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That was where Blue headed. Everly had never been much of a runner, but it was amazing what thugs and a firebomb could do. She could never keep up with Blue, but she ran as fast as she could.
She would worry about breathing later—assuming there was a later. And it involved breathing.
“Get down to the beach, then get the hell away from here,” Blue growled at her as they ran, but Everly could hear the voices behind them and, worse, the feet pounding into the ground.
There was a loud crack and a whistling sound, and she couldn’t tell which was which. But something thudded into the grass near her feet, and Blue swore.
He hooked an arm around her, picked her up, and tossed her farther down the lawn.
The next crack she heard in midair, but she recognized it.
It was a gunshot. They were being shot at—
But then she landed.
Everly hit the ground hard enough to grunt, then skidded on the grass. She scrambled around, trying to figure out where Blue had gone, gasping for breath, because he could have been hit—
But if he was hit, he didn’t show it.
He was running. So swift and deadly that it made her feel dizzy. It showed her how much she’d slowed him down.
And he was runningtowardtheir attackers.
Everly recognized the faces of the two men who charged him. She’d drawn them, ages ago, after that night in the apartment when they’d killed Rebecca.
They’d killed her. She’d been right all along.
Something in her shifted, hard, as if she’d been storing up her grief, holding it like a stone until she knew for sure—
But this wasn’t the time.
In the next second, Blue was in the air, launching himself at the bigger of the two men and taking him down with a thud so loud Everly could hear it from halfway down the lawn. The bigger man stayed down, but Blue rolled back up to his feet to face the other man.
Who lunged at him.
And for a few moments, the two men grappled, moving closer and closer to the edge of the pool.
Blue kicked the man away from him, sending him sprawling.
Everly pushed herself up to her feet again.
The bigger man did the same, but he came up with a gun.
Everly started to run, aware that the terrible noise sheheard was her own voice, raw and scared and screaming, but none of that mattered.
She saw the man jerk his arm. She heard the gunshot a split second later.
And she could do nothing but watch as Blue toppled toward the pool, crashed through the glassy surface, then sank like a stone.
Twenty
There was a roaring in her head. As if her throat had done all the screaming it could and had turned it inward instead.
Everly clawed the air, trying to get to that pool. Trying to get to Blue. Her vision blurred, and when she was suddenly stopped, with a hard band around her midsection, she barely registered it.
There was still too much damned noise in her head.
And only a bit of sloshing at the sides of the pool. Just the faintest hint of any disturbance on the top of the water, and less as each second dragged by.