Hold On (Page 182)

I screamed when the blood spatter hit my face.

Jones fell.

Chapter Twenty-Six

People Like Us

Cher

Marksmanship trophies.

Oh yeah, my man was badass.

“I love you,” I called, standing on my stoop, a dead man at my feet.

Merry lowered his gun.

“No shit?”

I pressed my lips together because that was the least romantic thing a man could say in this situation (or any situation), just as it had been the last time he’d said it.

But still, I was this close to crying.

Because I was alive to hear him say it.

(Not to mention, he’d just shot a man in the head for me.)

I controlled the tears.

Then I turned and raced into the house.

“Cher!” Colt called.

“Ryker! He’s been shot!” I shouted back while I sprinted through my living room.

I hit my knees on a slide right through a puddle of blood toward Ryker in my kitchen. When I stopped, I twisted, doing it awkwardly to get my hands, which still were tied behind me, on Ryker to see if I could find a pulse.

“Please have a pulse. Please, badass motherfucker, have a goddamned pulse,” I begged, searching for it.

“Man down. Send paramedics to our position. GSW,” Merry said.

I looked to him to see him moving swiftly into my kitchen, his phone to his ear.

“Three,” I told him. “Three of them.”

Merry’s eyes flared.

“He’s been hit three times,” he said into his phone. “Unconscious. Significant loss of blood.”

I lost sight of Merry behind me. Then my wrists were lifted, I heard the snap of a knife cutting through plastic, and my wrists were freed.

I turned, going back for Ryker’s pulse as Merry shifted, crouching across from me, shoving my hand aside and reaching in himself.

Colt, Mike, Tanner, Cal, and Sully came into my kitchen.

“Shit,” Sully whispered, eyes to Ryker.

Colt got close and crouched.

“Pulse. Weak,” Merry muttered. “Cher, get some towels.”

Pulse.

Weak.

Thank God.

I moved out. Mike moved in. By the time I got back with towels, they had Ryker on his back.

Men nabbed towels from me, went for a wound, and pressed.

I felt a hand on my arm and looked up at Cal.

He had one of my kitchen towels. He turned into me and his eyes watched his hand as he wiped blood off my face. He didn’t take a lot of time doing it before he caught my chin with his fingers and looked into my eyes.

“You good?” he asked.

I nodded.

He studied me.

Then he grinned. “Tough chick.”

“You bet your ass.”

He shook his head and dropped his hand.

I started to move to Ryker, catching sight of Tanner as I did.

There wasn’t a lot of room, especially with Ryker’s big body sprawled on my floor, but Tanner was pacing what was left of it, eyes glued to his bud, movements agitated, face set in stone.

They were tight, Tanner and Ryker. And don’t ask me how I knew, I just knew that Tanner was fighting the urge to drill the body on my stoop with more holes.

I went to Ryker’s head and got to my knees. Lifting his head gently, I slid my thighs under it to act as a pillow.

“Merry?” I called.

Merry looked from Ryker to me. “Yeah, Cherie?”

“Jones said he shot Ryan.”

Merry’s mouth got hard and he looked to Colt.

Colt looked to Sully.

Sully pulled out his phone and stepped out of my kitchen.

I turned my attention to Ryker.

“You’re good, brother,” I told him, curling my hands around his neck. “You’re good. You have to be. Alexis is boy crazy and someone has to protect her from teenage pregnancy, and you are the walking, talking anecdote for any boy who wants to get in a girl’s pants, if that girl’s your daughter, that is.”

Ryker, unconscious, said nothing.

My fingers curled in tighter.

“You’re good, brother,” I repeated. “You’ve gotta be good. You got sugar in your bed. What man in their right mind would leave that?”

Ryker just lay there.

It wasn’t right. It wasn’t Ryker.

Ryker didn’t just lay there.

He annoyed.

He got up in your shit.

He threw back drinks and spouted inappropriate crap that made you want to smile and punch him at the same time.

I leaned over him as far as I could get.

“You gotta be good, brother. People like us, Ryker…people like us, we can’t give up. We gotta show the world. We gotta show our kids. We gotta show ’em it’s okay. We gotta show our babies we can do it if we don’t give up. We gotta show ’em it pays off, it comes to you if you got it in you to wade through the shit. You’ll get the good if you don’t give up. You can live it if you just dare to dream.”

I heard the sirens.

I bent even further, my forehead to his.

“You got it all, brother. You finally got it all. Don’t give up,” I whispered.

Ryker said nothing.

He just lay there in a puddle of his own blood on my goddamned kitchen floor.

* * * * *

Ryan

He was trying to open his eyes.

All he saw was fuzzy. Blurred.

But he smelled weird stuff. Like he was in a hospital.

He felt nothing.

He blinked slowly, the only way his eyelids would move.

The blur was still there when he was done.

But he felt something.

His hand was squeezed.

Then he heard it.

“You’re good.”

Cheryl.

She was there.

As crazy as it was with all the shit that had happened to them, she was always there.