Was he here to save me? Did my father actually send someone? They’d said yesterday they found someone else. Wait—is he pointing the gun at me?
My arm is yanked back hard enough I feel like it’s ripped from its socket as the gun fires. I fall back as I hear another shot that comes from Shepherd’s gun. Deputy Chief Parker stumbles back as he lifts his gun again, but another shot from Shepherd puts him onto the ground.
People come running from every direction as I stand behind Shepherd and stare at Tex who is slumped against the hallway wall, blood coloring the front of his shirt, screwdriver still protruding from his neck.
“What the fucking fuck!” Tony exclaims as he barges onto the scene. “Who patted this asshole down? How’d he get a fucking screwdriver?”
It was mine.
He got it from me because I snuck it inside.
Rod rushes over to Tex and tries compressing the neck wound, but I think it’s futile. Feeling horrible, I hide behind Shepherd, realizing what I’ve done. I’ve gotten two men killed because of that fucking screwdriver. If I’d have just listened and done what I was told, they wouldn’t be dead.
I glance up and notice that Shepherd is watching me, but the moment our eyes meet, he looks away.
“He must have been hiding it when he came in,” Shepherd says.
That’s when I notice the arm I’m attached to is bleeding. The very edge of Shepherd’s shirt is torn, but he doesn’t seem to notice even as the blood begins to spread along the cloth.
Tony lets out some type of roar before punching the wall. “There goes our only fucking lead. I knew that asshole had something he was hiding,” Tony yells as he kicks the wall in anger. “Fucking hell, this is a goddamn mess.”
Shepherd waits a moment before putting his gun away and walking up to Tony. “I’m going to clean my arm up. Can I have the key to the handcuffs so I can get my shirt off?”
“You need stitches?”
“It’s just a nick.”
“Here. Fuck. But you give it back to me the moment you’re done.” He shoves the key at Shepherd who pulls me after him. We have to walk between the two bodies to reach his room, so I press myself into Shepherd’s back and try not to look at either as we pass. Once we reach his room, he takes me into the bathroom and unlocks the cuff on his left wrist. “Sit on the tub, hands on your lap.”
I nod as I go over to the tub, feeling strange and upset. It’s my fault this happened. I did this.
Shepherd is silent as he takes his shirt off, and I can’t help but wonder if it bothers him at all that he just killed a man. It doesn’t look like it, but he’s hard to read.
He tosses his shirt in the dirty clothes hamper and glances at his arm. Thankfully, there’s only a cut there where the bullet nicked the skin. If he hadn’t pulled me back, I would have been standing right where his arm had been. I was close enough to his side that I was touching him because of how narrow the hallway was.
“Thank you for pulling me back,” I say.
He glances over at me as he holds a washcloth against his arm. He’s too manly to even cringe. “Did you know that guy?”
“Yeah, he was Deputy Chief Parker.”
“Which means he knows you, right?”
“Of course. He and my father are… were close.”
Shepherd seems to process that for a moment. “Then why was he planning on shooting you?”
I shake my head, even though the exact same thought was running through my brain. “No, he just missed. He was just panicked, he probably didn’t notice you because he would have noticed me first as he turned, you know? Like turn and shoot and…” I don’t even sound convinced of my own words.
“When they said a cop broke in, I thought he was here to try and get you out. A sad attempt at your father trying to save you. But no, he was here to shoot you. Why?”
I don’t like the way Shepherd’s scrutinizing me, like he understands me better than I understand myself. I shake my head. “He wasn’t. He wouldn’t kill me. Are you trying to say my father wants me dead?”
“No,” he says as he pulls the washcloth back to see if the bleeding has stopped. “I didn’t say your father wanted you dead, but that man sure