Bring Down the Stars (Beautiful Hearts Duet #1)(91)

Bullets tore the air and exploded plaster chunks tore into flesh and bone. As the sun crept over the eastern horizon, it revealed a train of weary refugees—old men, women and children—running in a panicked clump as gunfire cut the air apart. They’d fled from the south and now the enemy, who knew the terrain better, was mowing them down.

“Fuckers are using them as cover,” I muttered. I started to take aim and realized Connor wasn’t beside me.

“Connor? Connor!”

Then I heard crying.

Somehow, under the barking orders, gunfire, and exploding rubble, I heard a child crying. In the pandemonium of refugees taking cover among us, a single little boy stood apart. Immobile in the chaos, weeping over the body of his dead mother.

Connor was running for him. He didn’t see the group of hostiles crouched behind the burned-out shell of a building. But I did.

“Fuck, no! Connor, stop!”

I ran after him, getting off a few rounds at the insurgents hiding behind a crumbling wall of scorched stone. Firing made me too slow. I had to save my breath and run.

The most important race of my life, with a weapon in my hands, slowing me down. My gear weighed a thousand pounds. It would flatten me to the track like a giant hand, while everyone I loved raced off and disappeared.

I’ll never reach him. I’ll never reach him. I’m going to lose…

The thoughts pounded in my head with my bellowing breath. Connor was in the open without cover, running straight through gunfire. I ran after, bullets whizzing past me from all sides.

This is it. It’s coming.

Connor was nearly to the kid. Plumes of dust and smoke fogged the street in a brown haze. Swirls and eddies billowing. Clouds parting to show an insurgent posed like a bowler about to throw a strike. The pendulum swing of his arm and the grenade rigged from a mortar round flew slow-motion in the dirty air. It rolled and jounced across the rocky soil, its course never veering from its target.

The child.

And Connor.

I channeled everything I had into my legs, forcing them to move faster than they’d ever run before. This was a race for life. Connor’s life. I was running the race of his life.

I was nearly there. I could see Connor’s eyes fixated on the child and determined to do something right. Something heroic and good that would make his parents—and himself proud. Unaware of the incoming danger. He didn’t understand the child was already lost.

I hunched like a linebacker, lowered my shoulders and ran. I was fast. I was going to win this fucking race. Dad’s car drove away but not this time. This time, I would catch it…

Connor, still running, reached his left arm out to the boy, shouted at him to Get down! Get down!

He was almost to the kid, but I was faster. The fastest. Always.

I won. I fucking won…

I barreled into Connor, knocked him clear off his feet, both of us flying through the air as the grenade exploded. The concussion blasted a crater of dust, dirt, shrapnel and blood.

For a single airborne moment, I only heard the air blowing past my ears. My arms gripped Connor hard. We were floating. We were flying.

Connor landed first, striking the ground hard. Our helmets cracked together as I landed on top of him and all the sounds of the world rushed in. Gunfire, explosions, shouts and screams. The rasp of my own sucking breath. Connor lay beneath me, unmoving. Eyes half-open, mouth ajar, his face streaked with blood and grime. Blood poured from his left arm, a piece of metal shrapnel protruding from the elbow joint.

“Connor?” I said, my voice torn and ragged, dust-choked.

He’s dead.

I reached my hand that was shaking as if we were in subzero temperatures instead of the merciless desert heat, toward his face.

Fucking God no. Please. Hell no, he can’t be dead. This isn’t how it’s supposed to happen.

I slapped at his cheek. “Connor, man… Come on…”

Another hail of gunfire, like stones pelting around us. I covered Connor’s head, shielding him, screaming at him to wake the fuck up and not be dead.

Pain exploded across my back like a string of firecrackers. It slipped under my body armor and my words choked off in a gurgle. Molten bolts of agony pierced my side, my waist, and hip. Bones ground together in my trembling body. My breath grew ragged as I started to hyperventilate.

In a mindless panic, I tried to escape. To crawl away and take Connor with me—Christ, he wasn’t breathing—but I couldn’t move. I couldn’t crawl, couldn’t stand, couldn’t run. I craned my head to look at my legs splayed out behind me. Blood poured from a gunshot wound on the back of my thigh.

But there was no pain.

Nothing.

Below the howling agony that wrapped around my waist, nothing was there.

“Connor… Please.”

My vision began to gray out. So dark. The agony was subsiding, growing distant, running ahead down the track and leaving me behind.

I rested my head on Connor’s chest, my eyes drifting closed.

Stars filtered across the black nothingness. I smiled.

I’d give them all to you, Autumn. My love. For you…



For you, I would

bring down the stars,

wreath their fire

around your neck

like diamonds,

and watch them

pulse

to the beat of your heart