The trembling starts then. Small at first, just my hands. Then my arms. Then my whole body, shaking so hard my teeth chatter.
"Shock," someone says. "Get her in the car. We need to move. Get her home."
“Atlas.” I look at Susan, choosing that as the one thing I can focus on right now. “He ran away?—”
“We’ll find him,” she promises. “He’s a smart boy, and he knows where his dinner is. He’ll come back to the stables.”
“But if the shooter?—”
“We’ll find him,” she repeats. “But there’s nothing you can do right now, so take care of yourself.” She looks worriedly at my arm. “You need to get to the hospital.”
“We’ll handle it from here, ma’am,” Eddie says flatly, stepping out of the Jeep and reaching to help me down. I’m guided from there into the SUV that brought me here, with no chance to do anything else. Eddie slides in beside me, his gun still drawn, his eyes scanning everything.
"We're moving," Cole says from the driver's seat. "ETA thirty minutes. I've already called ahead—he knows."
Sean.
Of course he knows. By now, he’s probably already planning what to do, how to respond, who to punish for this.
The trembling gets worse.
I press my hand over my mouth, trying to hold back the sob building in my chest, but it escapes anyway. Then another. Then I'm crying, great gulping sobs that make my whole body shake.
Eddie doesn't try to comfort me. Doesn't tell me it's going to be okay. Just sits there, alert and ready, doing his job and ignoring me entirely.
"Did you get him?" I manage to choke out when the tears finally start to slow. "The shooter?"
Cole is the one who answers. "No, ma'am. He was gone by the time backup arrived. It was clearly a professional. Knew what he was doing."
Someone sent a professional to kill me.
The sob that escapes then is almost a laugh. Because of course someone did. Of course my life—which is already a disaster—would escalate to assassination attempts.
My arm throbs. I look down at it—at the makeshift bandage someone wrapped around it, already stained red. I was shot—actually shot. If I'd been sitting differently in the saddle, if Atlas hadn't moved at that exact moment, if Eddie hadn't been there to cover me during the second shot…
I'd be dead. The thought is so overwhelming I can't process it.
"Mrs. Flannery." Eddie's voice cuts through my spiraling thoughts. "Look at me."
I force myself to obey, feeling a lump in my throat that makes it feel hard to breathe.
"You're alive,” he says firmly. “You're safe. We're getting you home. That's all that matters right now."
"Someone tried to kill me," I whisper.
"Yes."
"Why?"
"I don't know. But Mr. Flannery will find out."
Mr. Flannery.Sean.My husband, who has a file full of confirmed kills. Who beat a man half to death in our driveway yesterday for threatening me.
What will he do to whoever tried to kill me?
The thought should terrify me. But right now, sitting in this car with blood soaking through the bandage on my arm and adrenaline still flooding my system, all I feel is a sick kind of relief.
Whoever did this—whoever sent a professional shooter after me—is about to learn what happens when you threaten the Wolf's wife.
