Page 39 of The Disputed Legacy
Afforded no more than seconds to move, I twisted away from her, trusting that I’d knocked into her hard enough to drop her.
Holding my breath and bracing my muscles for impact, I took one huge step forward and leaped. Diving at Oscar as more bullets went flying after the windows shattered, I caught his small body. He didn’t stop my momentum. So slim and short as he was, he was completely blocked by my body. As I intended. I didn’t think. I didn’t plot or strategize. It was all a matter of autopilot to protect him.
Again, I was just in time. Fate was on my side tonight. As soon as I wrapped my arms around him to bring him to the messy floor with me, a searing rip of agony hit me. The instant pierce of pain radiated quickly, burning my flesh and forcing me to grit my teeth to bear through it.
I’d been hit.
But Oscar wasn’t.
Willow wasn’t.
We were all on the floor now, out of an easy line of range for those assholes to shoot at us. Others had dropped too, but it was too soon to stand and run for more layers of safety.
Keeping my arms wrapped around Oscar to prevent any bullets or shards of glass from reaching him, I huddled with him and tried my best to army crawl with him. Getting him under the table would be my best option, and to my relief, he caught on quickly. He scampered under the shadow of the table. Following him partway, I checked over what I saw of him. His back, his arms, his sides, his legs. No rips showed in his clothes. No blood leaked from him. The only crimson on him was frommyblood, from the bullet I’d taken for him.
Without stopping and giving me any indication that he had been hurt, he tucked under the table and turned. Facing me and staring at me with those wide-open eyes of utter fear, he proved that he was alive.
Unharmed.
Safe.
It freed me to turn back to Willow, pulling her toward the shelter of the table, too. It all blurred into a smear of time. No pauses happened, and I moved without thinking. But it felt like eternity of us hunkering down.
Screams pierced the air. Shouts followed. In the distance, that damn hip-hop crap was blaring regardless of the circumstances.
But the gunfire stopped.
As I panted, catching my breath and staring at Willow as she locked her terrified eyes on me, I noted the telltale sound of footsteps speeding away. The shooters were running.
No one was staying to make sure they’d gotten their targets, if they’d even had any to begin with.
Tinkling noises continued as the broken glass settled from being burst apart.
Time was suspended as I allowed myself this slight break to recenter myself. Like recalibrating and waiting for the next spur-of-the-moment movement to make, I tensed and waited. My fingers remained where they were, pushing back my jacket so I could rest my fingertips on the metal of my gun in its holster.
But I didn’t pull it out yet. My arm worsened by the second, feeling heavier and duller with the blood rapidly leaving my flesh. I couldn’t tell if the shot had gone through me, if I’d need stitches, or how thick of a gash it was as a grazing. It hardly mattered. The only facts I let my brain latch on to were that Willow and Oscar were here with me, under the table, and my body was blocking anything from reaching them.
I heaved out a deep breath when no one approached. The people in the diner stopped the frantic reaction of screaming or shouting. No more shots were fired.
They’d run off as quickly as they’d come.
It was over.
Staring into the deep panic and fear in Willow’s eyes, though, I knew that her experience with this traumatic event was only beginning.
“It’s okay,” I whispered, scanning her to double-check that she hadn’t been hit.
She nodded, a jerky, automatic movement of her head as she kept her eyes open so wide with stark horror.
“It’s okay,” I repeated in another stern whisper, seeking out Oscar, who hid at her side. She’d clutched him close, sealing her arms around him in a tight hug with no hint of releasing him. Together as a shaking, scared duo, they crouched in place and made no move to get out from the shadows beneath the table.
This was as far from fucking okay as I could ever imagine.
Guns being fired in their proximity didn’t sit well with me.
But it wasn’t just the idea of their being near danger that put me in a chokehold.
It was the notion that they could’ve been near harm because ofme.
