Page 20 of Blood in the Water

“Alright, alright,” I said, trying to keep up but doing more like a slight jog. “Not all of us have giraffe legs. I’m coming.”

My shoulders were laced with tension. He was right. We were really exposed. The plane was the only one on the tarmac, and the nearest cover was a few dozen yards away. Everything else was deserted. Too quiet.

Was that normal for commercial airports?

A little whizzing brushed past my ear andthunkedinto the concrete a few feet ahead.

I froze for a heartbeat.

“Run!” Cas yelled as he pushed me toward the plane. “Go, Leona!”

Oh my God, that was a fucking bullet.

Behind us, three motorcycles and an SUV screeched onto the tarmac. This was it. This was where we were going to die. At an airport, with a backpack full of underwear and only a knife shoved into my boot.

Cas pulled his twin guns from the holsters and immediately started firing. One of the motorcycle guys dropped, and the other two ducked behind their rides. Four people flooded out of the SUV, guns trained on us both.

“Cas!” I screamed, immediately pivoting away from the plane and toward the cover of the nearby building. We would nevermake it that far across all that open space. We had to get away from the bullets.

He laid more cover fire as we sprinted, and the answering gunfire peppered our feet. We finally made it around the cover of the building, and I waited one, two, three seconds, anticipating a slicing pain to rock through my body, but nothing. No injuries.

“Cas?” I asked, trying to suck in enough breath to keep me from passing out. He stood beside me, guns still in his hands while peeking around the corner of the building. “Please be okay.”

“I’m fine,” he responded with a grunt. He gritted his teeth as he reloaded his weapons. “You good?”

“Yeah,” I huffed.Fuck. He found us.

“If we get surrounded, we’re done for,” he said. He ripped the bag Colin gave us off his shoulder and plunged his hand inside. Then he pulled out the gun and handed it to me. “Take this.”

I wrapped my hand around the cold metal. It wasn’t my first time holding a gun—as a mafia princess with a dad in the gun trade, I had my fair share of shooting practice—but my fingers still shook. I was not a great shot. I had never really been allowed to take it seriously. It was just for fun. Max and Cas had always given me so much shit about it, but my father never really wanted me to learn how to use weapons. He always said weapons weren’t for young ladies, and I didn’t need to get involved with the Family’s business, and that’s why I always had Cas with me. Eventually, I stopped fighting.

I regretted that now.

“Just point and shoot,” Cas said as he adjusted his shoulder holster. Bright red bloomed on the top of his shoulder. “You’ve done it countless times.”

“Oh, my God.” My heart lurched. “You’ve been shot.”

He grabbed my shoulder. “Stay with me. It’s just a scratch. Focus on your weapon. Point and shoot.”

The blood saturated Cas’s shirt, spreading out from the wound just as it had on my father’s shirt. I gulped, shoving the image away. What the fuck was I going to do if I lost Cas, too? I wouldn’t survive it. What would be the point?

“It’s different.”

His deep, ocean-blue eyes locked with mine. “It’s not. Just point and shoot. Say it.”

“Just point and shoot,” I repeated, trying to chill out a little by focusing on the little lock of black hair that fell over his right eye. He had a habit of pushing that little piece of hair away, and for some reason, his simple action now grounded me.

“Again,” he said, leaning around the wall again to see where our attackers were. He fired three shots, and I heard two shouts before bodies collapsed to the ground.They were way too close.

“Just point and shoot.”

“That’s good, princess,” he murmured, sticking his head out of cover again. A bullet whizzed past him, and he jerked backward. “Don’t think. Just point and shoot.”

I nodded as I flipped the safety off. Already, the metal was warming to my hands, and the familiar muscle memory of holding a gun returned.

“They’re about to come around the corner, okay?” he whispered. “I count five. Trying to get the drop on us. But that’s not going to happen, is it?”

I shook my head. The knife was still in my boot. If I somehow missed or ran out of bullets, I could still use the knife.