Page 86 of Fatal Vision

Chapter Sixteen

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AT THE HOSPITALin Tulsa, Colton wouldn’t let Shelby out of his sight. Which wasn’t easy since the doctors kept insisting he get x-rays while they stitched up the cut on her leg.

Thank God she was alive. As he sat in the chair in the exam room and watched her watching him, he felt the dragon raise its head and laugh at him.

I shouldn’t have come back.

Someone was trying to kill him and Shelby was getting in the way.

Shelby eyed him from the gurney. “Stop it.”

A miracle she could see again.

A squat nurse with serious eyes stood next to him and handed Colton a gauze pad soaked in alcohol. He touched it to his eyebrow and the dragon welcomed the sting. “Stop what?”

Shelby flinched as the doctor finished the stitching and plastered a gauze bandage over her wound. She’d refused a numbing agent.

Such a Shelby move—refusing to show pain. “Blaming yourself for this,” she said.

Every cell in his body screamed for the sweet release of a good bender. Or another few hours spent between Shelby’s legs.

Like that was ever going to happen again.

He’d brought this whole thing down on her. The worst thing he could do was stay.

But leaving? Out of the question. Not yet anyway. Not with this madman running around.

Bastard.

He’d been so close to taking the guy down. If he hadn’t knocked his head into the cabinets and went lights out for a few minutes, he could have killed the guy. The impact, though, had left him dizzy and he’d barely prevented the guy from killing them all.

Sabrina was in surgery; her prognosis was poor. Two slugs point blank to her chest. How did anyone live through that?

He had. Six bullets had carved through his upper body and left him on life support for weeks. He still had some tiny pieces of shrapnel floating around his spine. Somehow, he’d managed to claw his way back from death.

The Devil isn’t ready for you in hell yet,Jack Claiborne had told him.

For once, the old man was right.

So Colton had continued to create a personal hell on earth.I’m my own devil.

“It’s my fault, Shel.” He tossed the bloodied gauze pad in the trash, accepted a second one from the nurse. His head wound was wrapped because it wouldn’t stop bleeding. Stupid cut over his brow wouldn’t either, but it wasn’t as deep.

The metallic taste of blood on his tongue made him wish for a bottle of bourbon.

Local law enforcement had been over every inch of the driveway and side of the house in the past hour. Their conclusion? A car bomb.

He’d already figured that out.

“I saw those footprints outside. I checked every inch of my truck, the bushes, everything. I don’t know how I missed the explosives, but I did.”

Now Sabrina was going to die and Connor would follow suit, at least emotionally, and didn’t that suck the big one since Connor had just come out of his PTSD shell.

All because Colton had missed a fucking brick of C4.