by Zoey Parker
It was a foolish want, but it didn’t change what I was inside.
“Abby, I can’t. You have to go. I’ll take care of James once and for all.”
Then I left her before she could plead with me any longer with those huge eyes. I raced out the door and up the stairs, checking at the top to make sure that he wasn’t there waiting to blindside me. The gun had failed once, but there was every possibility that he had fixed whatever had jammed it, or that he’d stashed another one somewhere.
But he wasn’t there waiting. It gave me some confidence that maybe he hadn’t gotten the gun to work. Maybe he was unarmed. Or maybe he was setting a trap.
Still, I’d find him and Abby had to get the hell out of here. I called back down to her to let her know that it was safe—or as safe as it could be.
She came up the stairs behind me and I urged her to the car. “Go now. I’ll make sure he doesn’t come after you,” I promised.
She bit her lower lip and clearly didn’t want to leave me, but nodded all the same. “Please be careful,” she murmured, then reached up and sealed her lips to mine, a kiss that told me she felt things for me, deep and unchangeable things.
Then she broke it and turned away, hurrying to her car. I watched her until she reached the door and slid in, then I took off for the house. I raced in through the front where the door was now banging open against the rain and the wind.
It hadn’t been open before.
Moving slowly and steadily, I went inside in search of James. The place was dark, making it difficult to make things out. Definitely not something in my favor. If I wasn’t careful, James would catch me by surprise.
I headed deeper into the house, my eyes adjusting as much as they would to the darkness. I searched for James, but didn’t see much of anything. I cursed myself silently for losing him. This had to end tonight. I wouldn’t leave without finding him, damnit.
Where is the bastard?
I made it past the foyer and into the adjacent kitchen. It, too, was empty. As I continued on through the kitchen, moving toward the back portion of the house, I heard the door slam in the front. I whirled around toward it.
Had he doubled back to try and leave through the front? Or had he gone after Abby?
I hurried around back to the front room, worried all of a sudden that Abby hadn’t made it far enough yet. That she’d gotten stuck in the mud…that she hadn’t listened to me at all.
I came through the doorway from the kitchen into the front foyer to find that Abby was there, sopping wet, half dressed, and searching the house frantically. Her eyes lighted on me and she made to move toward me. “Kade!” she called out. “I couldn’t leave you!”
There should have been plenty of time for me to reach her and her to reach me, but everything happened at once. James appeared out of nowhere, barreling into Abby. She slammed harshly onto the ground, immediately scrambling to try and get away from him.
I saw his gun again and all hope that it wasn’t working still or that it was out of ammunition or that he would somehow fuck up this shot, too, left me in a terrible whoosh of fear. He was aiming for Abby.
“You were supposed to love me!” he screamed at her, gun shaking in his hand as he aimed it at her head. “You were supposed to be mine!”
There were tears streaking down her face as she tried to scoot back on the floor only to have her back hit the far wall. Her hair was still damp, hanging in clumps about her face and shoulders, and she was only wearing her bra, her shirt in tatters around her breasts. She was utterly terrified and she had nowhere else to go.
“Please,” she begged him. “Don’t do this!
But he wasn’t listening. I saw his finger squeezing the trigger. I saw all of this in slow motion as though someone had stopped time to little more than a trickle. It seemed like I had eternity to just walk over there and stop the whole thing, except that I, too, was moving through time like an ocean of molasses.
I reached for her, lunging as I tried desperately to put myself in front of her.
The gun went off, a loud shock of sound in the otherwise quiet house. It sparked, giving us just a blink of light, like lightning and thunder all at once, and then there was just smoke and the rain jittering along the rooftop and against the windows. I felt a sharp spike of pain. That was when time seemed to snap back. Everything moved quickly from then on.
I slammed to the ground harshly, clutching at my shoulder where pain was bleating from it, pumping like blood between my fingers. I couldn’t say if I cried out or not, but it was hard to breathe all of a sudden.
From somewhere nearby, I heard Abby scream even though my ears were still ringing with the echoes of the gunshot.
I felt her cool, delicate hands fluttering over me, touching my face and my hands, everywhere they could. My name fell from her lips a thousand times, watery and desperate. I tried to answer her, but wasn’t sure if I managed it. I did see James in the background. He had his gun still in hand and he looked a little shocked, like maybe he’d never shot someone before.
He shot me, I thought strangely, detached and unafraid, though I knew I should have been.
I saw him shift the gun upwards again, however, that murderous look in his eye all over again. I realized that he was pointing it at Abby again and I tried to pull her to me, tried to roll us over so that my back was to the gun and she was nearer the wall.
But I was too weak. My body was trembling, in shock, and I felt dizzy and nauseous. I couldn’t make myself move. I realized how badly I must have been bleeding, the red color smeared across Abby’s smooth skin and slipping between my own fingers. She was crying, screaming, begging me to get up, but I just wanted to tell her to get out of there.
