The old woman fired a shot, just missing Tara as she scrambled to reach Warren’s gun and was finally able to grab hold of it. And just before the woman let out another shot, Tara took aim, then two shots cracked the air, and both bodies fell to the floor.

Chapter Thirty Three

Tara sat on a stretcher as an EMT carefully bandaged up her arm. The youngest girl, Kelsey, had already been taken away to the hospital, but the other ambulances had arrived only moments ago, quickly attending to Warren and the older sister, Anna. Tara’s eyes couldn’t stop darting toward them to check that they were still okay. They were each being placed on a stretcher and Tara could hear their distinct voices as they spoke to the EMTs. Each time they spoke, a wave of relief washed over her.

Before the ambulances arrived, she had waited with them and attended to their wounds as best she could, wrapping them in whatever she could find, applying as much pressure as she could. Warren’s wound was the most serious. He had been shot in the shoulder, and it was keeping him talking that became most important in those moments. It was during those crucial moments that Tara learned he came as soon as he saw her text. He didn’t mention if he was still angry with her, didn’t scold her for her rash moves—Tara knew that was yet to come. Instead, he only asked her the details of her discovery, and as she explained, he nodded.

Keeping them talking was the only way she could truly be sure that they were going to be okay, and so, even though they were in safe hands now, their voices still filled that need of reassurance within her.

However, it was the younger sister that she was most concerned about. Tara had checked on her too before the ambulances arrived, but unlike Warren and Anna, Kelsey remained silent, her eyes stayed closed, and her pulse was weak—so weak that at times Tara didn’t know if she would make it before the ambulances could reach them.

But she had held on, and once the EMTs arrived, they immediately put her on a stretcher and were soon on their way to the hospital.

“Any word on the younger girl?” Tara asked the EMT who had just finished bandaging her arm.

“She’s stable,” the EMT replied. “She’ll pull through.”

Tara nodded in return as she hopped off of the stretcher, looked down at her bandaged arm, and thanked him. She would still need stitches, he informed her, but she was lucky. Even though she had been cut deep, she had been sliced close to the bend in her arm, where her forearm was meatier.

“If he cut you any closer to your wrist, he probably would’ve severed your tendon,” he told her, before expressing the severity of an injury like that—that she could’ve lost mobility of her hand.

Again, she thanked him as the thought of what that would mean to her career seeped into her mind. That would’ve meant her having to turn in her badge. There was no way she’d be able to be an FBI agent with only one useable hand. The thought stung for a moment, but it wasn’t just the thought of what could’ve happened that made her feel momentarily uneasy. It was the fact that after this entire ordeal, she came out of it with the least serious injuries. It was this odd guilt that weighed heavily on her conscious. It was the same feeling she had for years after her mother’s death—that even though she was just a child, she sat in a closet while her mother fought for her life.