Page 53 of Sexting His Assistant

I stare at him, horrified, and he says it like there are more urgent things than honesty, which apparently there are.

Another burst of gunfire erupts near the ramp.

Security returns fire.

The whole garage flashes red and black and white.

Luka pulls me up so suddenly my knees nearly buckle. His arm clamps around my waist, and we move. Not elegantly. Not like two people escaping in a movie. We stumble, ducking low, half running, half falling toward the open car door while bullets hit somewhere behind us with sickening, metallic thuds.

I hear myself gasp. Luka grunts once.

I feel his blood slick under my hand.

As he drags me toward the open door, I make the mistake of looking back.

Two bodies are on the concrete near the far row of cars, one face-down beside a shattered headlight, the other twisted at an angle no living body should hold. My stomach turns violently, and for one awful second I think I’m going to be sick right there in the garage, with Luka’s blood on my hand and death spread across the floor behind us.

Then I’m shoved into the back seat, hard enough that I hit the opposite door.

Luka follows immediately, folding himself in after me with a controlled violence that would have seemed effortless if I hadn’t seen the wound. The door slams. The car lurches before it is fully closed.

I twist toward him at once. “Your shoulder.”

He leans back against the seat, jaw clenched, one hand pressed hard to the wound. In the dim interior, he looks paler than he should.

Too pale.

“Luka.”

His eyes open.

I don’t even realize I’m touching his face until his gaze drops to my hand.

My fingers are shaking against his jaw.

He looks at me for one long second, and in that second the garage, the gunfire, the blood, all of it falls away just enough for something worse to slip through.

He could have died, and that thought terrifies me.

The car speeds up, tires screaming as we tear out of the garage through a service exit I did not know existed. Behind us, another shot cracks, distant now, swallowed by concrete and distance.

I press harder against his shoulder because I don’t know what else to do.

He inhales sharply.

“Sorry,” I say, voice breaking.

“Don’t be.”

“Don’t be sorry that you got shot?”

“I’ve had worse.”

“That is not comforting.”

“It wasn’t meant to be.”

“Then stop speaking.”