Chapter Twenty-Eight
The parking lot was pitch black when she arrived.
She wasn’t sure what she was expecting, fleeing her job and her life, but she didn’t expect everything to look and feel exactly the same. If she didn’t think about it too hard, she could trick herself into thinking she was just getting ready for another shift. She wasn’t, she knew that, but it was all still too surreal.
The car was a lease. She’d call them in the morning to come and pick it up. It was a junker anyway. She didn’t need to worry anymore about it. Sierra pulled out her luggage and then swept through the car to make sure nothing else was in it. She didn’t need them to try to charge her any more than they would for her ending her lease a month early.
She wanted to leave.
Even though a week or two of staying, of planning, might have saved her from having to cut and run, she didn’t want to waste it. She didn’t think she could waste it, not after how Anthony had looked when she found him beaten and bruised. It didn't matter that he could heal from it. What if they didn’t stop next time? What if he wound up dead?
Sierra had to stop these thoughts in their tracks.
Reminding herself that he was going to be free of this place, too, cheered her up as she made her way across the parking lot to his room. There was someone yelling.
Sierra set her bags down and quietly peeked between the blinds of the window.
There was a woman in there – the woman from the bar – just laying into Anthony and screaming at him. Sierra’s blood ran cold. She watched for a moment more, and the woman pulled out a gun.
No.
She’d just set up her life to leave with him.
She sacrificed so much.
She wasn’t going to let him die.
Sierra dialed 911 and waited for them to answer.
“There’s a woman with a gun in one of the Casino’s hotel rooms. She looks like she’s about to shoot a man,” Sierra whispered anxiously. “Room 233. Please, please, hurry,” Sierra added, before she set her phone on top of her suit case.
She could hear the operator asking for her to stay on the line, and then pausing and asking if she was there.
Sierra watched closely, not wanting to say anything else in case the woman could hear.
Anthony and the woman went quiet, and she raised the gun.
The cops weren’t going to get there in time.
Sierra didn’t think and didn’t wait. She rushed to the handle of the room and found it unlocked. Within moments, she was bursting into the room and throwing herself at the woman’s arm to push it out of the direction of Anthony.
There was a bang.
He fell down.
Sierra felt her heart stop.
“Anthony,” she cried out. The woman under her started swinging at her to get her off, and Sierra struggled to keep her down. In this light, the girl looked different from the bar. She didn’t look more than twenty. What the hell was she doing?
“He’s killed people,” the woman gasped out at Sierra.
“I don’t believe you,” Sierra answered stubbornly.
“Please don’t say he’s gotten in your mind,” the woman complained, sitting away from Sierra as she pulled herself free.
“He hasn’t gotten in mine. You’ve just lost yours,” Sierra said angrily.
The woman reached for the gun again, and in a blur, something attacked her.
Anthony.
He was bleeding from his shoulder, and as she watched, he pushed the woman into the wall and held her there. He wasn’t choking her, didn’t hurt her, just held her there.
There was a banging on the door, and Sierra looked up to see a couple guards from the Casino standing there. Sierra scrambled to open the door and let them in.
“What’s going on? The police were called,” one asked, as the other rushed and pulled Anthony away from the woman.
“She came in here with that gun,” Sierra answered, rushing to Anthony’s side. “He’s been shot,” she added, rushing to his side.
“He’ll be fine. Do you want to press charges?” the security guard asked Anthony, un-phased.
“What do you…?”
Anthony shifted in front of them.
In front of a room of strangers.
It was just for a moment. There were cop sirens, and then he shifted back.
Sierra’s heart dropped.
The guards, too, looked un-phased.
Shifters.
How could he tell?
“I don’t,” Anthony said, looking at the other woman with an expression of such total disappointment that it made Sierra feel sick. “The bullet is in the wall, though,” he added, pointing up at it.
“Go ahead and get rid of the shirt before the cops get in here,” one of the security guards said quickly. Anthony shoved it in his open luggage.
The cops were treated completely differently.
They didn’t seem to know what was going on. None of them looked or acted familiar to any of those in the room. It took a moment for Sierra to realize they were state patrol sheriffs. Not local.
They talked a lot to her and Anthony. They shoved the woman that Sierra learned was named ‘Ivy’ into the back of a car.
They’d have to stay at least a few days for questioning.
So much for running off into the night.