Page 123 of Fatal Pattern

“Shut up.” She adjusted her finger on the trigger, ready to fire.

This man had killed her mother before Tori was old enough to know her voice. Killed her father before she could memorize his face. She’d spent her life believing she was alone because of what he chose to do one night in October.

“Do it.” His eyes drifted to Wells’s body. “Shoot me. You know you want to.”

The Glock sat heavy in her hand. The child who had hidden in that closet wanted to pull the trigger. She wanted to erase him the way he had erased her family.

“Do it!” Barclay shouted.

She looked at him and saw the evil she’d studied in textbooks. He was like a weed growing wild among the wheat, choking the life out of everything he touched. She wanted to rip him from the dark soil he lived in.

If she pulled the trigger, she became just like him.

She lowered the gun.

“It’s not my job to judge you. That’s for God.”

She turned away.

Ten feet away, Stryker was still in the wheelchair, head dropped forward but breathing.

Blade was standing there too. Blood soaked through his shirt in a dark map of the last hour. He crossed the space without a word. She met him halfway. His good arm pulled her against his chest. He smelled like blood and sweat. She pressed her face into him anyway.

His hand moved over her hair.

“You’re bleeding,” he said.

She pulled back to look at him. His nose was crooked. His eye was swelling shut. He looked like he’d been through a war, and he had. For her. “So are you.”

“No, Tori. You’ve been shot.”

She looked down.

A dark stain had soaked through the left side of her shirt. Three inches of torn fabric where the bullet had clipped her, the skin beneath it raw and weeping. Barclay’s wild shot. She hadn’t registered it.

It burned now.

She pulled the fabric aside. Clean entry, clean exit. The skin around it already purpling. “Through and through.”

Sirens outside. Ambulance. Cops. Real ones this time. Garrison didn’t bluff about calling for backup.

Blade stripped off his outer shirt and folded it into a pad, pressing it tight against her side. She put her hand over it to hold it.

“You’re going to need this cleaned and packed properly.”

“When the paramedics get here,” she said.

There was one more thing she had to do.

She limped over to Barclay, squatted, and fished Damien’s notebook from his jacket.

Barclay laughed from the floor, clutching his shoulder. “You think you’ve won? There are others. You haven’t touched the surface of this network. You’re done.”

“No,” Tori interrupted. “You are.”

34

The paramedic had been patient for about as long as Blade was going to allow. She’d been talking at him for ten minutes. Pressure here, hold this, don’t move that. He’d complied, but when she reached for the saline flush, he put his hand over hers.