Page 74 of Nine Months to Bear

The first shot cracks through the air like thunder breaking directly overhead. A car window to our left explodes. Glass erupts across the concrete.

I don’t have time to scream before he’s moving. Stefan tackles me behind a concrete pillar and blankets his body over mine. The impact knocks the breath from my lungs and my head swims, my bones ache, my cheek hurts where it’s pressed against the rough floor.

“Stay down!” he orders.

I couldn’t move even if I wanted to, which I definitely do not. My legs aren’t working. My mind is offline and I’d do anything he asked.

I can only watch as he draws a gun from beneath his jacket. He rises, levels it, exhales, and fires.

That day in his personal range comes back to me. I saw Stefan with a weapon then. I knew he was dangerous.

But seeing it in action now, I can’t believe this is real.

More shots ring out. It’s so loud in here that even the echoes hurt my ears. The metallic tang of fear rises in my throat.

Stefan returns fire, ducks to reload, then stands up and shoots again. His face is utterly calm the whole time.

Time stretches and contracts. Seconds feel like hours as bullets pepper the concrete around us. When they hit the walls, chips of stone sting my exposed skin.

I glimpse dark figures moving between cars. Muzzle flashes illuminate masked faces for split seconds before darkness swallows them again.

But one by one, the masked faces go down.

When silence finally falls, Stefan doesn’t relax. He does a final sweep, never lowering his weapon as he pulls out his phone to call Taras, barking orders about surveillance cameras and perimeter checks.

“We’re clear for now, but they could come back,” he tells Taras as he looks at me. “I want all the footage. Find out who sent them.”

He hangs up his phone, and I watch his expression shift. The hard angles of his face soften. His eyes scan my body methodically.

“Are you hurt?” His hands run over my arms, my waist, my hips—checking for wounds, I think, but it feels so much more like something else that my brain goes haywire, misinterpreting everything. My skin throbs everywhere he touches.

I shake my head and squeak out a timid, “No. I don’t think— No, I’m okay.”

I look down. The blazer I wore to impress investors is torn at the sleeve, smudged with concrete dust and what might be blood. None of this feels real.

“Who were they?” I finally manage. “Why would anyone?—”

“It doesn’t matter. They’re gone.” He helps me to my feet. When I sway, his arm wraps around my waist. “Come on.”

His eyes sweep the garage once more. He doesn’t let me look around at the carnage—with one huge hand, he keeps my head tucked against his chest.

I don’t mind, honestly. Right now, I’d let him lead me blindly into the lowest, frozen circle of hell if that’s what he wanted.

I think I might be in shock.

He opens the passenger door of his Maybach, then stops to look at me. Whatever he sees makes him sigh, because instead of stepping aside to let me in, he kneels, scoops me up like a baby, and deposits me in there himself.

The leather seat envelops me. I’m barely capable of breathing right now, but it’s impossible not to notice how his smell is woven into every nook and cranny of the car. It suits him.

Suits me just fine, too, although in a different sort of way. My body is half-purring and half-numb and it has no idea what it wants.

But Stefan knows. He slides behind the wheel and cranks the engine to life. As we pull out, with no signs of whoever the hell just shot actual, literal guns at us, he does the one thing I’d never ask for, the one thing I need more than anything else right now:

He rests his hand on my knee.

Just like that, I can breathe again.

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