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Hands were there helping me, but it felt like the more we moved, the more it continued to shift and fall.
Finally I uncovered a booted foot, but it didn’t belong to the woman I’d been searching for.
“Shit!” I cried out in frustration.
Before I could push that body aside, though, a hand lifted and shot blindly at me.
He’d hit his target.
Me.
A bullet ripped into my shoulder. Another to my lower leg. And one more to the right thigh.
Bang. Bang. Bang.
A sickening thud followed the last shot, but my brain was confused and shocked.
“Got him,” I heard someone say.
And, almost as if I could only focus on one thing at a time now, I moved six inches over and started to move more fabric.
I found her at the bottom, eyes open and fearful, as she stared at me with a look of utter horror in her eyes.
She had a heavy metal beam across her hips, and her neck was bleeding profusely.
Was that where he’d shot her?
I reached out and placed my hand against her neck, causing her to whimper.
“You’ll be okay.”
Looking at her, watching the amount of blood pumping out of the side of her neck and knowing there was nothing that could be done for a neck wound like that without medical intervention, I knew this was it.
The seconds would count.
I pulled out my phone and made a call.
“Mackenzie.”
CHAPTER 19
Gaslighting is not real. You’re just crazy.
-Winston to Crimson
WINSTON
“Keep her talking,” someone urged. “And if not talking, at least keep her awake.”
I didn’t know who said that.
All I did know was that I had just enough energy to hang up the phone as I’d made a call to a friend who happened to own a fleet of helicopters, I had enough energy to tell her anything and everything she wanted to know to keep her awake and responsive.
“Tell me about your babies,” she rasped. “I want to know them before I go.”
Know them before I go.
My heart literally broke in my chest.
“You would’ve loved them,” I croaked. “They were the sweetest babies in the world. They were so good. I know that they say twins are a handful, but my two? They were like a breath of fresh air in the shittiest smelling world you could ever imagine.”
She hummed. “Were they beautiful?”
“So, so beautiful,” I agreed. “They had all this blond hair, and the bluest eyes ever.”
“Blue like yours?” she asked, her fingers coming up to weakly curl around my wrist. The one that was at her throat, that I could feel blood squirting out between my fingers with each pulse of her heart.
“Blue like mine,” I confirmed. “They looked nothing like my ex-wife.”
“Good,” she rasped. “Good.”
“The night I brought them home from the hospital?” I said. “I looked at them and knew that they were going to be my reason for living. They’d be the sun and the moon, the wind and the rain. They’d be what kept me whole.”
“Tell me,” she said quietly.
Too quietly.
I’d share my personal nightmare with her all day, every day, for the rest of my life if it kept her here on this earth with me.
The beautifully vibrant woman looked like she was on death’s door, and I wasn’t doing well with that.
I hadn’t realized the depth of my feelings for her until I’d seen the gun aimed in her direction.
Heard that shot sound.
“Are you listening, Sunny?”
Sunny pressed a kiss to the wrist of the hand that was holding pressure on her neck wound.
She was listening.
“Listen, because I want you to know,” I ordered. “If anyone gets to know the hell I’ve been through, it’s the woman who pulled me out of it.”
• • •
7 years ago
I couldn’t quite explain what it was that I loved about coming home so much.
Maybe it was the way the twins ran at me with excitement in their eyes.
Maybe it was the way my wife met me at the door.
Maybe it was the way that I parked my car and could sometimes see them all in the living room dancing to a song I couldn’t hear but knew without a shadow of a doubt that it was “Great Balls of Fire” by Jerry Lee Lewis. God, the kids loved listening to that song on repeat.
Ever since I’d watched Top Gun with them, they’d been obsessed with two things. Planes and that song.
I got out of the car and hurried up to the house, my eyes on the gutters that looked like they needed to be cleaned out.
That was why I didn’t first notice the quiet as I walked inside. I was thinking about all the things that I needed to get done around the house.
Helping make a company great made life hard sometimes. There were things that fell to the wayside in order to make it more doable.
Sometimes the house and taking care of it was my very last priority.
