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Easton shakes his head. “None,” he states. “Percy is in palliative care, dying of late-stage lung cancer, and can barely walk, talk, or feed himself. There’s just no way. He’d rather put a bullet through his own skull than betray Zade. Besides, in his current state, he couldn’t physically or mentally pull off something like this. Giving us his name was a slap in the face.”
“So why the hell would he do it then?”
“Who fucking knows,” he mutters, shrugging his shoulders. “Not many are privy to the state of Percy’s deteriorating health. Most people think he’s been having some time off at his beach house up north. Perhaps he thought he could use Percy’s absence as an excuse to pin it on him. All I know is every fucking step forward we take, is another five back.”
I swallow hard and raise my gaze to his, letting him see the raw honesty in my eyes. “I’m going to die, aren’t I?”
His face drops and he doesn’t respond, but I appreciate that he’s not trying to sugarcoat some bullshit answer. Even with their protection, the reality of the situation is they don’t know who’s behind this, and without that, there’s no way to predict these attacks. Yet, I still find myself wondering why they want to protect me at all. I mean nothing to them.
A heavy moment passes between us and the tension dissipates, leaving nothing but hollowness. Seeing the defeat in my eyes, Easton gives me a tight smile. “You’re stronger than you know,” he tells me. “You’ve made it this far, haven’t you? We might not be able to protect you at all times, but you can protect yourself. You just need to believe you can.”
With that, he turns and strides back through my apartment toward the door. I don’t hesitate in heading to my room, hating how fucked up this man has got me. One minute I want to tear his balls out through his throat, and the next I want them in my mouth.
Letting out a heavy sigh, I shove through my bedroom door, flipping the light switch as I go and come to a startling stop, finding a man standing in the corner. He moves like lightning, a gun whipping toward me as I let out an ear-shattering scream and run for my fucking life.
My feet don’t move fast enough and this strange man is on me in seconds, gripping my hair and yanking me back. I ram my elbow into his stomach and he grunts, but his grip on me is too strong. “Fuck, you little bitch,” he spits.
He starts dragging me back, his hand clamped over my mouth like a goddamn vice. I try to scream around it as he reaches my bedroom window and quickly breaks the glass with his gun, realizing this is going to be his only way out of here.
He starts pulling me through it as I try to fight him off. I grip the side of the window frame, broken glass slicing through my palm like soft butter. I cry out and just as quickly as this motherfucker got me, Easton comes barging through my bedroom door, his eyes wild and sharp.
My captor lashes out in a fit of panic, his gun blasting by my ear. I watch in horror as Easton roars, the bullet shooting directly into his shoulder, the force of the blast knocking him back against my wall. He grips his shoulder, blood seeping through his fingers, but it doesn’t seem to faze him. It only serves to piss him off more.
I grip the window frame tighter, the jagged glass shredding my palm as I try to fight my attacker off. Easton raises his arm, his jaw clenched with fury in his eyes. The bullet flies from its chamber and I feel it whooshing past my face before hitting my attacker right between his eyes.
His hold immediately goes slack as a blood-curdling scream tears from the back of my throat. The fucker’s lifeless body falls back onto the grass outside my window and I quickly scurry back inside, blood pouring down my arm.
“EASTON,” I cry, trying to wipe the tears off my face as I barrel toward him, watching in horror as he slowly falls down my bedroom wall, the pain too great to bear.
He grunts as I fall to my knees beside him, my eyes going wide as I take in the gaping hole in his shoulder. “Fuck,” I panic, desperately searching for something to stop the bleeding. Finding a discarded tee, I grab it and shove it against his shoulder, pressing hard in an attempt to stem the blood flow. I try to calm myself, knowing I’m not helping anybody by being scared, but I struggle to keep my hands steady on Easton’s shoulder. “What . . . what do I do? Are you dying?”
“No,” he grunts, clenching his jaw, “but I’ll fucking pass out if we don’t do something soon.”
“FUCK.”
“Zade,” he says, the pain tearing at him. “Get me to Zade.”
I nod, my gaze snapping to my bedroom door. How the fuck am I supposed to get him to Zade? He’s twice my size, maybe six-foot-four, and packed with muscle. “You’re gonna have to help me,” I tell him, hurrying to my feet and gripping his other arm. “I can’t drag you.”
Easton grips his shoulder and I pull hard, trying to get him to his feet while blood soaks into the carpet. He gets himself up and heavily leans against me, each movement causing him to grunt and groan. “Come on,” I say, his large frame weighing me down.
I kick the door open again and start dragging him out, each step feeling as though I’m getting smaller. Tears linger on my face, and the harder it is to hold him up, the more pain that tears through my shredded palms.
I get him through the living room and as we try to get to the door, I can’t help but glance toward Cara’s door. How the hell is she sleeping through all of this? Surely she must have heard the gunshots.
We reach the door, and as I struggle to open it while trying to keep Easton up, thoughts of Cara fade to the back of my mind. It feels as though it takes a lifetime before we’re breaking out into the hall and I scream out, finding Zade, Dalton, and Sawyer coming through the main door at the other end of the corridor. “HELP,” I cry, my knees buckling under Easton’s weight, falling to the ground. “He’s been shot.”
They’re running before the words are even out of my mouth.
Zade reaches us first, his eyes scanning over Easton in horror. “What the fuck happened?” he demands as Sawyer barges through to my apartment, going to see for himself.
I shake my head as Zade and Dalton dive in, relieving me of Easton’s weight and hauling him back to his feet. “I don’t know,” I tell them as Zade kicks in his apartment door, not wasting time searching for his key. “Easton did the sweep, he checked my room and made sure it was clear, then when I was going to bed, there was someone in there waiting for me.”
“How the fuck did he get shot?” Zade spits, clearly not interested in the smaller details.
“How do you think he got shot?” I throw back at him, quickly following the guys into Zade’s apartment and pulling out a chair before they dump Easton on it. “The asshole was trying to drag me out the window and when he saw Easton, he took his shot.”
“Fuck,” Dalton mutters, his head whipping back toward the door, ready to race in after Sawyer.
