Then Roar’s.
Ashley’s bloody corpse.
Rush’s face.
I screamed against the gag from the bottom of my heart, all the pain and the loss and rage flooding to the surface all at once. My eyes strained to look at that monster in reality. His evil laughter echoed, but then his voice morphed into a more pleasant one. Dusty’s.
“Get the fuck off her!” I heard him say. Then a click. A gun click. “Now!”
Suddenly, the weight pressing over me vanished. My eyes barely opened at my command, and Dusty was standing at the door, over Ashley’s body.
Rush mumbled something to Dusty, but I couldn’t hear it. One voice boomed inside me. Took over me in a way that made it impossible to hear anything else.
Some fuckers deserve to die. It’s a necessity.
As if it had a mind of its own, my hand grabbed Rush’s gun from the back of his jeans. The son of a bitch’s head jerked toward me, and I aimed with whatever vision I had left.
“Cammie, no!” Dusty shouted.
I pulled the trigger. As many times as I could.
CHAPTER 13
Dusty
My head rested on my palm while I sat in an armchair next to my bed, my gaze trailing back and forth between Cammie’s bruised, closed eyelids, her swollen lips and her chest.
Waiting.
She’d passed out after she fired that gun and hadn’t opened her eyes since. Owl, our Doc brother and my best friend, said she’d been in coma since the attack. It’d been two days since I moved her to Rosewood. Even if she was going to hate me for it when she woke up, it was the safest place to be at the moment.
I rubbed my tired eyes, my body begging me to go to sleep. But I couldn’t. Even when I lay next to her, forcing myself to rest, I was haunted by what happened to her.
Because of me.
It was the middle of the night. The partying had cooled down since I’d returned. What happened to Rush—what Rush had done—left us all in a…pensive mode.
How could he do that to my woman when he’d known I was his son all this time? How did he think there would be no retaliation when he was one of the very few that knew I shot Roar for the very same thing he was doing to Cammie?
Stillness fell over the room, nothing but her breath dancing with mine and the beeping machine as I watched her, recalling, regretting, grieving. I still had no idea how I was going to tell her about…
My heart squeezed as I remembered the conversation I had with Owl.
“Why isn’t she waking up?” I’d asked.
“I don’t know. I cleaned all her wounds. Made sure there were no glass shards anywhere in her body. There was no internal bleeding, thank fuck. All her vitals are good. Apart from the broken nose, the contusions and the battering, she’s physically stable, but she’s been seriously traumatized. Everybody reacts differently to trauma.”
“What’s that mean? Is she ever going to wake up?”
“Most likely, yes. We just don’t know when.”
“What’s with all that blood down there? I stopped Rush before he raped her. That can’t be from the glass splinters, right?”
“No. There wasn’t much inside to begin with, and I took them all out. All her inner wounds are superficial.”
“Then what the fuck was that?”
“I’m sorry, Dusty. She was…”