My skin was damp around the butt of the gun.
Oh, right.
I angled the gun up under his chin as he focused on cracking my skull open. In the same moment he went to hit my head on the floor a second time, I turned him into a convertible.
His dead weight slumped on top of me, and my head smacked the hard floor again anyway, making the dizziness work. I tried to push the body off me but couldn’t get a good grip. My fingers felt like cooked noodles, and I couldn’t shove him.
The body was yanked off, and Desmond dragged me to my feet. “You okay?”
“Great.”
He gave me a once-over and then pulled my jacket free from my waist. His eyes widened, and his gaze darted back to my face. I didn’t love the bare worry I saw in his eyes. “You’ve been shot,” he announced.
Oh.
I pulled my jacket closed again and lifted my gun, firing a shot into the throat of a guy who was about to stick a knife in Desmond’s back.
“We can worry about it later,” I told him.
“Secret…”
“Later.” If I got distracted by something like a bullet wound, I wouldn’t be able to focus on the task at hand—not dying.
Grabbing Desmond by the shirt, I yanked him towards me and spun both of us towards the metal table, rolling across the surface as another body fell from the loft. Even though I landed on top of him, my bullet wound shrieked in protest. Given how it was burning, I knew Mercy had opted for silver bullets.
If the bullet was still inside me, it would be poisoning me steadily.
This kept getting better and better.
Dipping low, I laid a kiss on Desmond’s lips and rubbed my hand against his stubbled jaw. “Stay alive for me.”
“Marry me,” he replied.
Great. The silver was going to my brain. I thought he’d said—
“Marry me.” The look on his face was panicked, and I couldn’t tell if it was because he’d just proposed or because we were about to die. For that matter I couldn’t decide if our imminent demise was what motivated the proposal to begin with.
“I—”
“God, woman, don’t think so hard. Just say yes.”
I thought about Calliope, and I thought about what she’d told me. She’d asked who I wanted to be with, and she’d said the first to come to mind was my way of announcing I’d already made my decision.
And Desmond had been the one.
Desmond was the one.
“Okay,” I said, without consideration for consequence. After all, we might die in the next ten seconds, what could be worse than that? “Yes.”
Chapter Thirty-Three
I had a wedding I needed to live to see.
I had motivation now towards something other than killing my mother.
Yes, Mercy’s death was still my primary purpose, especially now with bullet-shell casings raining down on us and about a dozen men attempting to dispatch us from the mortal world.
But for the first time in a long time I felt…good. I felt like I had something to look forward to. A purpose to drive me. I wouldn’t go so far as to say I felt happy, because it was hard to be jubilant in a situation like this, but I didn’t feel nearly as dark as I had these last months.