heart while Grayson pops a bullet between the eyes of the two men flanking him. There’s another six to be contained, but my focus must remain on one. Leesa.
Her finger hasn’t moved for the trigger of the gun she’s holding to Tobias’s head, but that doesn’t mean she’s stable. The instant she realizes everything I just said to her is true, she’ll go from calm to deranged in under a second.
An appreciation for perfect hearing pummels into me when Leesa’s howling squeal overtakes the hiss of my bullet rotating through the air. This time next week, she’ll be wishing I had aimed for her head. Instead, I ignore the pleas pumping out of her watering eyes and take a second shot at her right shoulder. It has her gun falling away from Tobias’s temple before her finger gets anywhere near the trigger and has her spare hand shooting up to apply pressure to her wound.
She either applies pressure or bleeds out like Tobias is in the process of doing.
“We need a medic!” As bullets halo my head, I carefully lie Tobias onto the shell-case riddled floor. “Just hold on, all right? Help is on its way.” After tearing a large swatch of material from my undershirt, I bunch it up then press it to Tobias’s wound. The way it spurts at me when I switch his hands with mine reveals a vital artery has been severed. He’s seconds from death. “We need a medic, now! He’s not going to hold out for much longer.”
“B-b J-j…” Excluding my mother, Tobias is the only one who has called me BJ the past six years. “I-I-I…”
I watch him through both the eyes of an agent and a mentee when he slithers his bloodstained hand to a little pocket in the front of his bulletproof vest. After pulling out a tiny slip of paper, he attempts to hand it to me. I can’t take it. If I do, he’ll bleed out even quicker than he is.
“Izzy. Izzy,” he stutters out, tapping on the sheet of paper.
“Your daughter?” My daftness can be easily excused. He’s not a fan of nicknames, so he’s only ever called her Isabelle.
When confirmation flares through his eyes, I say, “It’s okay. She’ll be okay. I’ll look after her.” I peer over my shoulder to the members of Tobias’s team not gunned down in a motherfucking shitstorm. There are more dead agents than militants. “Where’s the medic!”
I return my focus to Tobias when he covers my warm hands with his dead-cold ones. “G-g-give her this.” My brows furrow when he adds, “Make s-s-sure she knows.”
When he shoves the slither of paper at me again, I snatch it out of his hand, dump it down the front of my bulletproof vest before screaming for the medic. Tobias convulsed through his last two pleas, and the cooling of his skin is all too familiar. It’s as cold and as white as Joey’s was when I attempted to resuscitate him.
The memories it bombards me with are sick and twisted. They have me responding in the way a deranged man would. Instead of pressing my hands down on a wound no longer pulsating since Tobias’s chest is still and lifeless, I wrap them around my Sig Sauer P226, storm to Leesa cowering in the corner of the room, grip her chin, then ram the barrel of my gun between her teeth.
She doesn’t recoil or flinch. She begs for me to kill her, to free her from the hell she’s about to emerge in, to let her join Paavo on the other side.
I almost answer her pleas.
The only reason I don’t is because Associate Deputy Director Agent Rogers tells me to stand down. He walks through the carnage being highlighted by the spotlights of helicopters hovering above, his shoulders high, his brows pinched.
From the stories Grayson shared, his father hasn’t been on the field in years, so his arrival on the scene tonight announces that an ambush by a Sicilian criminal entity will seem like a walk in the park after the department heads are finished with Tobias’s team. Heads are about to roll, so I may as well go down in a blaze of glory.
The guns of my comrades swing my way when I discharge three bullets into the brick wall Leesa’s head is resting on. Her cheek will hold the scold of my bullet casings for years to come, but it will be nothing compared to the wound she inflicted on Tobias’s daughter’s heart.
3
Brandon
My