“Give Goddard a little more time,” Hugh said.Let me figure out what’s happening inside first. Let me hear from Wren.
Quandt shook his head. “It’s my understanding that there were shots fired…”
“But not in the last three hours,” Hugh pointed out. “I’ve been able to keep him calm.” He looked at Quandt. “If you go in, can you guarantee that you won’t lose a hostage?”
The SWAT team commander’s jaw tightened. “Of course not,” he said.
Both men turned to Chief Monroe. “Hugh will continue to run with it for now,” the chief replied.
Chief Monroe put his hand on Hugh’s shoulder, turning him away from the SWAT commander. He spoke in a firm, quiet voice. “Youdoknow what you’re doing, don’t you?”
“Yes, sir,” Hugh said, as if hostage negotiation was a set of rules you could follow, rather than a game where the players made up the rules as they went. “I have to get back to…I need to…”
He moved to his makeshift desk again and grabbed his phone.
There was no message, and the dots were gone, too.
He texted again:WREN?
—
WHEN THE SHOOTER HAD YANKEDopen the door to her hiding place, Wren thought her heart was going to burst. She barely managed to hide her phone in her sock before he grabbed her wrist and pulled so hard that she cried out. She managed to claw his face and drew blood, a triumph about which she was supremely happy. He dragged her into the waiting room in the front of the clinic, the one with the windows where you could see out but people on the street couldn’t see in. She landed sprawled on her belly in front of a handful of people.
There was a woman in sweats, who had freckles all over her face that stood out because she was so pale right now. There was another girl—maybe in her twenties?—with a giant bruise on her forehead. The redheaded lady in scrubs who had opened the closet door earlier and pretended not to see her, and Olive was sitting on the floor. The only male hostage rested his head in her lap and was breathing heavily. His own scrubs had been ripped off at the thigh, and below a belt of fabric and tape, his leg was bloodied.
Her aunt Bex was nowhere.
Wren felt tears spring to her eyes. Was she dead? Had someone dragged her body into another room?
When she was little, and her aunt Bex used to watch her after school while her dad was at work, they did everything Wren wasn’t supposed to do. They ate dessert, and skipped dinner. They watched R-rated movies. Her aunt had promised that not only would she take Wren to get a tattoo when she was eighteen, she would design it for her.
What if neither of them survived that long?
“Tie her hands,” the shooter yelled. “Now!You!” He jerked the gun at the redhead in scrubs.
She took a roll of surgical tape and wrapped it around Wren’s wrists. She was trying to do it loosely, but it was tape, and there was no way Wren was getting free anytime soon. “Are you hurt?” she whispered. “I’m a nurse.”
“I’m okay,” Wren managed. “My aunt…”
“The woman in the closet?”
Wren shook her head. “No. The lady who was shot. Out here.”
“Bex,” the nurse murmured. “She got out.”
Wren collapsed with relief on an empty couch. Aunt Bex was alive. Or at least she had been.
She hoped that the next time she saw Bex, her aunt reamed her for putting her in this situation. She hoped that Bex yelled so loud Wren was brought to tears. She wouldn’t mind if Bex refused to forgive her for the rest of her life. Just so long as shehada rest of her life.
Wren had begged Aunt Bex to bring her here. If she had talked to her dad, maybe they could have made an appointment with a gynecologist. Maybe she would be snagging a lollipop from a basket on her way out. (Did gynecologists even have those? Or were they just for pediatricians’ offices?)
Then again, she never could have asked her father. He didn’t even let her wear spaghetti straps to school. All he knew about Ryan was that they were working together on a chemistry project.
Which was kind of true.
But what was combustible was the two of them. Wren thought about the kisses that made her lips feel like they’d been blistered; about how his hand snaked under her shirt and ignited her skin. She thought of the giddy rush of adrenaline that flooded her when they scrambled apart a breath before Ryan’s mother opened the door, her arms full of groceries.
Had she told her father about Ryan, he would have been waiting on the hairpin turn near the high school to give Ryan a ticket for driving too fast or too slow or too erratically. He would have done a background check. He would have convinced himself that this boy did not deserve Wren.
