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The woman didn’t move. She lay face down, one hand digging into the weeds. Her head was inches away from a stand of prickly pear.
She mumbled something, but he couldn’t hear her.
“Say again? You sound like you have rocks in your mouth.”
She lifted her head up. “Just kill us. We’ll both be better off.”
“Us?” He drew his gun again, holding it in both hands. He bent his knees and pivoted in a 360. Nothing. Except a witch on the bridge watching him. He stopped the moment he saw the woman. Why was she there?
Then he recognized the familiar dark ponytail. Holy fuck, it was Iris, but what was she doing on Amado Bridge?
He turned his attention back to the runner. “I don’t see anyone else. Who’s ‘us’, Ma’am? You got someone out here running with you?”
“Yes, but you’re looking in the wrong place.”
She wasn’t making sense. Blood flame had no doubt screwed with her mind.
“I’ll ask again; where’s your friend?”
“Here.”
Glancing down, he watched her turn on her side. She held her arm at the bottom of the coat, pressing it against her body.
When he saw the bulge of her stomach, his mind flipped over several times. The memory he’d been trying to suppress shot forward once more of another woman running flame.
Connor had killed her, shot her in the chest as she turned, gun in hand and pointed straight at him. He hadn’t hesitated.
But the gun had been taped to her wrist and she couldn’t have fired it if she’d wanted to. A set-up.
She’d also been pregnant, just like this one.
Darkness swirled through his head, a familiar creeping of more regrets than any man should have to bear. He’d killed her and others equally as innocent over the years until his soul was as dark as night. The flame drugs had been at the bottom of it all. He’d gone through the change and become something he despised.
“You gonna shoot, or what?”
Coming back to himself, he shook his head then holstered his Glock.
Five Bridges had worn him down to the marrow. But right now he knew something sinister was going on, directed at him and involving a drug addict lying in the dirt.
He shifted toward Iris. Was she involved in some way? Had she set him up? As a TPS officer, she had access to a lot of important people. The Tribunal was the combined government for all five species and held sway over each of the five separate territories as well as their individual border patrols.
It wasn’t a question he could answer right now, so he shifted back to the runner and extended a hand down to her. She eyed it as though it would turn into a snake any second.
“Come on. I haven’t got all night. Let’s get you out of here. You’re not dying on my watch.”
He didn’t kill women, at least not on purpose, and he definitely didn’t take out a woman with a belly full of child.
“I can’t move.” She tried to sit up, but flopped back in the dirt.
Whatever energy she’d possessed had been used up trying to scale the fairly steep side of the wash.
He dipped down and picked her up in his arms, cradling her. She weighed next to nothing. “What’s your name?”
“Tammy. Where are you taking me?”
“The clinic.”
She turned her face against his chest and damn him if she didn’t start weeping against his tank.