I heard another shot go off and waited for her to slump against my body.
But she didn’t. Instead, her head swiveled around and she shouted something that sounded like “Caleb” and “please.” But I couldn’t think much about that. All I cared about was the fact that Abby, despite her tears, was okay and the man with the red hair was lying on the ground, staring with glazed, blank eyes right at me.
Dead, I thought with a strange sort of relief. He’s dead.
And that was enough reassurance for me that despite Abby’s pleas, I could go to sleep. My eyes fluttered closed and I drifted off, letting the blackness swallow me whole.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Abby
I was sitting in the same chair since they let me in to see him. He was in surgery for a while, which was heart stopping for me. I had been sure that as he lay in my arms after James’s attack that he was dead. There had been so much blood.
“Kade!” I screamed at him, shaking his limp body. He was bleeding profusely from the shoulder, the dark liquid seeping into his already soaking wet shirt through the hand that had been trying vainly to slow the tide. “Kade!”
But he wasn’t answering. His eyes were open and I was positive that he was dead, that he was staring off into oblivion, his soul having already left his body. But then he blinked.
“Oh, thank god!” I cried, leaning forward and trailing my blood tinted hands across his cheeks and his lips, not caring what a mess the two of us were.
I looked worse for wear. My hair was damp from the rain outside, though it was trying to dry, and my bra was clearly visible thanks to my torn shirt. James had ripped it off of me, tearing like a wild man until he got to the flesh beneath. He’d held me down on the bed in there and was working on getting my clothes off. It was so reminiscent of that night in the alley that I was almost too panicked to do anything.
But I wasn’t drunk this time. I was sober and I was wired with adrenaline. I fought him off with everything I had, the struggle paying off as Kade broke through the door to my rescue before James could do much more than tear at my clothes.
We should have both escaped then and there, but he was determined to save me. Not just tonight, but forever. And he proved it when James pointed a gun at me, pulling the trigger with the b
arrel aimed at my forehead. He had been prepared to kill me if he couldn’t have me, and I thought that with the arrival of Kade, he had discovered just that.
He couldn’t have me.
But it wasn’t in the cards for me to die tonight. Kade appeared out of nowhere from one of the back rooms. He raced into the foyer where I was pressed against a wall with nowhere to go and he threw himself between me and the gun.
And now he lay bleeding in my arms, just barely conscious, bleeding so fiercely that he was pale, that he was surely dying.
Behind me, I registered that James had recovered from his shock of actually shooting someone, but I didn’t even turn to look at him. I clung to Kade desperately, trying to wake him up, to get him to move. I had to get him out of there, to the hospital where they might still be able to save him.
When the gun went off the second time, I was sure I was dead. But then there was a heavy thump on the floor behind me and I tore my eyes away from Kade long enough to see that James was lying dead on the floor. I let out a sob as I saw my uncle standing in the doorway with a gun still smoking.
“Caleb!” I cried, relieved that help had finally come. “Oh god, Caleb! He’s hurt! Kade’s been shot. Oh please, we have to help him! Oh god, please!”
Caleb hurried over to me, taking in the whole scene with one sweep of his eyes. His expression was grim, but he told me, “He’ll be alright. You’ve got your car?”
I nodded.
“Good, we’ll put him in there and drive him to the hospital. We don’t have time to explain all this to the cops right now.”
I agreed and grabbed my keys from the table—they were the reason I’d come back in the first place—and hurried out the door with Caleb trailing behind me. He was carrying Kade across his shoulders, an impressive feat given that Kade was not a small man. But then, neither was Caleb.
“He’ll be alright, Abby,” Caleb reassured me as he shoved the other man into the backseat. “Let’s get going.”
I drove him to the hospital.
They worked on him for a long time. Hours. It had me worried sick and when the lady tried to block me further by saying that only family was allowed to visit him after the surgery, I nearly lost my mind. I almost blew up—which wouldn’t have really helped my cause—but then Caleb stepped up.
“We are family,” he said firmly. “He’s my nephew.”
My eyes widened at this proclamation, but I didn’t question it. In fact, I was too desperate to see Kade to care about what excuse he provided to get me in there or the true meaning behind it.
All I cared about was seeing Kade.
Now I was sitting beside him as he slept off whatever painkillers they’d given him for the surgery. I would wait patiently until he woke up, unwilling to leave his side. Caleb came in and out, bringing in coffee when he could find it.
At this moment, however, he was gone—stretching his legs—and the coffee he’d brought me last was lukewarm. I was saved from having to drink it by the opening of the door and the smell of fresh, real coffee.
“Hey, how you holding up?”
