Francis didn’t move. Not at all.
“Get up.” The strange female snarl scraped at my sanity.
I refused to look at the woman with the gun. Whoever she was, she wasn’t Bobby Walker’s mother. She was a bitch who’d come into our home with a gun and—
“Tell your fiancée to stand up, Pratt, or I will shoot her.”
“Ronnie.” Desperation cut Lucas’s voice. “Babe, please stand up.”
I pressed my hands to the bullet hole on Fluffy’s shoulder and—eyes burning—raised my head. Locked my stare on the woman standing over me.
She was shaking. Fuck. She was also pointing what looked like a Smith and Wesson Shield straight at my head. Fuck. Again. She was shaking, and shaking was dangerous because it meant the gun could go off at any second.
Was she scared? She should be. She’d come into our home. She’d shot my friend. She’d shot his dog. She should be petrified.
I snarled, baring my teeth at her.
“Ronnie,” Lucas pleaded. “Please. Don’t—”
“Stand up,” the woman ordered, jerking the nose of the gun in short upright motions. As if I needed help understanding which direction up was. Who the fuck was this bitch?
I shook my head and continued to press my hands to Fluffy’s wound. Was the blood flow slowing? “Go to hell.”
She flicked a frustrated look at Lucas. “Tell her to stand up!”
“Ronnie. Please stand up, babe.”
Pressing harder on Fluffy’s shoulder, I frowned at him over my own. He stood a few feet from where I was, hands at the sides of his head.
I’d never seen him look so scared.
Lucas Pratt. Scared. Because a crazy woman was pointing a gun at me: the kind of threat he’d been trying to warn me about since I first discovered his secret. The kind I’d dismissed over and over.
My gut clenched.
“Who is she?” I asked.
Lucas’s Adam’s apple jerked up and down his throat. “Fluffy, you need to help me, dude.”
On the floor in front of me, Fluffy groaned. And then moved.
I swung back to the Marine, stunned. What was he doing?
“I’ve…got this…Ronnie…” he mumbled, covering my hands on his shoulder with his.
I blinked. And then jerked my stare back up to the mysterious woman. “I don’t know who you are, but I’m going to kill you.”
She laughed. Actually laughed. Laughed as she continued to point the gun at my face. “I can see why you and Tripwire make such an endearing couple.”
My gut clenched again. Tripwire. Lucas’s name when he was in Trinity.
“You’re from Trinity?”
Disgust twisted her face.
“Ronnie,” Lucas said. “Stop talking to her.”
The woman laughed. She’d stopped shaking. That was both good and terrifying. She was in no risk now of accidently firing her gun, but she wasn’t scared any more. Now she was confident. “He thinks, sweetie, that if you don’t know anything about me, I’ll let you live after I kill him.”