Page 194 of Into These Eyes
As my knees hit the floor, Reid wrenches the gun from my failing grip. When he takes a step back, the hallway walls grow fuzzy.
Then the fucker laughs. “I watched that worthless piece of shit leave hours ago, arsehole. Give it up.”
I stare at him, my mind drifting, blurring. He’s not looking at my face. He’s looking at my dick. I glance down. No. Not my dick. At the blood pumping from the hole in my gut. Blood that’s running down my leg and slicking the floorboards.
He raises the gun, and as I fall forward, I manage to grab his ankle. With everything I’ve got, I yank it toward me and hold on.
He crashes to the floor, and I hear thatpopagain. But no pain this time.
“Get Benny!”I yell, barely louder than a whisper.
The pain from the bullet scorches my insides and dims my vision, but I keep going after him, pulling at his jeans, using them to drag myself up his body.
He squirms beneath me, our eyes locking. The only thing looking back at me is determination and hatred.
As a wave of weakness loosens my grip on him, the heel of his shoe connects with my temple.
The foggy world fills with bright sparks, then threatens to thrust me into darkness. I fight it with everything I have. I need to save her. I can’t let him take her from this world. She’s too precious, too kind, and loving, and good. She’ll survive my death, but I won’t survive hers. If thereisany surviving. I’m not so sure right now.
When the world swims into focus, Reid’s looming above me, the gun pointed at my head.
“Get Benny,” I croak.
A thump comes from the bedroom, sending Reid’s attention to the open door. With the pathetic amount of strength I have left, I try to grip his leg to drop him to the floor again.
No longer amused, he shakes me free, raises his foot and brings it down on the bullet wound in my abdomen.
I think I cry out, but I can’t be sure. The world’s spinning away, darkness descending. Warmth pools at my sides, and I know it’s my blood. In contrast, there’s a deep cold seeping from the inside of my useless body, radiating outward. I desperately try to draw on the strength I found that first week in prison. The night those pricks cornered me. That feral animal still lives within me and it’s fighting like fuck to get out. But I hadn’t been shot back then. I’d had complete control of my body. Not this time. No matter how hard I try, it won’t cooperate.
With no concept of how much time has passed, feeling like I’m diminishing into nothingness, the last blurry thing I see is the hallway. Empty.
“Get Benny,” I whisper, over and over, when all I want to say isI love you, I love you, I love you.
As the darkness finally claims me, a gunshot blasts through the house.
Chapter 46
Gavin
Light bleeds into the darkness behind my closed lids, creeping in with flashes of memory. Something I don’t want any part of.
I’m floating, untethered from my body.
There’s no pain.
Just the comfort of nothingness.
And I embrace it.
I can’t be sure if seconds, hours or days have passed, but there’s something insidious squirming inside me. A foreboding lurking beneath the surface of this floating comfort. The nothingness buries a truth I can’t quite grasp.
Dread. Seeping in around the edges, tugging and seeking a way inside. I can’t let it. I won’t.
When a warm hand squeezes my arm, I let the nothingness take me back down into sleep, into that safe place where there is no reality, no pain. Where my heart doesn’t hurt.
The next time consciousness tugs at me, I’m no longer numb.
I move a little, gasping as the pain snaps my grainy eyes open.
