Chapter 7 - Taking the Bullet
The silence that followed was worse than the gunfire.
For twenty agonizing minutes, Clara sat in the dim light of the panic room, her injured shoulder throbbing with every beat of her heart, listening to the muffled sounds of chaos fade away into an eerie, suffocating quiet.
Click.
The heavy steel door slid open with a pneumatic hiss.
Clara gasped, pulling the children behind her and reaching blindly for anything she could use as a weapon.
Through the parting smoke stepped Davis Calvetti.
His suit was torn, his knuckles were bruised and stained with blood, and a deep laceration bled freely down the side of his face. But he was standing. He was breathing.
Toby and Bella broke away from Clara with joyful screams, running straight toward their father. Davis dropped to his knees, wrapping his arms around both children so tightly his shoulders shook.
“You’re safe,” Davis murmured, burying his face in Toby’s hair. “It’s over. The house is secure.”
Clara slumped against the wall of the safe room, the adrenaline finally draining out of her body, leaving a hollow, bone-deep exhaustion in its wake.
Suddenly, a sharp movement caught her eye from the shadows of the nursery hallway.
Adrian.
He wasn't dead. Despite the sniper round to his shoulder, the traitorous second-in-command had crawled up from the lower level, dragging himself toward the nursery with a manic, bloodthirsty grin on his face. In his trembling good hand, he held a heavy assault pistol, aimed directly at the back of Davis’s head as he held his children.
Davis’s back was turned. He couldn't see him.
Clara didn't think. She didn't calculate the odds, the pain, or the cost.
With a desperate cry, she lunged forward, throwing her entire body across the open space just as Adrian pulled the trigger.
Bang.
The bullet tore through Clara’s back, a white-hot agony unlike anything she had ever felt, tearing through her flesh and knocking the breath violently from her lungs. She collapsed hard onto the hardwood floor, the world spinning into a terrifying, tunnel-like darkness.
Davis whipped around, his eyes widening in pure horror as he saw Clara lying bleeding on the carpet.
With a roar that sounded less like a man and more like a wounded beast, Davis drew his weapon and fired three consecutive rounds into Adrian’s chest, ending the traitor once and for all.
Then, Davis dropped his gun, scrambled across the floor, and dropped to his knees beside Clara.
“Clara!” he screamed, his hands hovering over her back, coming away wet with blood. “Clara, look at me! Stay with me!”
“The… the children,” Clara whispered, her vision darkening at the edges as the cold crept into her limbs.
“They’re safe. Because of you,” Davis choked out, his voice cracking with a raw, agonizing grief that completely shattered the iron facade of the feared mafia boss. He tore off his expensive silk tie, pressing it frantically against the wound to stem the bleeding. “Don’t close your eyes. Do you hear me? You cannot leave me. I just found you.”
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A single tear slipped down Davis’s rugged cheek, cutting a clean path through the soot and blood on his face.
“I love you,” Davis whispered fiercely against her hair, pressing his forehead to hers as the world slowly faded away into blackness.
