Page 138 of Forever Dark
She pulled them from his belt, snapped one bracelet shut around the right wrist, then the other.Metal clicked.Final.Pruitt sagged for a second, chest pumping.
Selena kept her knee in his back anyway.
Only when she was certain he was no longer going anywhere did she look at Connor properly.
Blood had run down into his eyebrow and along one cheek.A scrape scored his jaw.He was breathing hard, shoulders rising and falling, but alert.
“You hit?”she asked.
Connor sat back against the bed frame and touched the side of his head, then looked at the blood on his fingertips as if annoyed to find it there.
“One bullet grazed me,” he said.“Mostly pride and decorative damage.”
Selena reached for his shoulder, turned him slightly, and checked the line of blood at his temple.Not a penetrating wound.A graze and a split scalp from the earlier impact.Ugly-looking.Survivable.
“You’re going to milk this,” she said, her lungs still burning.
Connor managed a faint grin.“I deserve a lot of sympathy for all of this, don’t you think?”
Despite everything, despite the gunshots and the stink of blood and the man cuffed under her knee, Selena smiled.
“I’m not quite ready to give that to you just yet.”
Sirens rose in the distance then, faint but coming fast.
A moment later boots pounded up the walkway outside and Arnold appeared in the doorway with his weapon drawn, chest heaving, eyes wide behind the sights.
He took in the wrecked room.Connor on the floor.Selena kneeling on Pruitt’s back.The shattered lamp.The broken door hanging off its frame.Blood.Guns.General ruin.
Then he lowered the muzzle a fraction and said, with real disappointment, “Aw.Is it over?”
Connor let his head fall back against the bed frame for one second.“Yes, Arnold, it’s over.”
Arnold grimaced.“I really drove like hell for this.”
Connor pointed weakly toward the room with one finger.“Don’t worry.There’ll be a ton of paperwork, and I wouldn’t want to keep all of that to myself.”
Selena caught her breath and allowed herself a laugh.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Selena sat on the hood of her rental car with both hands wrapped around the edge of the metal and her eyes fixed on the sky.
The sheriff’s department behind her had gone mostly quiet.A light still burned in dispatch.Another glowed in one of the back offices where somebody had likely been trapped by reports, evidence tags, and the long bureaucratic trail that always followed violence.Out front, though, the night had settled properly.Crickets stitched the dark together.A breeze moved through the flag by the entrance and set it to giving a soft, tired snap now and then.
Above all that stretched a sky the city had no right to compete with.
Black and broad and crowded with stars.
She had forgotten how many you could see on a good clear Harlan County night.
Or maybe she had not forgotten.Maybe she had trained herself not to think about them because remembering meant thinking about the rest.The roads.The fields.The old hurts she had once sworn distance would solve.
A door opened behind her.
Boots crossed the concrete with no hurry in them.
Connor came to the car and leaned against the fender for a second before hoisting himself up beside her with the careful stiffness of a man who had been thrown around a motel room and was feeling every bit of it now.The cut at his temple had been cleaned and taped.A fresh shirt hid most of the mess from earlier, but not the fact of it.He smelled faintly of aftershave and outside air.
