I ease the door open and slip inside.
A heavy sob echoes off the marble floors. An anguished sound. One filled with the kind of pain and loss I can’t even imagine.
It comes from the left, the hallway that leads to the sheriff’s office.
My stomach clenches, and I force my feet to move toward the sound instead of away from it. Turning the first corner, I almost trip on another body sprawled out on the floor in front of me.
A pool of blood still spreads beneath him, oozing out until it hits the toe of my boot. Holding my breath, I lean forward until I can see his face…
Oh, thank God.
I don’t recognize the man at my feet.
Was that the gunshot I heard?
Voices float down the hallway, soft, hurried, concerned. I creep forward until I can see into the sheriff’s office, the main doors propped open, and my breath catches.
No.
No.
No.
No.
Tony sits on the floor with his wife, Tanya, holding her to him, with seeping blood beneath them, while Liam kneels beside him, whispering to him quietly and holding his shoulder.
Killian and Connor have their backs to me, leaning over the counter, doing something I can’t see from where I’m standing, but they appear unharmed.
It’s impossible not to be relieved by that, but my eyes keep drifting back to Tony and Tanya, at all the blood—on his uniform, on her.
I did this…
A sob slips from my throat.
Liam’s head snaps up and his green eyes meet mine, holding such an intense sadness that my legs give out from under me. “Raven!”
Connor and Killian both whirl around, and as soon as Connor’s eyes find mine, he’s racing across the sheriff’s office toward me.
His strong arms wrap around me, pulling me up from the floor as gently as he can, but the pain still slices through me as surely as that man’s blade did. “What the hell are you doing in here?”
“I couldn’t just sit there when you might be in trouble.”
He scowls at me in the way only Connor McBride can, his annoyance tightening his shoulders as he lifts me easily and cradles me against his chest. “That was very stupid.”
“We can argue about it later.”
The look he gives me tells me that absolutely will be happening.
But for now, he stalks back into the sheriff’s office, slowing as he reaches where Liam still kneels beside Tony and his wife.
Now that we’re this close, I can see the carnage much better.
Tears stream down Tony’s face, his heart-wrenching sobs filling the air. Tanya is clearly gone. The bullet hole in her chest isn’t the kind you survive. And from what I can see, Tony’s been hit, too, a wound on his shoulder that Liam is applying pressure to still drips blood down his arm.
“What happened?”
Tony glances up at me, his face covered with splotches of blood, tear streaks running through them. “They just…showed up in town a few hours ago. Looking for me, looking for all of you. They ambushed me coming into town hall…hit me in the shoulder, but I managed to take two of them out. The third bolted around the side of the building…”
