The phone rang again. I couldn’t hear anyone coming to the door and wondered if I had been mistaken. Maybe someone was just turning around in the driveway.
“Are you going to get that?” I giggled and pushed at his shoulders without success.
“Nope,” Aiden said. “I have better things to do.”
I felt the button and zipper on my shorts release, giving Aiden better access to me. I was moaning, but not giving up. I twisted my legs around and tried to push him off of me that way, but it was futile. The person trying to call was just as insistent.
“Dammit!” Aiden said with a growl. “I’m going to kill whoever keeps calling!”
“Ugh! Just answer it already!”
Aiden pushed himself off of me and stomped into the kitchen. I started to follow, zipping my shorts back up along the way. There wasn’t any reason to make things easier on him, and I was enjoying the game.
“How the fuck did they get the address? Christ, Mo!”
I fluffed up my hair. The carpet had already tangled it all up. Aiden’s escapades were murder on my hairstyle.
“Chloe, get in the bedroom,” Aiden said.
“What?” I asked as I paused outside the kitchen to adjust my shirt. I heard another noise outside and tilted my head to look out the window at a red sedan in the driveway. It looked familiar, but I couldn’t place it right away.
Aiden was suddenly beside me again, grabbing me by the waist and pulling me back into the kitchen. My feet slipped out from under me, and I nearly fell.
“Don’t look out there!” he yelled. He grabbed my arm roughly and yanked me to his chest.
“Aiden!” I cried as he pulled me backward. “What the hell?”
“How far away is Lo?” Aiden said into the phone, ignoring my protests.
I turned to look back at his pale face. He was looking from the front door to the back quickly. The phone was wedged between his jaw and his shoulder, and his eyes were wide.
“He better hurry. They’re already here,” Aiden said bluntly before he let the phone drop to the ground.
I screamed as I heard a crashing sound from behind me. Glass was suddenly everywhere—all over the kitchen and part of the living room. The top half of the sliding door to the patio had been smashed.
Aiden dragged me toward the counter and grabbed one of the larger kitchen knives just as I saw a huge rock slam into the bottom half of the patio door, adding to the shattered glass on the floor. The two people who were just outside now stepped through the broken door.
I knew who they were immediately, even before I realized the car in the driveway had been the same one that sped off from the strip mall. I recognized them as the man and woman who had been firing guns at the restaurant’s back door as they fled. These were the people responsible for the death of Aiden’s son.
Chris Marc and Corinne Hayden were in the house, and I was staring right down the barrel of the gun in Corinne’s hand. Chris had one pointed at Aiden, and the cold smile on his face stopped my heart.
It wasn’t a dream. We weren’t “Red Shirts” in a movie or television series. There were people in Aiden’s house, people with one thing on their minds. They weren’t vampires, and I didn’t have any stakes. They weren’t supervillains, and I wasn’t wearing any bulletproof bracelets. They weren’t going to offer us some long discussion about how their plans weren’t to be foiled.
In fact, only three syllables were uttered.
“Say bye-bye,” Corinne said.
“No!” Aiden screamed.
Everything happened so quickly, but I remembered every second of it like it was etched into my brain. There was a flash from Corinne’s gun. At the same time, the front door burst open, and I heard Lo’s voice.
“HUNTER!”
Aiden was in front of me so fast, I never saw him move. He was just there, blocking my view of Chris and Corinne as a blast made my ears ring so badly I went deaf for a moment. Then Aiden was on the floor at my feet, and Lo and Mo appeared around the corner from the kitchen with guns in their hands, screaming at Chris and Corinne to get down.
Seconds really can last a lifetime.
There was blood on the tiles, seeping through a hole in Aiden’s shirt. I was sure it hadn’t been there a moment ago. I blinked a few times and shook my head. I still couldn’t hear properly. The kitchen knife had fallen from Aiden’s hand and bounced underneath the table.