I curled up, covering my head with my arms. My brain became a pulsing strobe of thoughts: Run! No! Wrong! Help me! Blackness. I was moving, shaking. A sharp pain on my cheek.

I opened my eyes. Bram was shaking me. “Darby, stop! Look at me.”

He’d slapped me.

I slapped him back.

He let go, then grinned. “I guess you’re better. It’s over. The shooting stopped.”

“Sorry,” I muttered. “PTSD trigger. Nobody’s ever slapped me before. Except me.”

“Yeah, well, I’m sorry about that. I’ve never hit a woman before, either. You were screaming. I probably should have done this.” He kissed me.

The burning on my cheek spread to my whole body.

He let go and turned toward the lobby. “Everyone okay?”

Wyatt answered. “No one was hit.”

“Good. Stay low,” Bram said. “Roy, do you have a hammer and long nails here in the lodge? We can use a table to board up this window.” Roy, Bram, and Wyatt soon had the table hammered across the shattered window.

I remembered Cookie had gone into the kitchen for water. The room at first appeared empty except for a broken glass and spilled water on the floor. I soon found her in a corner crouched under a table. “It’s safe now. Come into the other room.”

The two of us joined the three men gathered in the lobby. “Ladies.” Bram had to speak up to be heard over the panicked voices and crying. “Please, be calm. There is only one person out there.” He glanced at me quickly, clearly wanting to keep the possibility of two a secret for now. “The shooter doesn’t know how many armed people are in here, so he isn’t going to try to get in.”

“We have team-building exercises,” Roy said, “to teach companies what to do in an active-shooter situation. We are implementing these steps to keep you safe.”

“What we need you all to do,” Wyatt said, “is spread out even more and stay as far away from windows as possible. We want you to adopt the survival mindset. You will get out of this.”

Bram indicated the fireplace. “We’ll only have Angie and Cookie by the fire with one of the staff members. Wyatt, you’ll need to cover the back of the lodge. Got it?” The men nodded.

To stop shivering from the combination of a PTSD incident and Bram’s kiss, I returned to the dining room, then crawled across the floor picking up the notes we’d been working on. By the time I’d collected them all, everyone had settled down, or at least settled down as much as they could knowing a killer was outside. And knowing we had far fewer tables than windows.

Chapter 18