Page 273 of Cross Checked
“No isn’t just a sentence, Luke.” The words came out barely above a whisper, but they landed. I saw the exact second they did. “It’s a whole fucking sentence.”
Then his body sagged, and whatever had been left of him went still.
I wasn’t sorry.
I was bleeding out on concrete, my lung refusing to work, my abdomen on fire, my body already starting to fail beneath me, but regret never came. Maybe it should have. Maybe a better man would’ve found some moral line in the middle of all that blood and knelt there, horrified by what his own hands had done.
I didn’t.
Luke Dempsey was dead, and all I cared about was that Bliss was safe.
And for me, in that hallway, that was the only math that mattered.
I let him fall because I didn’t have the strength to lower him, and because I wasn’t good enough to care whether the concrete was kind. His last breath expelled with a heavy, final sound that seemed too small for the thing he had been in this world.
For a second, I stayed on my knees as breathing became work, then impossible.
I pressed one hand to my side, then the other to the wound lower in my abdomen, but there was too much blood and not enough pressure and my fingers didn’t seem to know what I wanted from them anymore. My chest pulled tight again,refusing to fill all the way. Every inhale came shallow and sharp, dragging wet pain through the left side of my body.
I made it to my knees, then fell sideways until my shoulder hit the wall, and I slid down it, leaving a smear of red against the pale concrete. The fluorescent lights buzzed overhead, too bright and too far away. My phone was somewhere. Luke had taken it. Maybe in his pocket. Maybe thrown in a trash can. Maybe sitting twenty feet away like some stupid, meaningless prize that had gotten me into this hallway.
Bliss was outside, and I just wanted her.
I planted one hand on the floor and tried to push myself up, but it was useless.
My body didn’t move.
That was new.
And completely unacceptable.
I tried again, harder this time, and pain ripped through me so violently my vision went black at the edges. My elbow gave out. I went down onto my side, cheek hitting cold concrete, breath tearing in and out of me in broken, shallow pulls.
I stared down the corridor toward the distant turn that led back to the main hall.
I heard footsteps.
For one small second, I thought maybe Luke was moving again, and whatever was left of my body tried to drag itself back into the fight on pure hatred and defective survival instinct. My fingers scraped against the concrete, searching for the knife, for anything I could use if that piece of shit somehow found his way out of hell and decided to crawl toward me and finish me off.
My hand closed around nothing.
Awesome.
Dying on arena concrete, one lung valiantly fighting for my life, and I couldn’t even locate the murder weapon.
Very impressive final performance from the captain of the Fury.
The footsteps got faster.
“Mercer?”
Ryan.
Relief hit so hard it almost felt like pain, which was rude considering pain had already overcommitted to the evening.
I tried to answer, but nothing came out.
“Cade?”
