His voice was croaky, a thread of his normal light baritone. His eyes were unfocused, his breathing fast, face pale and shiny with sweat as he clutched at his shoulder and winced. Blood leaked from between his fingers, the spreading patch dark against his ridiculously cheerful Hawaiian shirt.
‘‘Don’t move.’’ Roma wrenched Lewis’s hand away and forgot about diving for cover, forgot there was a gunman. Her mind spun into overdrive as she shoved the heel of her palm against his shoulder, planted her other hand on top of the first, and leaned into the wound, using her weight to apply pressure. She’d done first aid courses—she knew the theory—but she’d never seen a gunshot wound before, and the violent reality of it was paralysing. She had to force her sluggish brain to think past the frightening blankness, to remember.
She began talking, her voice hollow, jerky, rising over Lewis’s high-pitched moan as he tried to curl into a foetal ball, almost dislodging her hold as she explained what she was doing, that he had to be still, that she would get help.
Help.
Her head jerked up, gaze swinging wildly as she searched for assistance. She saw with a renewed sense of shock that she and Lewis were alone except for a couple crouched behind a nearby car. There were people huddled in the cinema complex; she could see faces peering out from behind movie posters. A man made eye contact with her and pointed at his cell phone as he talked rapidly into it.
Roma felt like closing her eyes against a raw punch of disbelief. She was shaking with reaction and the aftershock of adrenaline, her arms and shoulders aching from the strain of her position, yet just minutes ago she’d been relaxed and happy, enjoying the upbeat atmosphere of the movie crowd, the balmy evening and Lewis’s terrible jokes. She could still hear music, smell coffee and doughnuts. The city, the street, the night, were the same, yet in a split second everything else had changed. The protection of the crowd had melted away, leaving her kneeling, solitary and exposed, over Lewis.
Blood continued to well. In desperation, Roma wrenched off her shirt—not caring that she had only a bra on underneath—wadded the soft, white cotton into a pressure pad and jammed it over the wound, fisting it down tight.
The ambient air temperature was warm, she should have been fanning herself against the heat, but she didn’t feel warm now. A slight breeze flipped hair across her face, slid over her almost-naked back, roughening her damp skin with the chill of invisible fingers. She noted that Lewis was no longer conscious, and fear formed an icy knot inside her.
Roma knew guns, knew how to handle them, break them down, clean and reassemble them. She knew how it felt to fire a gun, to ache in her arms and shoulders and wrists from spending long hours at shooting ranges. She knew more about guns than she had ever wanted to know, but she’d shied away from learning anything more than she had to about the damage they could do. The wound in Lewis’s shoulder didn’t look big, but that was no cause for celebration. Small-calibre rounds didn’t make huge entry wounds, but they had a tendency to travel in the body, ricocheting off bone and causing immense soft tissue damage.
Her heart squeezed tight in her chest as she crouched over Lewis with all the fierceness of a lioness protecting her only cub. ‘‘Don’t die,’’ she commanded, her voice still husky, hollow.
His eyelids flickered, and she decided he’d heard her. He wouldn’t die. She wouldn’t allow it.
Lewis was her friend.
She could count the friends she had on one hand, and she cherished each and every one of them; they were as precious as family to her. She wasn’t going to lose Lewis.
Briefly she closed her eyes against the hot sting of tears and sent up a prayer. He needed an ambulance—fast.
The distant wail of a siren jerked her head up. She craned around, dark gaze homing in on the direction of the siren, as if she could make help come faster with the sheer force of her will.
The street was completely empty of movement now, and unnaturally hushed. Traffic must have been cordoned off. Across the road, darkened apartments loomed over the bright facade of shop-fronts. Roma had barely, if ever, noticed those apartments, but in the aftermath of the shooting, they took on a faceless, menacing aspect. She’d consciously blocked the thought that the shot could have originated from any one of those blank windows. She’d been running on adrenaline, reacting rather than thinking, but now cold logic and a growing awareness of being watched, began to register.
She froze, head still craned at a painful angle, gaze still fixed in the direction of the siren. She’d felt that same creeping sensation before, the tension in the pit of her stomach, the abrupt sharpening of her senses, but she’d always dismissed it as paranoia.
The warm breeze swirled, turned chill against the taut curve of her throat, the naked arch of her back, so that she tensed against the convulsive need to shiver. The skin along her spine tightened with an almost painful sensitivity, twitched, as if a gun was now trained on the centre of her back, the gunman’s finger stroking the trigger.
In that moment she felt her semi-nakedness, the sheer vulnerability of pale, exposed skin, the softness and fragility of flesh and bone.
A shudder rocked her and she had to fight the wild urge to fling herself flat on the pavement, belly-crawl behind a car and hide.
She hated the shattering sense of vulnerability, the cowardly impulse to save herself and leave Lewis bleeding on the sidewalk. She was a Lombard—for her, the threat of violence was no novelty—but she had never before felt directly threatened, never before felt so utterly powerless.
Images and impressions tumbled through her mind as the nightmare visions of a past that had haunted her since she was fifteen flooded back, swamping her.
Nine years ago Roma’s eldest brother, Jake, and his fiancée had been kidnapped and shot by a terrorist group headed by a man named Egan Harper.
The shock of their deaths had hit her hard. She hadn’t been able to turn off her imagination or erase the brutal details from her mind. She’d swung wildly between impotent rage and an icy fear of the same thing happening again to another member of her family.
She’d had counselling. It had helped, but no one had been able to give her back the older brother she loved, or the fragile illusion of safety. Harper had shattered a basic innocence in them all that day.
In the years that followed, her family’s vulnerability had been reinforced when Harper had continued to stalk them and had attempted to kill another of her brothers, Gray, and the woman he’d married, Sam. They had all breathed a collective sigh of relief when Harper had been the one to die in that last encounter.
Through it all, Roma had worked to achieve a level of happiness and peace, unwilling to let Harper take anything more from her than he already had. She’d done a number of things to take control of her life, including keeping fit, and taking martial arts and gun classes, but the fact remained that safety was only an illusion. Harper was dead, but he wasn’t alone out there.
Roma didn’t see herself as paranoid. She was a realist. The entire Lombard family was a target, not only because of their wealth and high media profile, but because a branch of the family business was tied up with the development of hi-tech arms and communication equipment for the military.
For them, it wasn’t a matter of if trouble would strike, it was a matter of when.
Lewis stirred, his eyes flickering. Roma stared numbly at the grey pallor of his face, and rage built steadily inside her at what had been done to Lewis—bright, inoffensive, fun-loving Lewis, who wouldn’t hurt a fly. Roma had the odd, fragmented thought that if she’d stayed at home, read a book or watched TV, instead of going out looking for bright lights and fun, tired of her own company, Lewis wouldn’t be bleeding on the sidewalk now. No one would have gotten hurt.
The wail of the siren grew louder, then stopped, the abrupt silence punctuated by the shallow rasp of Lewis’s breathing, the rapid thud of her heart shoving blood through her veins in short,