Written with Regret (The Regret Duet #1) - Aly Martinez Page 0,1

torso, her head snapping back from the sheer force of a bullet.

And then she fell, landing over the top of my father’s dead body.

“Mama!” I screamed, diving toward her.

The gunfire continued, each shot bleeding into the last.

Dropped to my knees, I took her hand. “Mama, Mama, Mama,” I chanted, hot tears streaming down my face. Blood leaked through her pale-pink sweater, and pure terror glistened in her eyes as she stared back at me.

I was only eight years old, and Hell was raining bullets all around us, but there was no mistaking the look on her face.

She knew she was dying—and she couldn’t figure out how to make sure I didn’t.

Suddenly, the gunfire stopped, and in a moment of clarity, I popped my head up to look for my sister. But the only thing I could see was death and despair. The once-busy food court had been transformed into a graveyard. Bodies lay crumpled over, rivers of blood merging into pools, those pools joining to form a sea of red. The screams had turned into moans and the shouts into whimpers. The few remaining living souls were hiding under the tables or clinging to injured loved ones much like I was.

Only, when I looked back at my mother, she was no longer injured.

She was dead.

My shoulders shook wildly, silent sobs tearing from my throat. I needed to run. I needed to get out of there. But the fear and helplessness were paralyzing. I rested my forehead against my mother’s the way she’d done to me so many times in the past, calming me after a bad dream.

I needed her—glassy-eyed and unmoving—to fix this. I needed her to sit up and tell me that it was over. I needed my father to rise to his feet and pull me into his strong arms, where nothing could hurt me. And I needed my sister to appear, take my hand, and tease me relentlessly for overreacting.

I needed this not to be real.

Suddenly, a man got up and darted toward the double glass doors. With one single gunshot, he dropped to the ground.

My scream mingled with the gasps and cries of others trapped and hidden in that war zone. Desperate, I scanned the area for help.

More death.

More blood.

More hopelessness.

I caught sight of a man around my father’s age. He had his back to a flipped table, his face scrunched and his hands covering his ears as he rocked back and forth. With a thick beard and muscular arms covered in tattoos, he was someone I would have thought I could turn to for protection. The pure panic on his face made him more of a child than I was.

My stomach seized when another gunshot sounded followed by the thud of what I now knew was a body hitting the floor. I could have lived a lifetime without ever knowing what that sounded like. Yet, now, I’d never be able to unhear it.

“Anyone else want to make a break for it?” a man asked in a deep, gravelly voice.

I didn’t know where he was, but I sucked in a sharp breath and flattened myself on the floor, hoping he wouldn’t notice that I was still alive.

It was eerily silent after that. The only sound besides the thunder of my heart in my ears was the squeaking of his shoes against the tile every time he turned. They were slow, like he was taking his time surveying his damage. Or maybe they were deliberate as he searched for his next victim.

My stomach wrenched each time the sound got closer.

Then I’d shudder with relief when they faded into the distance.

It was only a matter of time though. My parents were dead, maybe my sister too. I would be next.

Lying as still as possible, I closed my eyes and prayed for the first time in my entire life. We didn’t go to church and I’d never been taught religion, but if God was real, He was the only way I was going to survive.

Through it all, I held my mother’s hand.

She would protect me.

Or, as it turned out, she’d send someone who could.

“When I say go, I need you to crawl with me,” he whispered.

My lids flew open and I found a teenage boy, maybe fifteen or sixteen, with dark hair and the bluest eyes I’d ever seen staring back at me. He too was on his stomach, facing me with his cheek resting on the cold tile and a red baseball cap turned sideways to hide the