The moment I collided with his broad back, he was spinning with a roar of rage. On instinct, his hand wrapped around my throat, and he held me close, reaching around to his back to grab his gun, but it was too late for him.
The moment our bodies had made contact, I’d moved without thinking and pulled the thing free.
“Bitch!” He said it with so much rage and hatred, spit splattered across my cheek, and I saw Trigger’s attention move to me from the corner of my eyes.
I mentally pleaded with him to keep his attention on me instead of Drew. Watch me die! But Trigger didn’t care about me in the grand scheme of things. He cared about winning, and I now happened to be in the perfect place to watch him murder Drew mercilessly.
In a pure moment of desperation, my heel slammed into the Nav’s instep before I bounced my foot from the concrete and swung my knee up, sending his balls traveling to his throat, the pain forcing him to release his grip on me.
As I stumbled away, my first instinct was to check on Drew. Trigger was already bearing down on him with his knife raised, ready to end it all while Drew was out cold.
It just couldn’t end this way.
It couldn’t.
Fear made a scream form on my lips, but fear also made me swallow it whole.
Drew’s life was now in my hands, and I only had a second to make the call.
I knew that I wasn’t a good enough shot to hit a movingtarget, and the only person I knew for sure who could, was more than ten feet away on the other side of a fight. There was no way to make a run to Eric, and I turned to find him in desperation and found him frozen, his eyes on Drew and Trigger with horror painted over his features.
“Eric.” The sound came out strangled, yet he heard it, and he looked right at me.
One glance.
Eric gave me that one glance, and I risked everything by tossing the gun through the air with all the strength and determination I had.
It was a one in a million shot.
A risk I shouldn’t have taken, and when Eric snatched the gun from the air and closed his hand around the grip easily, it made me blink in shock. One twist of his wrist and he had the barrel aimed at me in a heartbeat.
“Down.”
I fell to my knees and heard the shot just as the shocking and painful impact of my knees on concrete rocked through my body. I scrambled on hands and knees, spinning just in time to catch the look of amused shock on Trigger’s face as a drop of blood trickled slowly from a small hole in his temple.
His eyes remained open, a look of shock forever etched on his face, and the knife tipped over the edges of his fingers, falling from his hand as his muscles seized.
The moment Trigger’s body fell, so did the silence of the warehouse, making the impact of him hitting the concrete ring out all around us.
The fighting had stopped as suddenly as it had begun.
Yet, my thoughts were on one thing and one thing only.
Drew!
The scream of his name in my mind was so clear. I was moving, scrambling on hands and knees toward him before I’d made a conscious thought to do so. I reached out with force,my fingers finding the chilled skin of his, the screaming truth of our reality now brutal in my mind as I crawled closer.
No, no, no, no, no.
Drew still wasn’t moving.
He was cold.
I raised my head to scream at anyone to get help, but the sound was muted as a blast came from the front of the building. An army in black stormed the room like a flood in the desert. The white ATF badge emblazoned across their chests as they held their guns raised on the men bleeding and bruised, all staring at Drew and me with the same horror I felt inside.
Pressing my head against Drew’s in resignation, I wrapped an arm over his motionless body in an attempt to protect him.
The way he’d given his everything to try and protect me.