Take Me with You (Take Me #2)(75)

“What do you think you’re doing?” I asked.

Fear prickled through every nerve ending in my body. Grant was holding a gun. If he fired that weapon, then I knew, deep down inside, that I would never find him again. He would bury the Grant I knew and loved so far inside of himself that I was afraid even I couldn’t save him.

“Taking care of business.”

“Grant, put the gun down!”

“You should listen to her, son,” Mike said.

“I won’t make the mistake of waiting for you to kill me, too.”

He was so deadly calm and serious that it almost completely unnerved me. How could he be so confident while pointing that gun at his father’s chest? How could Grant have let it come to this?

“Grant,” I murmured, taking a few more steps toward him. “You are better than this. Just think…if you pull that trigger, you’ll become everything you have worked so hard not to be. And you’ll have to live with that for the rest of your life.”

“I’ll do what I have to do.”

“You don’t have to. You barely survived the last time something traumatic happened to you. Do you think you could survive killing your own father? No matter what he has done to you, no matter how much you suffered, shooting him doesn’t bring her back.”

“I know that,” he cried. His hands were shaking softly, but he hadn’t torn his eyes away from his dad the whole time I’d spoken to him.

“Do you? Then, give me the gun,” I whispered.

Tears were stinging my eyes as I stepped forward toward him. My throat was stuck as if it were stuffed with cotton balls. Here it was, all my fears coming to fruition. I’d thought that I was enough to push back his demons. But with his father standing at his door, all the good that had happened in his life disappeared. Grant was locked inside his head, trapped with the fears of his childhood.

“I’ll give you the gun when he leaves and agrees to never come back,” Grant said flatly.

“Is that what you want?” his dad asked.

“I’m not sure what else a gun pointed at your chest could mean.”

Mike took a step forward, and Grant fired a shot that whizzed past his father’s right ear and out the front door.

“Grant!” I screamed. “What the f*ck? Oh my God!”

“Next time, I won’t give you a warning shot.”

“Are you out of your mind?” Ari cried. “You can’t fire that f*cking gun at another human being! You could have killed him.”

“He entered my home without my permission, and I feared for my life. It’s self-defense.”

I shook my head in shock. He had fired a shot. He had shot at his own father. My mind was whirring around at five million miles a minute. I couldn’t process this. I was shutting down when I needed to be alive and alert for this. I couldn’t let him go through with this.

“Grant, please!” I pleaded. “He’ll leave. He’s going to leave now and not come back. Just please…don’t shoot any more.” Adrenaline was kicking in, but my body was compensating for my fear with unshed tears and a racing heartbeat. I turned to Grant’s father. “Tell him you’ll leave.”

“I just came to talk,” Mike said.

Grant shook his head. “I have no interest in talking.”

Mike lifted his foot to walk toward Grant. I saw Grant getting trigger-happy, and I realized I couldn’t let this happen, no matter what.

Without another thought, I threw myself in between them. Grant’s arm jerked, and the bullet that had been meant for his father rushed out of the gun. I screamed, and then everything happened in slow motion. My heart skipped a beat in that split second when my eyes met Grant’s. And then, I was shoved out of the way. I landed roughly on my hip, and my hands barely caught my fall. I heard a loud thunk and saw the bullet buried into the wall.

My body shook as I stared at the small bullet hole. I didn’t know if I had been standing in the way of that bullet and Mike had saved me from being shot, or if when Grant’s arm had jerked, the bullet had been thrown off course. Either way, all I knew was that Grant had fired his weapon, and I could have been injured.

I could have been killed.

“Ari,” Grant murmured, all the emotion flooding back into his voice.

Our eyes met across the short distance between us. The anguish that had been plaguing him since he was a kid resurfaced with full force. He was the guy all over again who had poured his soul out to me at the ski lodge, who hadn’t been afraid to show me his favorite place at the beach where he would think about everything that had happened to him, and who had placed his heart in my hands despite his fear of giving it away.

Grant’s hand went slack, and I watched as Mike easily disarmed him, popped out the magazine, and actually disassembled the weapon as if it were the easiest, most natural thing he’d ever done in his life.

“I wasn’t going to shoot you,” Grant said automatically. He rushed over and collapsed onto the ground next to me, pulling me into his arms. “I’d never hurt you. Oh God, I never want to hurt you.”

“It’s okay. I know. I know.” I tightly wrapped my arms around him. It didn’t matter that I was the one who had been shot at. I found myself comforting him. My hand slid up and down his back, and I kissed his cheek. I couldn’t hide the fact that I was trembling.