Total pages in book: 78
Estimated words: 75616 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 378(@200wpm)___ 302(@250wpm)___ 252(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 75616 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 378(@200wpm)___ 302(@250wpm)___ 252(@300wpm)
He’d survived?
He was okay?
My gaze flew around, seeing the blood trail on the floor.
Had he been dragged?
Or crawled?
But crawled where?
Even as I thought it, though, the answer came to me.
He’d crawled to Judah.
Even bleeding, possibly dying, his instinct had been to protect my baby.
A cry escaped me as I turned, about to rush out of the kitchen.
When, suddenly, a man was there.
Gun raised.
Features tight.
“No!” I shrieked, rushing toward the knife block again.
“Hey! Hey, Claire. It’s me. Damon,” he said, as I tried to grab the knife with slick fingers. “Where’s Aurelio?” he asked.
“Aurelio,” I repeated as my heart sank.
I rushed away from the knife block.
I ran right past the man I now recognized as the other guard that had been with us since we came to the safe house.
I ran down the hallway, nearly tripping over another body that I hardly even spared a glance.
“No no no no no!” I cried, finding Aurelio propped up against Judah’s bedroom door, his gun at his side, his body horrifically still.
“Fuck,” Damon hissed, reaching down to press his fingers into Aurelio’s neck. “He’s alive,” he said, then, suddenly, he was shoving something at me.
I took it without thinking, without really even knowing what it was until I felt the cool metal in my hand.
A gun.
He’d passed me his gun.
“We need to call an ambulance,” I said, tears flooding my eyes.
“It will take too long,” Damon said, reaching down, then suddenly grabbing Aurelio, and lifting him. “I can get him there faster,” he added. “Stay here. Luca’s on his way,” he said. “Shoot anyone who walks through that door who isn’t him.”
With that and nothing else, he hefted up the alarmingly still Aurelio, and disappeared.
“No no no,” I cried, all alone with a body just a few feet from me.
Still.
Dead.
A gun a few feet from his hand.
I launched myself at it, grabbing it in my left hand, the other gun still in my right.
Then I slammed myself against the door where Aurelio had propped himself, unable to move, to even think.
It was like I lost all my senses at once.
I couldn’t hear anything but a buzzing sort of white noise in my ears. I couldn’t feel anything but a slight chill as the blood cooled on my arms, face, shirt, and pants.
I couldn’t see anything but the open door to the primary bedroom across from me, going in and out of focus as I sat there.
And as for thinking, well, I didn’t seem to do any of that.
I couldn’t explain it.
The numbness.
I was someone who always had a racing mind, each thought tripping over one another to try to get noticed first.
The silence, the stillness, would have been scary.
You know, if I could feel anything at all.
Which didn’t seem even remotely possible right then.
I couldn’t say how long I sat there like that.
All I knew was the next time I seemed to “snap to” was when there were footsteps rushing into the house.
It was then I remembered the guns in my hands, the need to survive, to shoot my way out of this if I needed to.
“Claire?” a voice called, the sound of it, the twinge of familiarity, pulling me back closer to the surface of my own mind. “Claire, it’s Luca. Honey, where are you? I know you have a gun. I want to help, but I’m trying not to get shot here.”
A strange hiccuping sound escaped me then.
“I’m here,” I called, placing the guns down like they were suddenly burning me.
It was then that the hall light flicked on, bathing the space in light, and making me painfully, gut-wrenchingly aware of the blood I was soaked in.
“Oh, fuck,” Luca said, dropped down on his knees in front of me.
“It’s not mine. It’s not… it’s… Oh, God,” I gasped, the memories coming back.
Of my hand.
Of the knife.
Of it sinking into Warren’s flesh.
Over and over and over.
But this time, I wasn’t detached from it.
My stomach roiled.
“Whoa,” Luca said, trying to reach for me, but I was already running toward the bathroom, dropping down on my knees in front of the toilet as my stomach emptied its contents. Over and over. Leaving me retching even when nothing else would come back up.
“Hey, it’s Luca,” a voice said as a hand pressed tissues toward me. “Come on. Let’s get you out of here,” he added after I blew my nose several times, then flushed the toilet.
“Judah,” I said, my heart suddenly speeding up, realizing he’d been alone in his crib the whole time I’d been dissociating.
Had he been crying for me?
Scared when I didn’t come?
“Hey, hey, hey,” Luca said, going to grab me, but then seeing the blood and thinking better of it, holding up his hands instead. “Lucky has Judah. He’s okay. Not hurt at all.”
“Was he crying?” I asked, lower lip trembling. “When you came in, was he crying?”