I looked up at April, offering the tiniest of smiles as I accepted one of the coffees in her hand. It was fresh brewed from an all-night place. “Thanks,” I mumbled.
She took a seat beside me, wrapping her hand around mine. She squeezed. “He’ll be fine.”
I nodded.
April had been safe the entire time and maybe if I’d known that, none of this would have happened and Kade never would have gotten shot. Her phone had been dead when I’d called it, she told me, and she hadn’t made it home yet. In fact, she’d stopped to see her mother who was in town for once and considered staying with her. One hour with the overbearing woman and April had reconsidered, but it certainly explained my inability to reach her. She told me that she’d texted me—and then called several times after—to get a hold of me as soon as she discovered what had happened, but by then I was already at James’s rinky-dink little house.
I tried to shove the memory of it away.
We sipped coffee and waited for a while, but eventually I told April to go home. She did and I was surprised to see Brody escort her out, promising that he’d keep an eye on her to make sure she was safe. Under normal circumstances I might have wondered if there was something happening there, but just then I couldn’t focus on anything but Kade.
He’ll wake up soon, I told myself, and it was true.
I had to wait another hour, but finally, he stirred. He made a groaning, grunting noise, then his eyelids flickered. I held my breath until his eyes fully opened.
“Where am I?” were the first words out of his mouth, followed close by a surprised, “Abby?” when he caught sight of me.
I smiled at him, relief bringing me to the verge of tears. “Oh, Kade, thank god! I was so worried!” Then I threw myself at him, hugging him with everything that I was worth.
He winced, and I started to pull back, but he held me against him all the same.
When he finally let me go, his hand clutching mine to make sure I didn’t disappear on him, he asked me, “What happened?”
I shook my head and took a deep breath, recounting the events. His insistence that I get out of there, my refusal to leave without him, and James searching for me while Kade was in the house. Most of them he seemed to remember, but it got a little fuzzy after the gunshot. “If Caleb hadn’t gotten there…” I shook my head, offering him a half smile. “Well, we’d probably both be dead.”
At that, he sat up suddenly, grabbing me by the shoulders despite his injured shoulder. “Damnit, Abby! You could have been killed! Next time, you leave me, damnit. You leave me!”
I stared at him, my chest tight at the emotion shining in his eyes, clear in his expression. I had realized as soon as he took that bullet for me, no, even before that, when he came into that room and pulled James off of me, that the things he’d told me before were lies. I didn’t have all the details, but the guilt on Uncle Caleb’s face spoke volumes.
I had the feeling that it was never Kade’s choice to begin with to break up with me and the only reason I wasn’t strangling Caleb’s neck just then was because he’d saved our lives in the end.
“You should know that I can’t do that,” I whispered in answer to Kade. “I can’t leave you when something awful like that happens. Not even if my life’s in danger.”
He looked pissed and fully ready to argue. Probably to tell me what an idiot I was, but I wasn’t going to let him. I placed a single finger on his lips, stalling his next argument, and leaned forward. When my mouth was poised just above his, I smiled sweetly at him.
“No, never,” I whispered, then closed that final distance between our lips. I pressed mine to his fiercely, lingering even when it was probably a good idea to pull away. It felt like we hadn’t kissed in forever.
When I pulled away, he looked just as affected as I was. He swallowed and whispered, “Abby,” pain in his voice. But the pain didn’t seem to be coming from his shoulder or his bruised jaw. It was an inside kind of pain, the sort of thing that wounded the heart, not the body.
He looked ready to tell me something awful, maybe break up with me a second time, and I wasn’t ready to hear it. I wouldn’t accept it this time.
“No,” I told him sternly. “Not this time. I’m not letting you go, no matter what you say. I love you, Kade Johnson, and I won’t ever let you go. You’ve saved my life, in more ways than you can possibly imagine.”
He sucked in a breath and looked like I’d just given him a precious gift. He reached for me, pulled me closer to him, until I was leaning my forehead against his. “Abby Woodard, you’re the bossiest, stubbornest pain-in-the-ass woman I’ve ever met. And I’m so in love with you that it hurts sometimes. And, baby, I know I don’t deserve you.”
I kissed him before he could say more, wondering how in the world he could possibly think he didn’t deserve me. When we broke the kiss, both breathing heavily, I said to him, “You don’t know anyth
ing. I belong with you, and anyone who can’t see that is crazy.”
***
Kade had to stay in the hospital for a week, much to his dismay. But I made it a more enjoyable experience by spending most of every day there with him. I would cuddle with him on the bed he was mostly stuck in and tell him about what was going on, keeping him updated.
Caleb and I had discussed the police in length after James’s death. Ultimately, we decided that we had to call them. It would look really bad if we didn’t call them and they found the body. Which, eventually they would. They’d realize he’d been shot and then it would only be a matter of time before Caleb was put on the chopping block.
