“No, Lucca!” the woman screams. “Don’t do this! She’s your daughter! Don’t kill another that you love!”
Mr. Sorrentino’s expression distorts, his face bunches with regret before turning ugly with rage. “I won’t let her. My brother will not go to jail over a Candella! I couldn’t tolerate it then, and I won’t do it now!”
Shoving the woman aside, he ignores her cry as she tumbles to the ground.
“Mom!” Chris yells as the man takes another step closer to killing his daughter.
I can’t let it happen.
I dive forward, ready to tackle Chris to the ground, but the towering guy who was shooting bullets before raises his gun again.
We’re both in the line of fire now but I’m not stopping. All I can think about is protecting Chris.
She gasps, her eyes rounding as she does exactly what I’m trying to do—put my life on the line to save her.
I thought I was playing the hero but it turns out I’m catching one instead.
A gunshot rings out.
I grab Chris just as her body jerks and flops against my chest.
The first thing I feel is warm liquid oozing into my shirt.
“No, no, no. Please, no.” I pull Chris tighter against me.
Another gunshot. My head jerks up in time to see Mr. Sorrentino kill the man who shot Chris. The towering guy drops to the concrete, his head lolling to the side. Chris’s father lowers his gun, his chest heaving, his skin pale when he turns to gape at his daughter.
The woman is screaming. “You killed her! You killed my baby!”
“I just killed the man who shot her!” he growls.
“You’re responsible!” Her body convulses with sobs as she pounds the man’s back. He ignores her rage, standing still while she pummels his back and screams hysterically.
The distant sound of sirens carries through the air behind us. It’s so faint, I have to strain to confirm what I’m hearing.
Mr. Sorrentino snaps out of his stupor and roughly grabs his wife. She wrestles against him as he tugs her towards the SUV. “We must go. It’s too late. It’s too late.”
“No,” the woman sobs. The SUV screeches to a halt beside them. The woman starts struggling that much harder and I look up in time to catch her eye. I don’t know if she can read my mind or what, but something in my expression must give her hope because she goes still and mouths, “Save her.”
I don’t know if I can read minds too, but in this moment, I feel like she’s telling me to take her daughter as far from all of this as possible. Protect her at all costs. She doesn’t just want me to save Chris’s body…she wants me to save her life. To give her a future.
I nod. What else can I do?
Her husband shoves her into the SUV and slams the door shut. They disappear behind the tinted glass and scream out of the dock, nearly running me over as they race past.
“Trey!” Kade shouts, bringing everything back into focus.
I jerk, my mind shifting into action. Lifting Chris into my arms, I run for the bed of the truck. She’s still breathing, still looking at me with tears in her eyes. But blood is soaking into her tank, warning me the clock is ticking. When I lay her down, she whimpers, her face a mask of pain. It breaks my heart.
Riley jumps in the back with me, yanking off his sweater and bunching it against her stomach.
She moans, tears breaking free and running down her cheeks.
“Sorry.” Riley brushes the hair off her face. “But we’ve got to put pressure on the wound. Sounds like the cavalry’s coming though, okay? Everything’s going to be all right.”
The sirens are gradually getting louder. The cavalry. Is that what they’ll really be?
The guilt on Rybeck’s face fires through my brain, followed swiftly by the fact that her freaking father just aimed a gun at her head. Even if she somehow makes it to the witness stand, what’s to say she won’t get shot on the way out of the courthouse? The look of fear on her mother’s face. Her desperate cry.
I can’t risk it.
I won’t.
“Kade, drive!” I shout, pounding the top of the truck.
He whips the window back and gapes at me. “What?”
“We gotta get out of here. I don’t trust those agents, and I’m not putting her in harm’s way.”
“She needs a hospital!” Riley shouts at me.
Chris closes her eyes, her waxy skin nearly changing my resolve.
But then Kade starts gunning it out of the dock. We scream up the road and veer right, disappearing around the corner. By the sound of the sirens, they reach the turnoff just after we split. I don’t envy what they’ll find down there, but as long as they don’t find us, I really can’t care about it.
Adrenaline is pumping through my body, holding off the act of actually processing all this shit.
All I can focus on is saving Chris.
“What the hell are we supposed to do now?” Riley snaps at me.