Sean does not look at me. He is reloading one-handed, his wounded hand, bracing the Sig against the island for the angle.
I move past him toward the back door.
"Two more outside."
He doesn't look up from the reload. "How many magazines?"
"Three."
"Make them last."
The man on the porch has been cutting cameras. He is older than the others. Two seconds slower than I need him to be. He was not expecting the back door to open from inside while his team was breaching through the front.
I shoot him in the throat. He goes down.
The last one is in the trees. Twenty yards out. Pulling back to make the call to whoever sent him here.
I cannot let him make the call.
I move through the door, low, fast. I see him at fifteen yards. He sees me. His sidearm comes up.
A single round from inside the cabin takes him to the temple.
He drops.
I look back.
Sean is at the kitchen window. Sig is still up. Checking the tree line with the methodical patience of a man who does not stop at done. He stops at a certain point. The dressing at his side is soaking through. His breathing is measured. The kind of measured that is covering for something.
I do the math without meaning to.
Fifteen yards. One-handed. Through glass. While bleeding through a dressing, I changed it at 4 a.m.
Sean read the geometry before I did, read it from a kitchen window at diminished capacity with a wound in his side, and took the shot anyway.
"Nice shot," I say.
He glances at me through the shattered kitchen window.
"You sound surprised."
"You are losing an alarming amount of blood."
His gaze drops briefly to his side.
"And yet,” he says, "still impressive."
Cazzo.
I hate that I almost laugh.
I have been saved before. By men who expected something for it. By men who saved me in the specific, tactical sense that I was alive when I had not been guaranteed to be.
Sean saved me in a different sense.
I am not going to name the sense.
He lowers the Sig and looks at me through the glass.
