Free The Omega Team: Assisting Aimee by Susan Stoker Page B

are. I wouldn’t have been able to stay calm if you weren’t here with me.”
    “Bull,” Tony countered immediately. “You’re a professional down to your bones. You would’ve done the exact same thing if I wasn’t here.”
    “But I’m glad you were,” Aimee whispered.
    Before Tony could respond, they were interrupted by a large man in a police uniform.
    “Miss O’Brien? Mr. Santoro? I’m Captain May. I’m certainly glad to see you alive and well. EMS will be here in a moment to take a look at that arm, but I’m going to need both your statements about what happened here today.”
    Aimee nodded, and Tony did the same. He held out his hand to the captain and they shook hands. “Thanks for getting here so quickly.”
    They all turned upon hearing the commotion on the other side of the gym. The kids were being let out of the lockers two by two. They looked scared and shaken up, but they were alive. It was all that mattered.
    One of the children, a first-grader named Bridget, saw her favorite teachers from across the gym and took off around the officers and military guys trying to herd them toward the locker rooms. She made a beeline for Aimee and Tony.
    “Miss O’Brien! Mr. Santoro!” she wailed as she ran.
    “Shit,” Aimee murmured under her breath, worried about Bridget seeing the bloody mess nearby.
    “Get her,” Tony ordered. “I’ll cover you.”
    Aimee stepped toward Bridget and opened her arms. The little girl ran right into them without looking away. Aimee folded her arms around the small child and turned so the girl’s back was facing Bill. She held on tight, not loosening her hold for a moment when she felt Bridget’s tiny body shaking and trembling with the force of her tears and fright.
    “You’re okay, Bridget. Everything’s fine.”
    “I was so s-s-scared,” she blubbered.
    “But you did good. I didn’t hear one peep from anyone. That was amazing,” Aimee praised.
    “Tommy held me the whole time,” Bridget said, finally picking her head up off of her gym teacher’s belly and looking up. “He was scared too, but we didn’t make any noise.”
    “Good girl,” Tony soothed. “No wonder you get all A’s in my class. You’re super smart.”
    Her teacher’s praise obviously went a long way toward making the dark-haired girl feel better.
    “Go on now, you need to get outside with the others. I know your daddy will be worried about you. He’ll want to see for himself that you’re all right,” Tony told her, obviously knowing his students well. Bridget’s mom had never been in her life and her dad was a soldier raising his small daughter by himself. He’d be beside himself worrying about her, as would all the parents.
    “Okay. See you tomorrow!”
    Tony and Aimee watched as one of the officers sent to retrieve the runaway child escorted her to the locker room, careful to block her view of the violence nearby. Aimee felt Tony step next to her, getting into her personal space.
    “You need to change,” he told Aimee in a weird voice.
    “What?”
    But he didn’t repeat himself, merely worked on unbuttoning his dress shirt to give to her. “It’s not exactly clean, but I’m guessing you might prefer my blood on you, over his. I’ll have to take this off anyway so the medics can get to my arm.”
    Aimee watched in confusion, and with some awe, as Tony stripped off his shirt and held it out to her. It took her a moment to realize why he was giving her his shirt, and she turned her head to try to see behind her back.
    Tony took her chin in his hand and kept her from seeing the blood that had splattered onto her when Bill was shot. “I’ll block the view of the others. Just take it off and drop it. You’ll be covered up in a jiffy.”
    Aimee nodded, not comfortable at all in stripping off her T-shirt in front of all the men and women wandering around the gym, but she wanted Bill’s blood off of her more than she wanted privacy.
    “Don’t pull it over your head,”