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Rhys’s voice is close to my ear, but I barely hear him. Someone shifts in front of Dad, giving me a clear view of the cloth pressed against his chest. It’s white around the edges and completely red everywhere else. The man holding it lifts one hand for barely a second, and blood immediately seeps through again, coating his fingers and running over his wrist.
Something inside my head simply stops working.
“Let me go.”
I pull against Rhys.
“Let me go. I need to—” I wrench forward again, but his arm tightens around me, and irritation flashes through the confusion. I don’t understand why he’s doing this, why he’s holding me here when my father is lying on the ground and obviously needs me. “Rhys, let go of me.”
“Wait.” His voice is calm, but there’s something much heavier underneath it.
“For what?”
He doesn’t answer.
I twist around far enough to look at him. That’s when I see the blood running down his arm, soaking through the upper sleeve of his shirt, and dripping steadily from his fingertips.
My eyes move from his arm to my father, then back again when the gunshot comes rushing back all at once. Lucien turning in the saddle. The pistol swinging away from my head. Rhys in front of us. Dad behind him on Étoile when she reared.
One gunshot.
There had only been one.
“Oh.”
The sound barely leaves me. Something in Rhys’s expression changes, and I look toward Dad again.
“No.”
“Boone—”
“No, he’s fine.” The words come out before I even know what I’m saying. I nod quickly because there has to be an explanation that doesn’t end with my father lying motionless in the road. “It went through your arm first.”
Rhys says nothing.
“That’s good.”
He continues to hold me against him.
“That means it slowed down.”
“Boone.”
“It had to slow down.” I turn toward him, searching his face for some sign that he understands what I’m saying. “It hit you first, so it couldn’t have hit him that hard.”
Rhys just looks at me.
“Say something.”
His hand lifts to cup my face. I grab his wrist and yank his arm down.
“Tell me I’m right.”
He doesn’t.
It scares me.
“Why aren’t you saying anything?”
