Page 104 of Deathtoll
That last thing she said made a lot of Murph’s pain go away. “We’re going to talk about this at the earliest opportunity. Right now, I have to grab my phone.” He hurried around the building.
The second he had the phone in hand, he called Cirelli. “I’m all right. I’m with Kate,” he said as he headed back to her. “Asael is dead.”
“Where the hell are you?” Cirelli demanded. “I sent agents to the location you texted.”
“They didn’t come.”
A pause while Cirelli talked to someone on the other end. “There are two Nowak’s Antiques. Their old place and their new place. I’m sorry, Murph. How dead is Asael?”
“Bullet through the heart. Would be hard to be deader. I gotta go.” Murph hung up and ran toward the car with Kate next to him.
“You’re bleeding through your overalls.” She grabbed his wrist. “Give me the phone. I’m calling 9-1-1.”
He glanced at the dark stain spreading on his chest. “It’s barely anything. I’m sure the ambulances are busy.” Then they were at the car, the key still in the ignition, thank God. He stopped with his hand on the roof. “Tell me you know I love you and it has nothing to do with forced proximity or any other bullshit, and I promise to heal instantly.”
“What if I just activated your protective instincts, which, let’s face it, are pretty overdeveloped from having been a police officer and a soldier?” She pushed him out of the way to get to the driver’s-side door. “I’m driving.”
He went around to the passenger side. “First of all, I’m hurt that my protective instincts are the only overdeveloped thing I have that you noticed.” He got in. “Second of all, I’ve protected plenty of people when I worked in the PD, and plenty of people when I was in the Reserves. A lot of them were women. I never felt about any of them like I feel about you. So, please, give me some credit here that I know my own mind.”
“Okay.” She turned the key in the ignition.
He stared at her. “Okay? Just like that? After putting me through hell for the past three months?”
She swung the car around. “I could have lost you for real. Permanently. I don’t want to live without you. Even if I could, I don’t want to.” She handed him the first aid kit from her lap. “Please bandage yourself up. I can’t think when you’re bleeding.”
“We’re starting over.” He laid down the law as he rifled through the contents. “Once a month, we’re going to have a fight. We’re not breaking up again because you get worried that we never argue. We’ll have a spirited disagreement about something. And then we’ll have makeup sex.”
God, he couldn’t wait to get his hands on her.
“We’re in the middle of an emergency.” She reproached him, but didn’t sound terribly offended. “Don’t look at me like that.”
Chapter Thirty-Two
Kate
“Are you sure you’re all right?” Kate glanced at Murph as she drove.
She’d gotten to him in time. Murph was alive, and Asael was dead. Little else mattered.
“Good as new.” He finished bandaging the thumb with the missing nail. He’d already slapped Band-Aids on all the cuts on his chest. “What I want to know is, how did Asael get you? How the hell did he get past Hunter?”
She winced. “He didn’t. I did.”
And then she explained to Murph how all that happened.
He grew quieter and quieter, a tornado brewing on the passenger seat.
She told him about the part when Asael had forced her to inject herself and Emma. “Some kind of paralytic, but I’m not sure what.”
“What the hell?” His voice was low, tight, dark. “What the…” He shook his head as if he didn’t trust himself with more. “Kate…”
“I know! Okay? What other choice did I have? He was pointing a gun.”
“You shouldn’t have been there in the first place. What were you thinking? Why would you risk yourself like that?”
“I had to try to save Emma. Like you had to come to save me. Like I had to come back to save you.”
He looked away from her, out the windshield, as if he didn’t trust himself to look at her. She had a feeling this wasn’t the last fight they were going to have about the subject.
