“And I was hoping you’d make this hard,” I whispered as I unholstered my gun and fired it into his stomach before he had the chance to react.
His roar of agony drowned out the strained curse that ripped from me as I turned, already firing two more into Davis’ chest as he simultaneously clutched at his stomach and swiped for my shirt. And then there was silence as he slumped to my kitchen floor. That ominous, weighted silence that was suddenly crushing my chest.
I took a step toward my room, gun raised, but staggered back instead and stumbled into my pantry door just as Gray appeared, gun drawn and stare searching for any remaining threats as he demanded, “What happened?”
We probably alerted the neighbors . . .
A wheezed cough tumbled from me instead as I pushed from the door, only to fall back against it.
And it hurt.
But it shouldn’t have.
It was just a door.
And that weight on my chest...it was so heavy. Heavier than it had been. Heavier than it should’ve been.
My free hand trembled as I reached for my neck, wondering if Davis had cut deeper than I realized. But before I even made it there, my hand fell to my chest. To the pain there as I struggled to take in a breath.
“Mallory,” Gray demanded as his eyes snapped to mine and widened with fear that was thick enough to break through that ominous silence and coat my shaky limbs. “Mallory.” The last was said on a horrified whisper just as a gurgled cough clawed its way up my throat.
“No, no, no,” he breathed as he rushed over to me, gun holstered and phone at his ear before his hands were racing everywhere and somehow nowhere.
Briefly smearing the blood on my neck before hovering over my body as he rapidly searched for the larger problem.
Because there was a larger problem.
I could feel it in the way each strained breath felt so sharp, so heavy, so pained. I could sense it in the panic seeping through Gray’s words as he relayed information to a dispatcher, when Gray was always cool and calm in these situations. I just couldn’t understand it.
I couldn’t understand how everything had gone so wrong, when my head had finally been clear, and I’d been confident in my timing of taking control of the situation. I’d known each step, each action, each?—
The other man.
“Gray.” His name was a wheeze as I pushed myself from the pantry door, just to have another bubbly cough wrench from my too-tight lungs. Something warm and wet trickled past my lips and seemed to freeze Gray before he was moving again.
Looking all around me as if he could make sense of what he was seeing. When he started turning my body, his hands stilledon me a split second before another pained curse rasped from me.
“Gray,” I tried again when he straightened in front of me.
“Don’t talk, baby, just—just try to breathe,” he begged, his voice hitching as he curled a hand around my cheek and dropped his forehead to mine. “Why didn’t you yell?” He brushed a thumb across my lips as if in reminder not to speak, but he needed to know we weren’t alone.
“There’s—”
“I love you,” he said over me. “You’re strong—you’re so strong, Peach, and I need you to be strong now, because you’re the one person I can’t lose.”
The tears gathered in his eyes tore deeper at my chest than the pain already there because I knew what they and his words meant. But it didn’t matter what he’d found on my body, neither of us were going to survive if he didn’t let me warn him.
In the next labored beat of my heart, it hit me like a sledgehammer to my chest—or maybe that was just the crushing weight there—that it wouldn’t just be the two of us who wouldn’t survive.
It’d been difficult to breathe before, but it felt impossible then, as my thoughts went back to the baby that, not even an hour before, I’d wanted nothing to do with—that I’d wanted toget rid of.
Tears blurred my vision and my chest struggled to pitch with a muted sob as I swayed toward the pantry door again.
“No, no,” Gray caught me before I could smack into the surface, then deftly, carefully, switched our positions, so his back was pressed to the door, and I was leaning against his chest. All while I struggled to warn him about the man somewhere in my condo.
“There’s a knife in your back,” he said over me softly, matter-of-factly, even though his features showed his outright terror.“From what I’m hearing and seeing, I think it punctured your lung, which is why I need you to stop talking.”
As he continued, one of his hands slowly moved down my arm until his fingers were curling around where I still loosely gripped my gun. Once it was in his right hand, he added, “EMS are on the way, and I need you to be the incredible, stubborn woman you are, and stay with me, because I’m not living the rest of my days without our arguments and your cold glares. I’m not going through life without your quick jabs and dirty way of fighting. I’m not losing my wife. Understand?”
