Chapter 23
Vitals are stable, pulse is elevated. Minor burns and external injuries—scrapes and bruising. Pulse ox is rising, currently at eighty-five.
The smell of smoke clung to Logan like a campfire as he worked to make sense of the voices hovering over him. He must be on rounds in the hospital.
Someone had been in a fire.
He remembered the dead weight of Jax in his arms, felt the heat of the flames so close to his body. His eyes shot open just as the ambulance doors closed.
“Breathe deeply, sir,” said the EMT, a bald man with dark brown skin trying to fasten an oxygen mask over Logan’s ears.
Logan pulled it off. “Where’s Jax?” he croaked.
“The other big guy? Dark hair?”
Logan nodded.
“Already on his way to the hospital. I hear you saved his life.”
Logan leaned back, allowing the man to put the oxygen mask on him. He remembered crawling on his hands and knees, searching for Jax. He remembered firing a bullet into Stewart Cole. He remembered arguing with Gemma.
She didn’t want to see him anymore.
The ambulance started to move. Logan sat up suddenly. “Wait!”
“Sir, you need to—”
“Where’s Gemma?”
“I don’t know who Gemma is, sir.”
“Stop the ambulance.”
“We need to get you to the hospital.”
Logan pulled the mask completely off his head and ripped an IV out of his arm.
“I said stop it, now.” He cleared his throat and immediately regretted the action as the raw sides of his trachea rubbed against one another.
“I need to get out. I have to make sure she’s okay.
” He turned toward the driver. “Stop this vehicle, goddamn it!”
The ambulance came to a stop. Logan stood and wrestled with the door until it opened. Five hundred feet away stood Cowboy, and Logan took off at a jog. “Where’s Gemma?” he asked.
“Back at headquarters. She didn’t come with us.”
“Yes, she did. She was in the van with Jax.”
Cowboy’s eyes went wide. He and Logan ran across the property searching for the vehicle parked on the other side, a full moon lighting the way.
If she’d gotten hurt because of him, he’d never forgive himself.
Logan reached the van before Cowboy. Gemma was slumped over in the passenger seat, what looked like dark stains all over the upholstery in the light of the moon. Logan opened the door and she fell into his arms, lifeless.
Blood.
Those stains are blood.
It was splattered along the back of the seat in a pattern that was all-too familiar from his medical school days. “She’s been shot! Get that ambulance over here!”
Cowboy took off running.
Logan rested her on the ground and felt for a pulse. It was weak and racing. “She’s in hypovolemic shock. She’s lost too much blood.” He didn’t know who he was talking to.
He didn’t care.
He lifted her shirt and saw two wounds, one on the edge of her breast, the other just below her rib cage. The lower was bleeding far more than the upper and he folded her shirt, using it and his hands to put pressure on it.
“You’re going to be okay.” He stared at a drop of blood as it rolled down her breast and around to the side of the other, seeming to mix into the tattoo of the ocean wave where it touched the shore.
She’d been through so much already. It didn’t seem fair she should be dying right in front of his eyes.
“Please let her be okay,” he begged.
The ambulance came racing across the property, headlights shining and emergency lights flashing.
Logan showed the EMTs her wounds and stepped back so they could care for her, strapping her onto a gurney, loading her into the back, and taking her away—leaving him and Cowboy standing in the dark outside Anthony Royce’s burned down lake house, in an orchard full of rotting peaches.
Crickets chirped in the distance.
“You know what this means?” asked Cowboy.
“What?”
“This isn’t over.”
“What do you mean?”
“You killed Cole, Noah got one from his sniper’s nest, and I got one when the van exploded. That’s three tangos down.”
“But someone shot Gemma.”
“That’s right. Someone shot Gemma, and this ain’t over yet.”