Page 109 of Crowned In Blood
"What? Why?"
"Because the gunman wasn't pointing at me. He was pointing atyou."
My eyes went wide.
"If I didn't reach for you right then, you wouldn't be here, Lina. He was aiming for your head."
Someone tried to kill me.
Someone tried to kill me and Marco pulled me out of harm's way.
He took the bullet for me.
Marco almost sacrificed his life for me.
I punched him in the chest, hard.
"Ow! I am an injured man, you know."
For half a second, my anger quieted.
But then he smiled, and I hit him again.
"Don't you ever fucking do that again, Marco. You don't take bullets for me!"
He grabbed my fist, brought it to his lips, and kissed it as though my anger was nothing.
"If the choice is between your life and mine, I'll choose you every single time."
23
Catalina
“Do you want to postpone?”
I buttoned my pants. “No. This has to happen tonight.”
I knew that, and so did he.
Marco had been discharged, much to the utter bewilderment of the hospital staff. But even though he was fine, my nerves were a wreck.
I tried to tell myself nothing bad was going to happen. It was the most logical conclusion. We had more people, were better prepared. We’d sealed off the exits to Felipe's house by car, and while he had a helicopter, we’d taken his pilot hostage at one of the warehouses.
We would win, weshouldwin, but based on what Marco had said, we might also have another enemy that we hadn’t accounted for.
I didn’t think it was my father. He may have wanted to kill me before, but from the last messages I’d seen, he hadn’t changed the terms of his deal with Felipe. So who wanted me dead?
Did it have something to do with the trafficking? Were we closer to finding the victims than we realized, or was it something else?
I never really thought about my death. I wasn’t afraid of dying, but I wanted to live out of spite for those who wished I was gone.
My freedom and finding my sense of power were more important to me than anything else had been. They were my reason for survival.
But that was no longer the case.
My gaze drifted over to Marco as he pulled on a clean black shirt.
He was my purpose now. I wasn’t sure exactly when it had happened, if it was the first time we’d kissed, the day I’d called him after a panic attack. When he barged into my house after my father’s men had tried to kidnap me, the gun range, or even before then. Maybe it was that night at my birthday party. But somewhere along the line, he'd become such a big part of me that nothing else mattered.
