Darius’s mouth was dry. His throat hurt a little too. He managed to keep his voice low despite the uncomfortable feeling.
Theo didn’t need to look at his phone or find a clock.
“Just after three in the morning. You’ve been out since yesterday.” He frowned. “You lost a lot of blood. You had to have surgery too.” His finger hovered next to the bandage on Darius’s shoulder. “They had to dig a bullet out of you.”
Darius understood why he was running slower now. He really was medicated. It explained the haze and the dull pain.
“I’m guessing they got it out?”
Theo nodded.
He pointed to Darius’s side.
“You have some pretty intense bruising around there—we guess where you took the impact from the fall through the floor—and there’s also some bad gashes around your thigh area. But other than where you were shot, there’s no stitches. At least, the doctor didn’t tell us if there were.”
When he said the wordus, his gaze went to Winnie on the couch.
Darius waited for him to look back before asking the part of the situation he didn’t understand.
“What about her? Eve. Is she okay?”
Theo nodded again.
“The bullet that lodged into you went through her first, but she got lucky at the angle,” he said. “It went clear through and didn’t do any permanent damage. The doctor even clocked her recovery time at a few weeks as long as she takes her antibiotics.”
Anger seared through Darius.
Eve being shot hadn’t beenluckyin his book.
Not at all.
“The man who did it?” he asked, jaw clenching.
Theo lowered his voice just a bit more.
“Died instantly. Never had a chance to shoot his gun again.”
It hadn’t been the first time Darius had had to take a life in the line of duty. That didn’t mean he was used to it. But seeing as how the man had made the first move—that move being to shoot Eve—he wasn’t overly upset about it.
“What about the second shooter? The woman.”
“A woman carjacked Mr. Gleason at the gas station next to the mill around the time I got down to you and Eve. They caught her on camera and have an APB out on her and the car.” He shook his head. “So far nothing, but the entire department is on it.”
The last thing Darius remembered before blacking out was being in the dark with Eve in a tunnel beneath the residence hall. His eyebrow raised in question.
“When you got down to us?”
Theo went from frowning to brandishing a sheepish smile. He pulled at his earlobe in a fidgeting gesture.
“I kind of followed you yesterday morning.”
Darius almost tilted his head to the side at that.
“You followed us… What do you mean?”
Eve had gone back out of his bedroom window the morning before while Darius had gone through the house, acting like everything was normal. He hadn’t seen Theo at all.
That sheepish smile grew a little.
