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Erin had her head on my shoulder, her eyes closed and silent tears trickling down her cheeks. She’d cry for a while, then just go quiet and stare at the wall, haunted. Imagining a life without Danny. Stacey and Emily were there, silently gripping the arms of their men.
Cal paced up and down, his size and the fury on his face making the other patients and relatives shrink back each time he passed. Gabriel, Kian, Bradan and Gina kept trying to comfort him, but the big guy was tearing himself apart for not taking out the sniper faster, even though there was nothing he could have done differently.
The doors to the surgical area opened and Danny’s surgeon came out. All of us instantly swarmed him, nine of us throwing questions at him at once. The surgeon staggered back and raised his hands in surrender. “He’ll live!”
We all slumped in relief and Erin began sobbing, hanging onto me for support.
It would be another few hours until we were allowed to see Danny, so we grabbed coffees from the vending machines and sat back down to talk.
“The cops have taken the body of the guy Cal shot,” Kian told us. “I’ve talked to Callahan, the FBI haven’t identified him yet.”
“He had a tattoo,” said Cal. “A dog’s head, on his neck.” He was calmer, now, but still determined to make amends. “Not like a picture of a pet. Stylized. Like it meant something.”
Gabriel sidled over to the nurse’s station, leaned over the counter and spoke to the nurse there. His voice was too low for us to make out the words but, a moment later, the nurse was flushed and giggling and he returned with a pen and a wad of printer paper. “Tell me what you saw,” he told Cal, sitting down next to him. And he began to draw.
Now that I was calmer, I could think better, and a cup of coffee helped, too. I sat there silently sipping, brows furrowed, running over what I’d seen again and again. The sniper had put his red dot right on Lorna’s chest. If he’d shot then, I wouldn’t have had time to save her. But he hadn’t. He’d moved his aim down to her stomach before he took the shot.
There was only one reason to do that. The shooter wanted Lorna to die slowly and painfully. But that made no sense, unless…
I lifted my head and looked Lorna right in the eye. “It’s personal.”
She cocked her head to one side. “What?”
“I’ve had this wrong from the very beginning,” I said. “I just assumed it was to do with McBride Construction. But it’s nothing to do with the company. This is about you. You and your family.”
Lorna stared at me. “But…” Her face fell and she looked down at herself, horrified. Someone hates me that much?
I grabbed her, pulled her to her feet and crushed her to me, wrapping her in my arms, then stood there trembling in protective rage, scowling at the world over her shoulder and daring it to come near her. Suddenly, everything was different. I’d worried that I didn’t understand all this corporate stuff, that I was a dumb soldier up against some billion-dollar conspiracy. But now it was simple. Primitive.
Someone hated her. Hated her enough to kill her. But they weren’t going to get her, they weren’t going to fucking touch her, because…
Because they had an opposite. Someone who loved her as much as they hated her.
Something released inside me, and I closed my eyes and pressed the side of my head to hers. It was time. If I wanted to be with her, I had to go through the pain and hope I made it to the other side.
I gently unwound myself from her, went over to where Kian was sitting and put a hand on his back. “I need some time with Lorna.”
He looked up at me, then patted my hand. “Go. There’s nothing you can do here until they let us see Danny. I’ll keep you posted.”
Gabriel looked up from where he was sketching. He was already several sheets into the wad of printer paper, drawing based on Cal’s instructions, like a police sketch artist. “We’ll keep working on the tattoo,” he told me.
I hugged Erin tight and made sure Stacey and Emily were distracting her with girl talk. Then I went back to Lorna. “Come on,” I said quietly. “We gotta talk.”
I took the big black Mercedes and drove Lorna across the river to New Jersey. Storm clouds were building overhead, but the weather was holding for now. I stopped on a deserted bit of waterfront and we climbed out and looked across the river. The sun was just going down and, as it slid behind the skyscrapers of Manhattan, its glow was sliced into shining ribbons of gold and scarlet, stretching out across the water.
