Page 89 of Cohesion

He’d hoped, when Jericho had called him, that he’d been worrying for nothing. Sebastian was protected by people that Jericho trusted, and Henry, who while young and not as experienced, had a good head on his shoulders. Quinn had dared to hope that kind of protection meant that no one would even try for Sebastian.

He’d been wrong. So completely fuckingwrong.

Kendrick leaned heavily against a red Mitsubishi, another car—a black Toyota—only a foot away, where it was parked awkwardly right in the road. Blood dripped down his rippedpants, and his knee was twisted at a wrong angle. He had to be in agony, and yet his hands were steady as he kept his gun trained on the unfamiliar man sitting on the hood of a car nearby.

While the stranger looked too weak to put up much of a fight, blood soaking half his shirt from a wound on his shoulder, it was the stark terror in his gaze that told Quinn he wasn’t about to try to run.

Quinn’s heart sunk when he caught sight of Caleb and Monica. They knelt beside Henry, who was sitting up and slumped back against a black sedan. Monica had a jacket—had to be hers—against his cheek. There was still a steady drip of blood from his jaw. Caleb had two fingers on the inside of Henry’s wrist. The half-lidded, glazed-over eyes worried Quinn.

“Oh, thank God,” Monica breathed out when she saw Quinn. “We’ve called an ambulance, but my first-aid skills involve skinned knees and patching up split lips for lawyers who talk back too much.”

Quinn crouched beside the rookie. “Let me see,” he said gently, attempting to control the way his hands were shaking, panic slowly overtaking his blood stream. Neither Henry nor Monica fought him as he gently lifted the jacket.

The nasty gash across Henry’s cheek hadn’t stopped bleeding yet, still seeping. “Bullet?” Quinn asked.

Henry nodded, though it was more like a twitch. He’d been lucky; a headshot didn’t normally end so well.

“Henry, where is Sebastian? What happened here?”

Henry blinked slowly. “Gone.”

Quinn had to slap a hand against the car to stop himself from falling to his knees. He’d known. Of course he had. They were here, and Sebastian wasn’t. It wasn’t rocket science.

Hearingit somehow made it worse.

There was no use asking where. Henry wouldn’t know.

Quinn glanced around. “What about Spencer?” There was a body near one of the cars, a clean shot through the forehead, but it wasn’t Spencer.

“I don’t—gone too?”

Grady came around the corner in Quinn’s car. He skidded to a stop close to them and burst out of the door. “What the fuck happened?”

“Ambushed,” Kendrick said weakly, the loss of colour in his face alarming. “Calculated.”

“And what, security was just sleeping on the job?” Grady asked incredulously.

“Doubt the cameras are working,” he grunted in response.

Quinn pressed the jacket back against Henry’s cheek, his fingers trembling as he lifted Henry’s hand and encouraged him to put pressure on it. “Hold it there for me, all right? The ambulance can’t be far away.” There wasn’t anything they could do for him until then. He was stable, alert, and speaking clearly.

“What’s the point of all these bodyguards if they can’t stop this from happening?” Caleb asked. Quinn knew the anger wasn’t directed at him, but he bristled anyway because they’d done theirbest. What more could they have done?

“No one is infallible,” Quinn said, keeping his own anger and fear from his voice. Buzzing got louder in his ears as the reality crushed him.Sebastian was gone.He’d been taken. People had died, and he’d beentaken.

Whatever Caleb said to him was lost as he watched Grady pull cuffs out and move to arrest the man Kendrick was still aiming at.

He was part of this. He would know. He would know where they’d taken Sebastian.

Quinn advanced on him, his mind blanking, emptying itself of everything but despair and the desperate need to find Sebastian.How could he have let this happen? They’d known the danger; they should have been able to prevent it.

Now that Quinn was closer it was more obvious that he hadn’t tried to run because his leg was broken. Quinn didn’t care.

The man’s eyes widened in fright as Quinn advanced. “Hey, wait—”

Quinn grabbed his jacket and slammed him onto his back on the hood of the car.

“Quinn, I don’t think—” Grady tried, but Quinn was beyond listening.

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