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Once her hands and neck were free, the other woman paused, setting the knife on the table, and took off her suit jacket. Before I could cuss her ass out for not finishing the job of freeing Casey, I blinked, relief and gratefulness overwhelming me as she laid her jacket over the top of my girl’s body, covering her nakedness. Why that one act was enough to make my eyes water, I had no idea. Maybe I had just lost too much blood.
I sagged back against Ethan as he continued to hold me up, and we both stared down at Casey. “She’ll be alright,” Ethan rasped out.
“Yeah,” I whispered, neither one of us daring to really believe it.
After cutting all the ropes, the woman laid the knife on the table and pointed with her thumb over her shoulder. “I’m just going to step outside and wait for the ambulance to arrive.” We both nodded in thanks as she gave Casey one last long look filled with sorrow and regret.
I reached over to gently touch Casey’s neck, looking closer at the knife wound there now that the rope was gone. It was bloody and would leave a vicious scar, but it wasn’t as deep as I had feared. “Her neck doesn’t look too bad. She’s lost a lot of blood from her chest, but why is she still passed out?”
“I don’t know, maybe shock?”
I lowered my head as her jagged breathing started to register. “Ethan, her breathing. Her lungs…”
He pulled back the jacket and ran his hand through the blood over her chest, but the only wound was the one in her clavicle. He started shaking his head. “I don’t know why she’s breathing like that. The knife wound is too high to be near her lungs.”
There was a scraping sound coming from behind us. Before either of us could react, Ethan was hit in the temple with the butt of the gun the killer was holding in his hand. I watched in disbelief as Ethan’s eyes rolled back into his head. As he crumpled to the ground, I lost my balance, not having enough strength left to hold me up. My hands scrambled for purchase and landed on Casey’s shoulder, making her moan out loud in pain. Instinct had me jerking my hand off of her injury.
It had happened so quickly. Between seeing Ethan getting knocked out by the guy we all thought was dead, to see him standing over me with blood dripping in his left eye. The gun was held steady, pointed at my fucking chest again while I lay on the floor, barely breathing from the pain that took over the second I hit the ground.
I glanced over at Ethan, wishing that I had told him I loved him more. Then I dropped my head back and looked up at the table, and the regrets I had when it came to Casey vanished as I began to comprehend what I was seeing.
The stray bullet.
The strange breathing.
Why she was passed out when the blood loss hadn’t seemed that bad…
I watched as the blood dripped from the bullet hole under the table to the puddle of blood that my hand was lying in. I raised my hand off the ground and stared at it in disbelief.
“Casey…” I croaked out her name as tears pricked my eyes. All of this for what? This asshole was going to win? He was going to kill me, my girl, and then my man? No! It couldn’t end like this. He was nothing but a monster that preyed on innocents. The monsters didn’t win. They weren’t supposed to win.
“I told you,” he said, cocking back the trigger and leveling the gun at my chest, stepping forward slowly until he was right over me, next to the table. He looked like the monster he truly was, with the blood covering half his face and dripping over his lips, into his mouth, and coating his teeth in a macabre smile. “She belongs to me.”
“I belong to whoeverthe fuckI want to.” The wet, raspy words were punctuated with a knife through the center of the killer’s throat.
The last thing I heard was the sound of the gun falling to the floor. Another bullet being fired and embedding itself into the wooden wall about two feet above my head. I was already floating in darkness by the time the stampede of officers, along with the Detective, ran into the cabin to see the carnage. I also missed when Casey slumped to her side just as the sound of a siren wailed in the distance.
***
The beeping of the heart monitor wasn’t what woke me out of my medically induced coma. It wasn’t even the sound of the alarm on the infusion pump as it alerted the nurse to change my IV bag. Instead, it was the sound of a man crying while squeezing my hand.
“Did she… Did she die?” I had to choke the words out through my dry throat. I refused to open my eyes, not wanting to face the reality of a world where Casey didn’t exist.
The nurse cleared her throat as she pushed a few buttons. “I need to get the doctor now that you are awake. Are you in any pain?”
I didn’t answer, just shook my head. The pain in my heart was so much worse than any physical pain I could have.
“Alright, I’ll be right back. Detective, please don’t get him too worked up, okay?” She didn’t wait for a response, just backed out of the room, shutting the door quietly behind her.
I turned my head and finally opened my eyes. He looked tired. His hair was a mess, and his five o’clock shadow looked more like a five-day shadow. He looked beautiful. “When did she die?” My heart broke as I grated the words out.
“She’s not dead,” he whispered. “They say she’s going to make a full recovery. She had a collapsed lung from the bullet that went through the table, and she’ll have to be careful, but overall, she’ll be fine.”
I stared at him in confusion as I finally accepted the cup of water and straw he’d been trying to shove at me since the nurse had left. After cooling my parched throat, I pushed the cup back. “Then why the hell are you crying?”
He shoved away from the bed, the slight jostling making me wince. “Becauseyoualmost died, you stupid son of a bitch! Because I watched the man and woman I love get loaded into the back of an ambulance with a bullet hole in his belly and one in her back! Because I have just spent the last week watching over you both, counting every breath.”
I didn’t know what to say. If I had been in his position, I didn’t know if I could have handled it. I probably would have ended up in jail for going on a rampage through town, destroying everything in my path while lost in my grief.
