by Lisa Childs
“Judge Holmes!” she called out.
The gray-haired judge rose shakily from behind the bench and gazed around his courtroom. He shuddered at the destruction and carnage.
And Jocelyn looked around, seeing what he saw. The holes in the walls and furniture and the blood everywhere.
She cried out, then pressed a hand over her mouth to hold back a louder scream. So many of those young men who’d been sitting on Luther’s side of the courtroom were dead. Even his lawyer lay cowering on the ground, his briefcase held over his head as if he was afraid that someone might blow it off his shoulders.
She was afraid to look at the other side, at where Landon had been sitting with his boss and some of the Payne Protection Agency bodyguards.
Landon shouted, “Is everyone okay?”
Parker and those other bodyguards were checking on Luther’s fallen crew members and collecting their weapons. The only one sitting behind the prosecutor’s side of the courtroom was the chief. He was slumped on the bench seat, his hand pressed to his shoulder. He had been hit.
“Chief Lynch!” Jocelyn rushed over to him.
Parker rushed to the chief’s side, too, but the bodyguard’s stepfather waved them off. “Go after him! Don’t let him get away!”
All the bodyguards hastened to follow his orders, rushing out of the courtroom. Except for Landon...
He stayed beside her with his gun in one hand and his cell in the other. He dialed 911.
“Help’s on the way,” she assured the chief of police.
“I’m fine,” he told her even as he flinched. “The bullet went right through my shoulder.”
From the amount of blood oozing from the wound, she suspected it had done some damage on its way out, though. She pulled her scarf from her neck and wadded it up against his wound.
The chief’s face was pale, but his grasp was strong when he covered her hand with his, which was bloodied from his wound. “Luther...” he murmured urgently at her. “They’ve got to get Luther...”
Unlike the chief, who was injured, and all those other people who lay dead on the floor, she doubted the drug dealer even had a scratch on him. But he could not be as invincible as he thought he was.
“He just got out of the room,” she told the chief. “He won’t get out of the courthouse.” There were guards at all of the exits, and the bodyguards had gone after him.
He would not get away.
But Jocelyn and Landon exchanged an uneasy glance. Even if Luther did manage to escape, though, the two of them would be fine. They, strengthened from the love they shared, would keep each other safe—just as they had during the shoot-out, and like they would for the rest of their lives together.
Forever...
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