Page 74 of Stolen Hearts

My vision blurs. My core tightens to a steel ball as his thumb rolls across my clit.

“Be a fucking good girl and fucking come for me, baby girl.”

Oh fuck.

I hear his zipper yank down, and my eyes go wide.

Oh holy fuck.

He’s going to fuck me.

He’s really going to fuck me.

This is really happening. I’m about to lose my virginity to CASTLE.

“Come for me, and then I’m going to fuck you like the bad girl you are.”

The steel ball in my core turns white and then explodes with the force of the sun. I scream, my body twitching and writhing. My fingernails claw at my own legs, trapped by my panties. My toes curl on the floor as spasms rock through my body and I shatter into a million pieces.

My head is swimming. My heart pounds like a piston against my chest as I pant into the cushions. I swear, I’m going to have a stroke.

…And that’s when the front-facing windows across the roomexplodein a hail of glass and mortar.

I scream as the moment shatters together with the windows, and I’m instantly frozen by the sound of the gunfire blasting through the night.

Castle moves instantly, without flinching.

He grabs me and yanks me across the room, throwing me behind another couch and flipping it onto its side between me and the window.

I’m still screaming as thundering gunfire explodes through the front wall and the ruins of the windows, sending bits of paper from the shelves of books flying into the air like confetti. Castle bolts across the room, hurdling a table and then yanking open a closet, exposing a big metal cabinet. He thumbs in a code, tears the door open, and suddenly whirls, a rifle in his hands.

“STAY DOWN!” he roars, spinning around, dropping to one knee, and lifting the stock to his shoulder in a movement so practiced, so routine to him, it’s almost terrifying.

His shoulders tense up. His breathing slows. I scream again and cover my ears on the floor as he starts to fire back through the shattered glass before suddenly, everything goes quiet and still but for the thunder of my pulse in my ears, followed by the sound of approaching sirens wailing in the distance.

18

CASTLE

She’s unhurt.

For some reason, that’s my single thought after it’s over. Hell, it was consuming ninety percent of my thought process even as I was yanking out the rifle I’ve had in that gun safe for the last nine years “as a precautionary measure”. Making sure Callie wasn’t hurt even had a negative impact on my ability to focus and breathe through the shots when I returned fire.

Which, ironically, is probably the only reason that motherfucker got away.

The shooter was up on a neighboring rooftop across the street with a fifty-caliber—a gun big enough to blow holes through the front wall of the library and turn half the books inside to confetti. I mean shit, it even blew the fucking door off the goddamn room behind us.

But whoever it was got out of thererealquick when I started shooting back. And I’m even pretty sure I hit him somewhere around the shoulder as he was bolting.

Callie is unhurt, though. That’s what matters the most, now that the smoke has cleared and the adrenaline has worn off.

My confusion over my concern for her safety isn’t that I’m a cold, heartless shithead. Of course I was worried about protecting her. But thelevelto which I felt that protectiveness, and the pure unmitigated rage I felt toward a person trying to cause her harm wasn’t just regular anger, or the instinctive safeguarding of a noncombatant.

It felt supremely personal. It felt like the level of protectiveness and fury I’d have felt if someone were shooting at Neve, or Eilish—maybe even more.

That’swhat’s confusing to me. Almost as confusing as the rage I felt when I walked into that bar and saw another man’s hand holding hers.

I’ve had a chance to comb over the shooter’s perch across the street. Whoever he—or she—is, they’re a trained professional. Even in their rush to get away once I started returning fire, they managed to take every single shell casing with them. The whole area’s also been doused with bleach, which means even if I did clip them and make them bleed, any possible DNA sample is gone.

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