Page 265 of Things We Left Behind
He pulled the trigger just as the first cop hit the second floor. I dodged to the side and kept coming like a freight train.
I drew my fist back and let it fly. It connected with his jaw, and Wylie Ogden crumpled like he was made of paper.
The gun was right there. I could pick it up and put an end to him, to all the pain he’d caused over the course of his lifetime. But I was better than that. I was better than men like Ogden and my father. I had Sloane to prove it. I had a lifetime with her ahead of me, and nothing was going to endanger that.
Nash entered the room, weapon drawn, vest on over what looked like a decent suit. “Suspect is down,” he reported into his radio as he eyed me. “We good?”
I nodded curtly. “Yeah.”
“Thank Christ. I didn’t want the paperwork on this.”
“You might want to let him wake up before you personally slap the cuffs on him. He put your name on the list, not Dilton.”
“Fucker,” Nash muttered. “He’s lucky Lina’s not here. Hey, you’re bleeding.”
“Fuck.”
“Lucian!” A blond and pink blur flew at me, and Sloane launched herself into my arms.
“Go easy on him, Sloaney,” Nash instructed. “He’s shot.”
“He shot you?” She tried to wriggle free.
“Where do you think you’re going?” I demanded.
“I’m going to kill him,” she announced, heading for the door.
I nipped her around the waist and pulled her back.
“No, you’re not. I don’t want our first time post-vasectomy reversal to be in a conjugal trailer.”
She growled in response. Laughing, I carried her to the porch swing where EMTs converged on us.
“She wouldn’t let us fix her up until you came out,” the first explained as he began to clean Sloane’s wound. She winced and I anchored her to my side.
“Are you okay? Does it hurt?” I asked gruffly.
“Only when I smile, which is going to suck for tomorrow when two of our best friends get married.”
“I hate when you hurt,” I confessed.
“I’m not too fond of you having a gunshot wound, big guy.”
I dropped a kiss on the top of her head.
“I have bad news,” Sloane said, plucking at the skirt of her dress.
“What?”
“Besides my dress being ruined, it looks like one of the shots went through the window in Dad’s study and hit the lower branch of the cherry tree. It broke when I climbed down.”
It looked as though we all would be carrying the scars from this day.
“We’ll fix it,” I promised her. If I had to call in a team of fucking tree surgeons, there was no way I was going to let evil and greed destroy something so precious to me.
“This is a clean through-and-through,” said the other EMT as she examined my wound. “An inch or two higher and we’d have had a real problem.”
Sloane clung to my hand in silence as they patched us up.
