’t place right then leading him.
Everybody stopped talking as the newcomers made their way inside, and that was when I noticed why Rodrigo would be there in the first place.
He had a gunshot wound to his left thigh.
Two teenagers followed him, looking just as murderous as Rodrigo. They both looked malnourished and scared. Another officer was in front of them, likely to keep distance between Rodrigo and the children.
The two teenagers scanned the hallway around them and seemed to lock on Izzy because in the next second they were both bolting in our direction.
I tensed, but the officers stopped them before they could move toward us.
“Aunt Izzy!” the kid screamed.
Izzy left me like a hot potato, rushing toward the two children with a look of horror on her face.
“Oh, my God!” Izzy gasped as she moved. “Diana! Ruben! Oh, my God! Are y’all okay?”
They didn’t look okay.
Honestly, they looked like they were about to fall over.
Then Ruben did just that. Or almost did. The officer right next to him caught him around the arms and helped him find a seat directly next to my bed.
Diana was in a little better shape, but not by much.
“What happened?” Izzy repeated.
Ruben’s eyes went to where Rodrigo had been taken, and he glared.
“That piece of shit kept us in his freakin’ basement for three months, that’s what.”
***
An hour and a half later, we found out that what the children said was true.
The sick bastard, Rodrigo, had kept the kids locked up.
Apparently, with the two of them ready to run away, Rodrigo had caught them in the act of trying and had locked them up in a makeshift cell in his basement.
