Written with Regret (The Regret Duet #1)(2)

Only, when I looked back at my mother, she was no longer injured.

She was dead.

My shoulders shook wildly, silent sobs tearing from my throat. I needed to run. I needed to get out of there. But the fear and helplessness were paralyzing. I rested my forehead against my mother’s the way she’d done to me so many times in the past, calming me after a bad dream.

I needed her—glassy-eyed and unmoving—to fix this. I needed her to sit up and tell me that it was over. I needed my father to rise to his feet and pull me into his strong arms, where nothing could hurt me. And I needed my sister to appear, take my hand, and tease me relentlessly for overreacting.

I needed this not to be real.

Suddenly, a man got up and darted toward the double glass doors. With one single gunshot, he dropped to the ground.

My scream mingled with the gasps and cries of others trapped and hidden in that war zone. Desperate, I scanned the area for help.

More death.

More blood.

More hopelessness.

I caught sight of a man around my father’s age. He had his back to a flipped table, his face scrunched and his hands covering his ears as he rocked back and forth. With a thick beard and muscular arms covered in tattoos, he was someone I would have thought I could turn to for protection. The pure panic on his face made him more of a child than I was.

My stomach seized when another gunshot sounded followed by the thud of what I now knew was a body hitting the floor. I could have lived a lifetime without ever knowing what that sounded like. Yet, now, I’d never be able to unhear it.

“Anyone else want to make a break for it?” a man asked in a deep, gravelly voice.

I didn’t know where he was, but I sucked in a sharp breath and flattened myself on the floor, hoping he wouldn’t notice that I was still alive.

It was eerily silent after that. The only sound besides the thunder of my heart in my ears was the squeaking of his shoes against the tile every time he turned. They were slow, like he was taking his time surveying his damage. Or maybe they were deliberate as he searched for his next victim.

My stomach wrenched each time the sound got closer.

Then I’d shudder with relief when they faded into the distance.

It was only a matter of time though. My parents were dead, maybe my sister too. I would be next.

Lying as still as possible, I closed my eyes and prayed for the first time in my entire life. We didn’t go to church and I’d never been taught religion, but if God was real, He was the only way I was going to survive.

Through it all, I held my mother’s hand.

She would protect me.

Or, as it turned out, she’d send someone who could.

“When I say go, I need you to crawl with me,” he whispered.

My lids flew open and I found a teenage boy, maybe fifteen or sixteen, with dark hair and the bluest eyes I’d ever seen staring back at me. He too was on his stomach, facing me with his cheek resting on the cold tile and a red baseball cap turned sideways to hide the majority of his face. How he’d gotten there, I would never know.

I shook my head so fast that it was almost as if it were vibrating.

His eyes bulged. “Listen to me, kid. He’s pacing a pattern. Right now, he’s down near the froyo place. After he makes his next pass, we’ll have about sixty seconds to get over to the Pizza Crust. They have a door in the back we can escape through, but you gotta stick with me.”

I blinked at him. Who was this boy? He was young but older than I was. And while he wasn’t big and muscled like the tattooed guy, he was tall and could probably put up a fight.

“Did you hear me?” he asked when I didn’t reply. “When I say go, you stay low and head behind the counter at the Pizza Crust. Okay?”

“He…he’ll shoot us,” I stammered out.

“That’s why we have to be fast.” He lifted his head and glanced around. “Shit,” he muttered, putting his cheek back to the tile and closing his eyes.

I stared at his long, fluttering lashes for several seconds, debating if I was seriously going to trust this kid. I didn’t know him any better than I knew the shooter. But he was all I had. Help in any form, even that of a lanky teenage boy, was better than nothing.

His eyes were still closed, his breathing shallow and his body completely still, when he suddenly reached out and used two fingers to close my lids.

“It’s going to be okay,” he whispered so quietly that, had he not been mere inches away, I wouldn’t have heard him.

And for the first time since I’d seen my father collapse, I felt a spark of hope that maybe it would be okay.

Flattening my palm against the cool tile, I slid my hand over until I found the tips of his fingers. The footsteps were getting closer, but that boy didn’t delay in moving his index finger to rest on top of mine.

It was such a small gesture, but it brought tears to my eyes.

For a terrified little girl, playing dead to hide from a madman, it was sweetest thing he could have done.

With nothing more than the pad of his finger resting on mine, I wasn’t alone anymore.

I didn’t know who he was or where he’d come from, but I knew without a shadow of a doubt that when he said go, I was going with him.





CAVEN



Fourteen years later…



“I wish I had more words. Well, honestly, I wish Ian had words. But, somehow, he always finds the back of the room.”