Innocence (Tales of Olympus #1)(81)

The car finally came to a stop and Marcus struggled with Cora’s seatbelt to get it undone.

“Take your hands off her. Hands up.”

“Mom? What are you doing?!”

Marcus turned and there she was. Demi Titan, pulling off the chauffeur’s hat that had hidden all her dark brown hair and tossing it to the side.

She held a sizable pistol, the barrel pointed straight at Marcus’s chest.

“Cora, get out of the car,” Demi ordered.

“Mom, put the gun down!”

Demi never took her eyes off of Marcus even as her voice got sharper with her daughter. “Get out of the car now or the gods help me, Cora, you won’t like the consequences.”

Marcus already had reason to hate this woman but her treatment of Cora only cemented it. If he moved quick enough, he could jam the gun upwards and even if she got a round off, it would land harmlessly in the—

“Tell your sister I send my fondest regards,” Demi said. “Poetic justice, if you think about it. Mine was the last face she ever saw, too.”

Wait, what? She’d killed Chiara—

“Mama! No! I love—”

Two things happened at once, simultaneously really. It was a moment Marcus would live and relive over and over again in his memory. Why hadn’t he seen what Cora had? Why hadn’t he realized that Demi was done eulogizing?

Because there was the explosion of a gun firing right at the same time as Cora’s body slammed into Marcus’s.

Demi’s agonized scream only reinforced what his brain refused to process.

No.

Cora hadn’t really just jumped in front of a bullet for him.

She wasn’t that foolish.

But when he pushed her back onto the seat, her face was ghostly pale and, though not immediately visible against the red velvet of her dress, his hand came away slick with her blood when he touched the left side of her chest.

Demi had thrown away the gun and was screaming and reaching back to try to get to her daughter, but Marcus shoved her away.

“Drive! She’s going into shock, get us to New Olympian General. We’re five minutes out.”

Blood streamed down Cora’s bare arm now and pooled on the leather seat underneath her.

Marcus put pressure on the wound. “Stay with me. Cora, do you hear me?” he barked. “Stay with me, dammit!”

Cora’s dazed eyes drifted towards him but he wasn’t sure she heard him at all. Fuck!

“Drive faster,” he shouted to the front.

Demi didn’t say anything but she did run the next red light, barely skirting past an oncoming car. Marcus didn’t care. Cora’s breath was labored and her eyes were erratic.

“Stay with me. Stay with me, Cora.” It was all he could say. He kept chanting it until it was a prayer.

She couldn’t leave him. She couldn’t fucking leave him now that he’d found her. He couldn’t go back to—to— There was no life for him without her in it.

“We’re here,” Demi called and Marcus looked up to see that they were indeed at the hospital, at the emergency room entrance. Demi pulled the car all the way up to the entrance and several emergency room techs ran out.

Marcus shoved open the back door. “Bullet wound, upper left chest. She’s losing a lot of blood.”

Several more techs had brought a gurney and together they expertly lifted Cora out of the car and up onto the gurney.

Marcus followed behind as they wheeled her into the hospital. He only spared one glance back for Demi, standing beside the driver side door, watching her daughter be wheeled away.

He should have texted his lieutenants right then and there to grab the woman before she could sneak out of the city.

Instead, he kept running beside the gurney. Blood, there was so much blood. It was even more apparent against the white of the gurney sheets. So much blood. Just like Chiara. It was just like Chiara, and what if he lost Cora, too?

More people joined the procession running beside Cora as they flew down the hall with her. Nurses, doctors, all of them calling out questions and medical jargon that Marcus could only half follow.

He clasped Cora’s hand and kept up his mantra, interspersing, “Stay with me,” with, “I won’t ever let you go.”

But as they finally wheeled Cora into a room for surgery, an orderly pushed Marcus back. “You can’t come in here, sir.”

Marcus glowered at the man and got right in his face. “She’s my wife,” he growled. “And she just got shot. You do not want to try to get between me and her right now.”

The orderly looked like he was about to shit himself but with a wobbling chin, he repeated, “No loved ones allowed in during surgery, sir.”

“Do we have a problem here?” asked a second man, a nurse who had moved from Cora’s side to join the orderly, blocking the door.

“Get back to my wife’s side,” Marcus all but shouted. “What the fuck are you doing over here? She needs you over there.” He pointed back to where four people hovered around his wife, all of them working on her. He wanted to be beside her as well, holding her hand, promising her he’d make everything okay again.

But that was a crock of shit.

There was every chance that nothing would be okay. That she would die.

The orderly put his hand on Marcus’s arm to try to guide him out of the room and Marcus shoved him off. But he turned of his own accord, not wanting to distract them all from the far more important work of focusing on Cora. He stormed down the hallway several paces as they shut the door to Cora’s room.