Page 111 of Last Shot

‘They wanted the chaos,’ Max guessed. ‘They needed everyone to freak out and run. A gun is more dramatic.’

‘Who arethey?’ Luca’s voice was strained.

‘We’ll figure that out,’ Grey said, ‘once I get you to safety.’

‘I’m staying with you,’ Luca said. ‘I’m helping you kill every last fucker who shot my ... who killed my ...’ His voice broke.

‘Me too,’ Frankie whispered.

Max’s heart stretched painfully.

‘You’re not ...’ Grey started but a movement stopped him. ‘Where the fuck are you going?’

Forrest had broken his link with Ariana and Frankie and was pelting towards the glass doors leading out to the blackened vineyards.

‘Forrest, no!’ Max screamed. Grey yanked her hand back but she was too quick. She charged after the idiotic kid, past the dark shapes lumped beneath the walls. Grey’s security guards. Maybe others.

‘I think I know an exit!’ a guest called in the dark, maybe one of Tomaso’s friends, Max thought, based on the overenunciated vowels and the generalised arrogance.

‘Don’t!’ Max begged. ‘There could be trip wires on the exits.’

But the crowd was following the male voice, not hers, limbs and voices pushing past in a storm of stilettos and Oxfords.

‘FORREST!’

As a cop, Max had only ever attended one scene like this before, a suspected terror attack at a community centre. Lone gunman – five casualties, fifteen wounded. She could still remember the sounds and smells and the horrible shape the white blankets made over the bodies. But that had been forty minutes after the initial shot. This was different. This was raw and immediate – she knew she’d feel the effects of it later, like the pain that comes from surgery after the medication wears off. But right now the adrenaline was her buffer against all feeling – right now she could move through the horror of what was before her and meet her objective.Find Forrest. Not because he was more important than any of the other guests, but even through her adrenaline-soaked mind, she knew Forrest would be the key to getting the Barbaranis to safety.

Ariana wouldn’t go anywhere without her boyfriend.

Luca wouldn’t go anywhere without Ariana. Not after he’d just seen both his parents die.

‘Forrest!’ she called again.

He was gone.

Had he barged past the thicket of people? Had he been taken out by another dart like the one that killed Vittoria?

How many killers were they searching for?

Was this a macabre ‘Eat the Rich’ game? Some sort ofHunger Games? The La Marca family hunting the Barbaranis?

Where thefuckhad Forrest gone?

She hated that she expected Grey to have followed her. She hated that his alpha-male protectiveness or whatever it was that had made him attack the guy with the gun was something she’d come to expect. But Grey hadn’t followed. None of them had.

In fact, they’d completely disappeared.

Had she been knocked unconscious by the attacker and not realised? Had hours passed? Surely not. She felt the back of her head – no blood. She wasn’t hurt. She reached for the knife she’d sewn into the dress but remembered with a hot wave of horror she’d left it there when she’d switched with Frankie. Fuck. At least Frankie had protection. Not that the knife would do much against a bullet or a dart gun.

How had they escaped the ballroom so quickly?

Max would not focus on the swelling sting that they’d left her. After all, she was the one who’d broken free of their human chain.Snap out of it. You’re a cop. You can handle this. You don’t need someone to protect you.It was true. She’d protected herself since that night her parents died, she’d had her own back. She’d crawled out of the car wreckage alone, over broken glass and oil, and everything ever since. She’d crawled out of jail, and she’d crawl out of this horror show too. She didn’t need anyone. She’d never needed anyone.

But she couldn’t go it alone without a weapon. She jogged back upstairs to the dining room to the slumped figure she’d knocked unconscious. His dart gun was lying three feet from him.

It’s not the same thing, she tried to reason.No bullets.

But itfeltlike a gun. It wasn’t as heavy but it had the same shape. The same whirring potential in her hands.

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