Page 74 of Forbidden Protector

"He's already got glass on you. Wrong angle for me to⁠—"

The channel doesn't go dead. It goes worse than dead. I hear him draw one breath, sharp, the sound of a man about to move his whole body faster than a body was built to move, and somewhere above me, catching the last thin light off the moon, something flashes once.

Not toward the building.

Toward me.

TWENTY-THREE

HOLT

Through my own glass I catch it too. The same half-second warning she must have caught from the ground: moonlight sliding off his scope, and the angle of it wrong. Not aimed at the building. Aimed at her.

I don't have a clean shot at him. I don't wait for one.

I come up off the scree on my knees and then my feet, no crouch, no cover, standing up into moonlight on purpose. Standing up into moonlight is the only way to put myself between his scope and where it wants to go.

The report comes a half second later, flat and short, swallowed almost whole by the creek.

She's down. Then she's moving, rolling for the base of the elevator wall, fast, not hit, and something in my chest lets go so hard it nearly takes my knees with it.

The second shot has my name on it.

I feel it before I hear it.

My right hand goes wrong. Not pain yet. Wrong, the way a thing goes wrong a full second before the body agrees to report it.

I'm on the ground. I don't remember getting there.

"Holt."

Her voice, close. Too close for how little time should have passed, except it hasn't been little. Scree is slow even in daylight, and she climbed four hundred yards of it in the dark on a dead run. Ten minutes, maybe more. It only felt like one.

"Holt, look at me."

I look at her instead of my hand. Her face is doing the thing I've only seen it do twice before. Once over Jacob in the snow, once in a frozen parking lot at midnight. Not panic. It’s the other thing. Focused. Terrifying.

"Talk to me. Where?"

"Hand." Flat, reporting, the same register I use for wind calls. "Right hand."

Her belt's off and around my forearm before I finish the word.

"Can you feel your fingers?"

"Some of them."

"That's not an answer."

"It's the only one I've got left in me tonight."

I make myself look down. A man who won't look at his own wound is a man lying about how bad it is, and I've never once had that luxury.

It's bad. Bone, tendon, this range. Whatever this hand does for the rest of my life, it isn't going to be what it did before Voss's second shot.

The rifle lies twenty feet off, thrown clear of my hand by the impact itself. I don't reach for it. That decision belongs to a hand that no longer answers to me.

"Where is he?"