Page 150 of The Final Cut

Gunfire cracks. Not at us this time.

The sedan swerves, tires screaming, and slams into the curb hard enough to jump. Its front end clips a parked truck, metal folding with a wet, horrible crunch. One door opens before the Blackwood SUV pins it in place.

Shiloh does not slow.

He takes the next turn, then another, putting blocks between us and the crash while my pulse tries to beat through my throat. The voices on the car system blur together: Ever confirming pursuit stopped, Nash demanding injury status, someone else giving location markers and clean routes.

Shiloh keeps driving. One block. Two. Three.

Then he pulls beneath the covered entrance of a closed loading bay and stops. For a second, neither of us moves. The wipers drag rain across the windshield. My ears ring. My hands are locked around the seat belt. I cannot feel my fingertips.

Shiloh turns toward me. “Reva.”

“I’m okay.”

“Look at me.”

I do, because the edge in his voice is too sharp to ignore. His face is pale beneath the streetlight spill, all the easy gold stripped out of him. He reaches for me and stops halfway, waiting. Something inside me cracks wide open.

I nod, bottom lip trembling.

His hands are on me immediately. Face, shoulders, arms, ribs, knees. Not sexual. Not gentle in the soft way. Efficient, shaking only a little as he checks for blood, for glass, for places my body might be lying to both of us.

“I’m okay,” I say again. “We’re okay.”

His hand cups the side of my face. For one second, he closes his eyes. Then the car speaker crackles.

“Shiloh,” Nash says. “Answer me.”

Shiloh opens his eyes. “We’re clear. Reva’s not hit. Their vehicle was disabled. Your men have them?”

“Two alive,” Nash says. “One dead. Police scanner is waking up, so my team is leaving them for uniforms after removing anything useful.”

Ever cuts in. “Take the east route. I’m sending a new path. No hotel approach until I confirm there was no second tail.”

Shiloh stares at me while he answers. “Copy.”

I swallow. “They followed us from the hospital.”

“Yes.”

“So Isabel knows I went.”

“Maybe. Maybe she had someone on the hospital already.”

“Because of Cal.”

“And because of your mother.”

The word mother still feels wrong in his mouth. It feels wrong everywhere. A thing from another language I used to know and forgot after the house filled with blood.

I turn toward the window. The rain makes everything beyond the glass look smeared and surreal.

“What did she tell you?” I ask.

Shiloh’s thumb brushes once beneath my eye, catching wetness I did not know had fallen.

“Not in the car after someone tried to shoot us.”