She looked up, blinking, and glanced down at her leg. “Oh, crap.”
Blood swallowed the jagged ends of her fractured tibia, which had broken through the skin of her shin.
“Hold on.”
He ran to the end of the hallway, and grabbed a fire extinguisher to return and start blowing out the fire. An alarm blared and water poured from the ceiling. He extinguished most of the flames and returned to find Hana leaning against the wall, her face pale and pinched.
She shifted slightly to the side and cried out in pain, her eyes glazing over.
He bent and examined the bone protruding from her leg. “Oh, man, that’s a bad one.”
Sirens echoed in the distance.
“It hurts like hell,” she said through clenched teeth, her hair falling in tendrils down the wall. “I can’t believe he set us up.”
Rory’s gut hurt. He’d looked at Hana as a younger sister for years, and now she’d been hurt. It was his fault. In his hurry to get to Lewis, he’d fucked up. The bomb had been a tripwire-triggered pipe bomb. Simple. Easy to assemble. And something they should have expected. He wasn’t sure where the trigger had been, but chances were they’d barely hit it in their rush across the carpet.
“How did he know we were coming?” Hana asked in Korean, putting her head back and shutting her eyes, pain cascading off her.
“I don’t know,” Rory muttered in her native language, tugging his belt free to wrap around her leg. He had to stem the bleeding. “Hana, stay awake.” Blood kept pouring out of her leg.
The elevator doors opened, and the police rushed out.
Rory held up a badge. “We need medical here now. Officer down.”
Chapter8
Serenity noticed the truck trailing her from the hardware store as she hurriedly parked in her garage and ran inside, locking the doors. She tiptoed through her house for some reason, noting the twinkling Christmas tree lights casting magic across the living room. She might be stubborn, but she was keeping her decorations up until Valentine’s Day. She and her mother had invented the tradition, and she loved it.
She pressed one knee onto the sofa and gingerly slid the curtains to the side to see a large, dark blue truck parked at the curb beyond her snowy lawn. She squinted and then relaxed when she recognized the driver. “Oh, come on,” she muttered.
Sighing, she let the curtains fall into place and stomped to yank open the front door. It had snowed a few more inches, and she hadn’t had time to shovel, so she had to trudge through the snow to reach the truck door, which was opening.
“Hey,” Knox Albertini said, stretching to the ground in one graceful movement. “Where’s your shovel?”
He stood in front of her, big and broad and looking so much like his brother that her heart hurt. They were both tall and dark, but Knox’s eyes were an intriguing teal color that contrasted starkly with his dark hair.
“What are you doing here?” she asked, looking way up at his hard-cut face. It was sharper than Rory’s rugged bone structure, but the Albertini raw magnetism was stamped there hard. They were all handsome and way too charming for anybody’s good.
“We’ve been tailing you all day,” Knox said easily. Rough scruff darkened his jaw that looked like more than a five o’clock shadow.
“You’ve been tailing me?” she repeated. “Seriously?”
He looked up at the darkened sky and then strode past her toward the house. “Yeah. Where’s your shovel? I’d like to get everything taken care of before the next storm hits.”
“I can shovel my own drive, Knox,” she said slowly as if speaking to somebody with a head injury as she traipsed along after him. “Why are you tailing me?”
“Um, the flowers and the hang-ups? The fact that someone’s stalking you?” he said mildly.
She put her hands on her hips, still thinking the entire situation was silly. Somebody had a crush and wasn’t handling it well. Except…those flowers had been burned. “Have you been on me all day?”
If so, she really needed to learn to be more observant.
“We’ve taken turns.”
Yeah. She definitely needed to pay better attention to her surroundings. “Great, so I’ve been watched all day and had no idea.”
He lifted one broad shoulder. For his detective job today, he had worn a sheepskin jacket, jeans, and thick boots. “Rory had to leave town. You’re in trouble. We’re here.” He said the words slowly with the Albertini drawl. “Now, why don’t you head back inside so I can shovel your driveway?” He kind of made it sound like a question, but not really.
