7KIERAN
“Then what areyou still doing there?”
Webb immediately turned around after we pulled into the reserved parking spot at Meridian Gallery and dropped me off at my car, his expression unreadable as he closed the door behind me. But I didn’t have the time to decipher what it meant.
I started the engine and tore out of the lot, every red light and sharp turn amplifying the chaos in my chest. The GPS coordinates my team sent me were all that mattered—everything else, including the biggest business opportunity of my career, blurred into irrelevance.
My phone buzzed incessantly with updates from Sarah.
Phone signal stopped moving.
Last location: Warehouse Row, Alley C. No movement for 3 minutes.
Three minutes felt like an eternity as I pushed the car harder, weaving through traffic with manic precision. Muscle memory kept my hands steady on the wheel, but my mind was a storm of worst-case scenarios. Cross Security had trained me to stay calm, to assess threats and respond—but this wasn’t aprofessional situation. This was Willa, and every instinct in my body screamed to get to her now, no matter the cost.
The city lights blurred past my windshield, red and white streaks bleeding together as time warped into something elastic and cruel. And then neon gave way to broken streetlamps. The buildings spaced out. Warehouses replaced storefronts.
The rational part of my brain kept trying to convince me I was overreacting, that Sarah’s concerns about erratic movement patterns could have innocent explanations. But the part of me that remembered Willa as a seventeen-year-old girl hiding behind Jude’s protective shadow knew better. The part that spent years learning to read danger in people’s faces and body language recognized something broken in her eyes at the gallery—something that didn’t belong to nerves alone.
When I heard the gunshot echo off the warehouse buildings, my blood turned to ice. I slammed on the brakes. The car screeched, tires skidding on wet pavement, and before the engine could settle, I was already out of the car.
The smell hit me first—metallic blood mixed with urban decay, the unmistakable scent of violence in a place where it often went unnoticed.
Then I saw her.
Willa lay crumpled against a brick wall at the end of the alley, her thin nightgown drenched, clinging, unmistakably red. Her right shoulder was torn open by what was clearly a bullet wound, and she pressed her left hand against it in a futile attempt to stop the bleeding.
“Willa?” I whispered as I ran toward her. “Can you hear me?”
She looked up at me with unfocused eyes, her face pale and stunned. Her lips moved, but no sound came out. Blood loss and shock had already begun to pull her away from me.
I dropped to my knees beside her and immediately assessed the damage. The bullet had passed through her shoulder, whichwas both good and bad news. Good, because the slug wasn’t still in her body. Bad, because exit wounds were often worse than entry wounds, and she was losing blood fast.
“Don’t worry,” I said, stripping off my suit jacket and pressing it against the wound. “I’ve got you now. You’re going to be okay.”
She tried to say something, her mouth moving soundlessly, her eyes struggling to focus on my face. I leaned closer, holding my breath, but whatever she was trying to tell me was lost in the haze of trauma and blood loss.
I scooped her up as carefully as I could and cradled her against my chest. She was so light, so fragile, and the way her head lolled against my shoulder terrified me more than any threat I had ever faced in my professional life. Her heartbeat fluttered against my chest, uneven and too fast.
Getting her to my car was the fastest option. The nearest hospital was only eight minutes away, and calling an ambulance would have meant waiting for them to navigate the maze of warehouse-district streets. Every second counted, and I refused to give any of them away.
I laid her across the back seat of my BMW, panic clawing at my throat as blood soaked through my fingers. I tore the hem from my undershirt, twisting it into a makeshift tourniquet and cinching it tightly above the wound. It wasn’t perfect, but it slowed the bleeding.
Once it was secure, I scrambled into the driver’s seat and took off, glancing back every few seconds to make sure she was still breathing.
At the hospital, I handled everything the way I handled all crises—with calm efficiency and the kind of connections that money and influence could buy. I made calls to ensure she got the best trauma surgeon available, dealt with the police whenthey arrived to take her statement, and when the staff asked about her insurance, I simply handed them my card.
What I didn’t do was call her husband.
The police asked about next of kin, about who they should contact, and I gave them Jude’s information, even though I knew he was deployed and unreachable. I told them I was a family friend, which wasn’t exactly a lie, and that I would take responsibility for her care until her brother could be reached.
Detective Morrison was the one who interviewed me about finding her—a tired-looking woman in her forties who had clearly worked too many cases like this one.
“You said you were driving through the area when you heard the gunshot?” she asked, consulting her notes.
“That’s right.”
“Any particular reason you were in the Riverside District at midnight?”
