Page 81 of Hunter

Hunter had left.

“Call the club,” Mint snapped, throwing his phone at me.

I didn’t waste time, opening his phone and scrolling through his contact list until I saw the first name I recognized. The phone rang and rang, and with each silence in-between, bullets bounced. I held the phone to my ear, my eyes going everywhere, wrapping Adair as tightly as I could to my chest.

Please, please, please, please pick up. Answer your goddamn phone!

“Hello?” Anna’s voice came through the speaker.

Relief was about to hit me when I saw someone with a gun on the other side of the park. They raised it, pointing right at us, no slide to block our way.

I grabbed Adair, covered him with my body, and screamed.

The gunshot resounded through my head, deafening my ears. I stared forward and watched as the man on the other side of the park collapsed to the ground as the ringing began to fade. I looked up at the dent the bullet had left on the edge of the slide’s frame above my head. I wanted to breathe a sigh of relief.

I didn’t.

Instead, I watched as Mint collapsed down to one knee, and then to the other, and then he fell to the ground, not moving.

The playground grew silent.

Adair had fallen into shock, his face pale, tears dry.

I, in my moment of numbness, looked at the phone on the ground, to where I had thrown it in surprise, too far out of cover for me to reach, and the screen had cracked.

No guard.

No phone.

No help.

No Hunter.

I could hear the approach of footsteps coming for me. They wanted me.

It was clear what I had to do.

I reached down to Mint’s wound and dipped my fingers in the blood pooling across the dirt. Then I smeared it across Adair’s skin and clothes.

“Don’t say a word,” I whispered to him as I pushed Mint’s body to the side so his back faced the direction of the oncoming people. They couldn’t see us, not for this plan to work.

I cradled Adair into the still Mint’s side so his body would hide Adair’s without crushing him. Adair stared back at me, emotion filling his eyes, but he couldn’t speak through the shock. For that, I was grateful.

“I love you, baby boy,” I whispered, running my hands through his curls, little bits of blood tainting the golden color. I pressed a kiss to his cheek. “I’ll be back soon.”

I left him there in his silent shock and stepped out from behind the slide with my hands raised.

Two guns immediately pointed my way. Seeing my surrender, they hesitated.

“This the bitch?” one of them asked.

“Yeah.” The other nodded. “Come here and don’t try anything funny.”

When I stepped forward, one of the men grabbed me by the hair, dragging me toward him.

I hissed at the pain, but that only made him tighten his grip. He was big and burly, his cut holding the Hell’s Runners’ emblem, but he wore no patches to indicate his rank.

He narrowed his eyes on my face, his cold gun pressed to the underside of my chin. “Bitch’s got an ice-cold face. You in shock, honey?”

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