Total pages in book: 94
Estimated words: 92043 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 460(@200wpm)___ 368(@250wpm)___ 307(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 92043 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 460(@200wpm)___ 368(@250wpm)___ 307(@300wpm)
“They wrestled,” Reese said as she gingerly picked her way through the room. She came to a stop where I’d found Lucy. “He was on top of her, but somehow she managed to wiggle out.” Reese shook her head. “I’m not sure how she did it. I was still trying to stop the men coming in through the window. One second, she was under him, and the next, she was on his back with her arms around his neck. I shot that one as he came up behind her.” She pointed to the body that Chance had dragged off Lucy’s limp body. “And he fell on her legs.”
“Look at this, Ambrose,” Chance said, crouching down by the body that Lucy had been laying on top of. He pointed.
The man’s eyes were nearly gouged out of his head, and his neck was broken.
My mate had broken the man’s neck.
Good.
“Watched her do it from the window,” Chance said, rubbing his hand over his mouth. “It was clean, Ulf. Precise.”
I nodded and lifted the dead human’s hand and checked the nails. They were bloody. He was the one who’d scratched her forearms.
I rose to my feet, my boots crunching on the broken glass all over the rug.
“You did good,” I told Reese, turning my head to look at her. “Thank you.”
She let out a little hysterical laugh.
Chance shook his head and pushed to his feet.
We gazed around at the bodies around us. Some of them were mangled from my mother’s shotgun. Some had huge exit wounds from Reese’s rifle. A lot of them had smaller bullet wounds from Lucy.
Silently, I made my way over to the front door while my brothers followed, and Reese walked back to the kitchen.
“I wonder who did that,” Beau said, gesturing to the sideboard pushed against the door.
“Sven?” Chance asked as he moved toward it.
“Could be.”
I helped him scoot it back against the wall where my mother kept it. The door had been shot to hell, and it swung open once the cabinet wasn’t holding it closed anymore.
“Leave it,” Beau ordered as I pushed it shut again. “I’ll figure out a way to keep it closed.”
I stepped away from the door. With the windows wide open, it wasn’t like the door would keep someone out anyway. “What happened to the security? Anyone know?”
“I found two outside and sent them home,” Chance replied, leaning tiredly against the wall. “The others are either dead or taken.”
“Fuck.” There should’ve been more than enough of them to hold the property, but we hadn’t imagined an assault of that size.
“We’ll deal with it tomorrow,” Beau said as he walked back toward Reese.
I went back to Lucy.
Charlie was sitting on the edge of the bed, holding his sister’s hand. She was so still.
“Alice,” I called, looking at my mate’s pale face.
“She’ll be okay,” Alice replied without turning around. She and Josiah were still working on my mom. “We got to her in time.”
I looked around the room. Everyone else who’d been injured was mated and immortal, but there was a very real chance that Lucy’s immortality hadn’t locked into place yet. She had to have known that when she’d decided to make her last stand at the front door.
Charlie smiled wanly at me as I rounded the bed. He’d pulled a light blanket over her. I should’ve done that. I doubted she’d be happy when she realized how many people had been in and out of the room while she’d been half naked and getting her thigh stitched up.
“Has she woken up?” I asked.
“No,” he replied. “But her temperature’s been rising. It’s good you’re back.”
“Fucking heat,” I said under my breath. The thing I’d found so incredible, the first link between us, had become an albatross. She needed to heal without that shit ravaging her body further.
Carefully scooting onto the bed, I aligned my body with hers and pulled her head to my shoulder.
“I shouldn’t be surprised,” Charlie said conversationally, the tears from earlier gone as he rubbed his thumb over the top of her hand. “That she decided to go all Rambo, I mean. She’s been like that our whole lives—protective to a fault.”
“She was in the most danger.”
“I doubt she considered it,” he said, meeting my eyes.
“How are you holding up?” I asked. The dark circles around his eyes had never really faded, but they seemed more pronounced.
“Glad that Erik is over there pacing,” Charlie said ruefully. “I bet you don’t even think about it, but watching him fall was…” He swallowed hard. “I’m human. Wounds like that are fatal. You were right about the instincts. I fought.”
“Did a hell of a job too,” Josiah commented from his place by my mother.
Charlie’s head shot up, and then he looked at me sheepishly. “I keep forgetting you guys hear everything.”
“You did great,” I assured him, remembering Josiah’s and Matthias’s voices in my ear. Part of me wished I could’ve seen it. “They would’ve taken his head.”