“Play it!” Drew barks.
“Christ, fine,” Fitz mumbles, taps a button, then the video begins rolling with no sound.
Knowing what’s about to transpire, my throat dries, and my palms dampen, but I force myself to watch the raw footage of what has only been blurry snapshots until this point.
Annie turns to me, and the look on her face says more than any words could. Adoration, desire, she was gazing at me all dreamy, like I was the main character in one of her stupid shows—and I hadn’t a fucking clue.
It’s unfathomable how I missed the signs and misread her intent as she leans in and bites her lip.
All eyes are glued to the screen when she throws herself at me, and the silence becomes deafening. But when I push her off a couple of seconds later, way too fucking hard, thunder echoes off the walls.
“Fuck,” I say under my breath. I always knew I’d been rough and regretted not being able to control myself, but I didn’t realize it was that bad. I didn’t know she’d hit the corner of the coffee table so hard it made her bleed.
I wince when I watched her crawling away from me, so fraught she whacked her head. I tried to help her up, but she fought like I was a fucking predator.
It happened so incredibly fast, but this replay seems to be in slow motion. All the things I should have noticed then, are blinding me now. The red light on the security panel indicated a breach, and the motion light on the porch flashed bright. My phone had fallen on the floor, but it, too, was warning me. Then the door handle rattled, and the lock was destroyed from the first bullet that flew that night.
I looked over, and the door flew open. I reached for my weapon, but I was too late.
He pulled the trigger one, two, three times, each with precision. The burning pain is still raw and the smell of searing flesh coils in my gut as if those bullets were shredding through me in real time.
Through all of it, I managed to throw myself on Annie, but that was the last thing I remembered.
I link my fingers behind my neck as I watch Annie on screen falling apart as she tried to put me back together. There’s no sound on the tape, but a faraway part of my mind remembers her heartbreaking cries. Her emotions are so visceral that I know every man in this room can feel her terror as if they were there. You’d have to be soulless not to.
She attempted to roll my lifeless body off of her four times before she was successful. She did everything she could to stop the blood oozing out of me, frantic in her attempt to save me, all while Don remained a useless fucking statue.
I can read her lips. “He wasn’t hurting me,” she shrieked. “What did you do? What did you do?”
I’d later find out that Drew had, in fact, sent in another man to take over for me. Despite my insisting that nobody was taking me away from Annie and that I had everything under control, I can’t deny that his insistence was ultimately what saved me.
So that’s why Shep was there. He stormed inside and, with a face made of stone, aimed his gun at Don, who finally dropped his. Shep threw me over his shoulder, then raced me to a hospital.
But now it was just Don and Annie on the screen, both with looks I’ve never seen before—his a cross between terror, shock, guilt, and regret and hers filled with nothing but guttural agony. She was covered in blood, tears streaking through the crimson on her cheeks. Don took a step toward her, and when his hand grazed her arm, she lost it. She shoved him away, screaming, and then pounded on her father’s chest over and over, so hard she couldn’t keep her footing.
And then she crumpled to the ground.
The screen goes black. The room is still. The men are speechless, and so am I.
For approximately four seconds. “Fuck you,” I growl at Drew. “You feel better now? Your superior ego inflated enough? Get what you needed shoving my failure in not only my face, but everyone else’s?”
He has the balls to look confused. “That’s not—”
“That’s exactly what you did.” I stab my finger at him. “But if you think I earned that shit, fine. You win. You got what you want. Now, can we get back to why we’re here in the first place, or do you want to show everyone the night my knee went out and I fell down the stairs before we get back to our fucking jobs?”
“You done?” Drew asks, getting to his feet. “Anyone else got something they want to say?” He holds his hands up and looks around.
Fights between us brothers don’t happen at work, so I’m not that surprised Parker is the only one who chimes in. “That was a dick move and completely unnecessary.”
Drew addresses the room. “Our number one priority is the safety of not just clients and victims, but also the team members involved. What you just saw was an isolated incident, but an incident nonetheless.” He clenches his jaw, then catches my eyes. “I don’t give a shit if you’re pissed at me as long as my point penetrated, that point being that when emotions are involved, bad shit happens. And really bad shit happened to you once already, I don’t want it to happen again.”
“It penetrated. Just like those three bullets did through me. And I’ll tell you the same thing I had to tell Annie. That”—I point at the blank screen—“was my fault. Not hers. Not anyone else’s. I live with that failure every day, not you.”
“It wasn’t a failure. You’re not a failure,” Drew says low.
I shake my head and stare at the wall. “Right.”
“I thought you were dead.” My gaze swings back to him. “I was alerted to the breach. I watched that happen in real time, and I thought you were dead. So forgive my reaction to discovering the same woman you took those bullets for showed up in the middle of the night, and then hours later, you take off without following themost basicsafety protocols.”
