“I’m so sorry.”
It’s the last thing I say before the whole world goes black.
LUCKY
In the months since the robbery, I've imagined a thousand different horrific scenarios, had nightmares about what would happen if Lorell ever found me, what he would do if he ever realized I had survived and came to hunt me down. But in all of them, it was always me in the crosshairs.
It was always me he was targeting.
Never innocent people.
Never people who just wanted to help.
Never someone I loved.
As Liam's eyes drift closed, my scream cuts through the barn. "Liam, no!" I take his face between my palms, the blood on them from his shoulder smearing across his face. "Stay awake, Liam."
But his eyelids don't flutter.
He doesn't respond at all.
Connor pushes to his feet. "Fuck. We have to get him to the hospital. Even if we called for a helicopter, by the time it came from Asheville and returned, we could have gotten him there faster."
I glance over my shoulder at him, tears blurring my vision.
He scans the barn in the darkness. "Fuck. I don't know if there's anyone else out there. How many men he might have brought with him.” Scrubbing his hands over his face, he turns back to me. “If we try to carry Liam out to the truck, we wouldn't be hard targets for people like them.”
Panic laces his words, but he’s trying to tamp it down.
For both our sakes.
I press as hard as I can on the wound in Liam’s shoulder, desperate to stem the bleeding. "What do we do?"
Connor grabs his shotgun from the floor where he dropped it to grab the axe now embedded into Lorell’s back. "Stay with him. Keep pressure on that."
“Where are you going?”
His hard, dark eyes meet mine, the unease in them making them almost onyx. “I’m going to get the keys for Liam’s truck from his cabin, then get it over here.”
Shit.
That means going out where anyone could be waiting, concealed in the trees, for one of us to appear to take us out.
But we don’t have any other options.
Not if we have any chance of saving Liam’s life.
He’s already lost so much blood.
The dark crimson is smeared across the axe handle, along the wall where he was propped up, and all over the floor, currently pooling under him.
It coats my hands where I press into the wound, which seems to be doing very little to help the situation.
We have to hurry.
“Be careful."
Connor kicks the axe over to me without comment, but he doesn’t have to explain.
