I lifted a hand to touch it, frowning when my fingers came away shiny and red with blood. My brain felt foggy and confused like it couldn’t compute what it was looking at or how I had gotten a cut on my cheek in the first place.
Looking over at the four alphas around me, I saw their faces in varying stages of registering the situation we had found ourselves in.
“Get down!” Maverick shouted, his words slowed down and dull as he reached out a hand for me.
But he was too far away to actually reach me as more objects whizzed by my head.
Then a pair of arms were wrapping around my torso and dragging me to the ground as the world erupted into chaos around me.
“Stay down!” Dallas barked into my ear as gunfire filled the night and I clenched my eyes shut, the scent of apple whiskey filling my nose as I tried in vain to drown out the sound by clapping my hands over my ears.
Then I felt it, something warm and wet dripping down my chest.
“Dallas?” I asked, looking up at his face that was bunched with pain.
“I’m fine,” he told me, but my eyes were already moving to where the source of the blood was coming from.
Through his dark jacket, I could already see blood blossoming on his shoulder.
“You’ve been hit!” I squawked, remembering that night with Agent Brady before he died.
I tried to sit up but Dallas wrestled me back down. “You need to stay down, damn it, they’re shooting up there!”
“But you’re bleeding,” I protested, my words hitching on a sob. “You’re going to die.”
“Lennon, look at me,” Dallas said, but I was too lost to the flashbacks to hear him.
“Shit,” I vaguely heard him curse. “I don’t really know how to do this…”
Then his arms wrapped around me and he pressed my face into his neck, right where his scent was.
“Breathe in, Lennon,” he told me as people continued to shout and fire off guns around us. “Just breathe.”
I sucked in one, long shuddering breath, then I felt it. His throat had begun to vibrate.
It was thready and unsure, unlike Maverick’s which had felt steady and strong, but even still it worked like a charm.
I melted against Dallas, our legs tangled together, and focused on his purr until the gunfire stopped and we were safe again, his scent filling my lungs and his purr dulling my panic.
Chapter Eighteen
A few hours after gunfire erupts at the UK Delegates dinner — White House
2 months & 1 week until the election…
“How was he even able to get through to the Kennedy garden in the first place?” Maverick asked as we all sat in Collier’s office hours after the shooting in the Kennedy garden.
The president was due back in an hour and we still had no fucking idea how such a thing had even been able to happen in what was supposed to be the safest place in the entire country.
The assailant, a man dressed in a camo bulletproof vest with ‘ALPHAS PRIMUS’ emblazoned across the front and back had managed to hop the fence that should have been well-watched and guarded, armed with an assault rifle had made his way to the East wing where he’d pointed his gun directly at Lennon and opened fire.
He hadn’t been gunning for anyone else but her.
Alphas Primus was a so-called alpha rights group that had been gaining steam over the past several years since there had been several omega protections laws that had been federalized.
To some they were traditionalists, fighting for the state’s abilities to choose their own laws.
To me they were a bunch of domestic terrorists hell bent on oppressing an entire group of people in the states that already didn’t make protecting omegas their priorities.
