I glared at her.
“Freya, leave,” Hades gritted out.
I didn’t move.
She sighed, the woman with the gun. “As riveting as this honorable routine is, I’ve got a plane to catch. I’ve got to wrap this up. Hades, don’t worry, I’ll get the brain on the first shot.” Then she steadied the gun, looking more purposeful.
I acted on instinct then, my life flashing before my eyes, Hades’s life flashing before my eyes. There was no reason, no tactic to it, only the desperate need to keep Hades alive.
I charged.
The only reason it worked was because the crazy woman was not expecting to be out crazied and charging an armed woman without a weapon or any kind of brawling experience was definitely crazy. My hands went for the gun, then we went tumbling to the floor.
Hades reacted fast, really fucking fast. But it happened faster. As we slammed to the floor, struggling for the gun, my finger found the trigger, and it went off. Loud. Loud enough to rattle my teeth.
Something warm covered my face.
Hades was there then, pulling me backward, the gun in his hand now. It all happened slowly, in my head, at least. In slow motion, my eyes looked down at the woman.
The dead woman.
The one I had killed.
Things got a little chaotic once Swiss arrived, just seconds after the gun went off, after Hades had searched my entire body, looking for wounds. There were none. The blood and brain matter I was covered in was not my own. He’d let me go only because I was desperate to check on Sirius. Obviously, Swiss had taken my text seriously, arriving with Elden, Anderson and Hansen. All of whom were armed and quite obviously ready to go to war.
“Late to the party. Fuck,” Swiss teased, holstering his weapon and pouting. Pouting at the woman lying dead on my living room floor.
I was sitting on the floor with Sirius’s head in my lap, face and eyes dry even though I was sure I’d been sobbing. Maybe that had just happened on the inside. Whatever the case was, I was grateful since there were a lot of stoic badasses here right now, and I did not want to be the crying, hysterical woman.
“Fuck,” Hansen hissed, walking over to where I was sitting on the floor.
“She killed the fucking dog?” Swiss asked in horror.
“He’s not dead,” I snapped, my hand on Sirius’s torso, letting the even rise and fall of his breathing stave off the grief and panic.
“I’ll call a vet,” Anderson offered, phone at his ear.
“I’ll take care of her,” Swiss volunteered, nodding to the dead woman on the floor.
“Someone needs to check on Hades,” I told Hansen from my spot on the floor.
Hansen’s eyes went to Hades, looking for a wound of some sort.
“I’m fuckin’ fine,” Hades ground out, eyes on me.
“No, you’re not,” I seethed. “She, whoever the fuck she was, drugged you, and I want to make sure it wasn’t some kind of lethal, slow-acting poison.”
Hades looked like he was going to argue, but I pointed at him from my spot on the floor. “So help me God, if you try any macho masculine shit, I will scream. I’m holding it together by a fucking thread right now. You’re going to get checked out.”
Hansen watched our exchange with a raised brow. Hades glared at me.
“Fine.”
The word was a victory, or it would’ve been if I wasn’t holding my unconscious dog in my arms. If I hadn’t just killed a woman, and if I wasn’t covered in her blood.
Sirius woke up. After a checkup from a vet—one who made house calls and didn’t ask questions—he was declared healthy. The vet had said that Sirius might be groggy and confused for a while, but the drug would have no lasting effects. I was going in for a checkup tomorrow too. Just in case.
Hades was also fine, according to Sarah, who I believed to be a fucking saint. Swiss, as promised, had ‘taken care’ of the body. After a badass powwow, the Sons of Templar left my house.
Hades had wordlessly taken me into my bathroom, slowly peeled off both of our clothes and got us both in the shower. The water turned red as the blood washed from me. I’d watched it with detachment, my body cold despite the steaming hot water, despite Hades’s body pressed against mine. He washed me with tenderness and care, in a way that wasn’t at all sexual. Then he’d taken me out of the shower, dried me and wrapped me up in a terrycloth robe. It was the warmest robe I owned, yet my body still shivered underneath it.
Hades didn’t speak until we were back in the bedroom, after I’d checked on Sirius, curled up happily on the bed. When he spoke, the tenderness that existed in the shower stall was nowhere to be seen.