Chapter 19 Will
Will
“Thomas?”
He didn’t answer.
I’d just leaned over the seat when I saw the dark stain spreading across Thomas’s shoulder, visible even in the dim light from the dashboard. It was too dark and too much to have belonged to Otto. It was his blood.
“Thomas!”
His head lolled against the window. His eyes were closed.
“Bisch, Thomas is hit.”
Bisch’s eyes flicked to the rearview mirror, then back to the road. His jaw tightened.
“How bad?”
I reached over the seat, pulled Thomas’s coat and shirt aside. The bullet had gone through the meat of his shoulder. I found an entrance wound in front and an exit wound in back. He was bleeding steadily but not spurting.
“He needs a doctor. Now.”
“Twenty minutes. Keep pressure on it.” Bisch’s voice was flat, focused. “He has survived worse.”
I stripped off my coat, wadded it against Thomas’s shoulder, and pressed hard. He groaned but didn’t wake. His skin was cold and clammy, his face draining of color.
Shock was setting in.
“Stay with me,” I told him, panic threatening to claim me. “You don’t get to die. That’s not how this ends.”
He didn’t answer.
I pressed harder, feeling the wet heat of his blood soaking through the fabric onto my hands. As the Mercedes hurtled through the darkness, I counted Thomas’s breaths.
They were shallow, too shallow.
“Talk to me,” I said, though I knew he couldn’t hear. “Tell me about Paris. Tell me about the flat. Tell me about the terrible coffee you make every morning that you think is good but isn’t.”
Nothing.
“Damn it, Thomas. Tell me about Rome or about the day we met.”
His chest rose. Fell. Then rose again.
“Please, Thomas.” I was begging now, tears falling so freely my vision clouded. “Tell me what you’re going to say when this is over when we’re back in Paris. Just . . . tell me anything, babe. God, please say something.”
The road curved.
Bisch took it too fast, and I had to brace myself with one hand while keeping pressure with the other. Thomas’s blood was everywhere now—on the seat, on my clothes, on my skin. I could smell it, all copper and salt, the smell of a body trying to hold itself together.
“Don’t you fucking dare,” I whispered. “Don’t you leave me.”
The minutes crawled past.
Each one felt like an hour.
Each breath Thomas took felt like a gift I didn’t deserve.
Fifteen minutes.
Ten.
Five.
“There,” Bisch said, pointing. “Just ahead.”
The doctor’s house was a farmhouse a few miles outside Bern, set back from the road behind a screen of bare winter trees. I couldn’t see any lights in the windows. In fact, I couldn’t find a sign anyone was home. It looked abandoned and forgotten.
Bisch pulled into the drive and killed the engine.
“Wait here.”
He climbed out of the car and limped to the door. His leg was worse than he’d let on, I realized.
Once at the door, he knocked in a clear pattern: three short, two long, three short.
Nothing happened.
I watched Bisch standing in the snow, his breath fogging in the cold air, his shoulders rigid with tension. Behind me, the Baroness was stirring, making small sounds of pain. In the seat beside her, Otto hadn’t moved since we’d loaded him in.
And Thomas—
I checked his pulse again. It was still there, but weaker than before.
“Come on,” I muttered. “Come on, come on, come on—”
The door finally opened.
Yellow light spilled across the snow, warm and sudden. I saw a figure silhouetted in the doorway. It was small, stooped, and wrapped in a heavy robe. Words were exchanged, too quiet to hear. Bisch gestured toward the car, urgent, insistent.
Then he waved us forward.
I opened the door and lifted Thomas as gently as I could, cradling him against my chest the way I had carried the Baroness through the drainage channel.
He was much heavier than her—solid and muscular, the body I knew as well as my own—but I barely felt the weight.
Adrenaline, fear, and love were more powerful than any weight.
Bisch was already at the back of the car, pulling Otto’s broken body from the seat. The old man’s mustache was matted with blood and stuck against his face. His eyes and cheeks were a landscape of bruises and swelling. He made no sound as Bisch lifted him. I didn’t know if that was good or bad.
“The Baroness,” Bisch said, nodding toward the back seat. “Can she walk?”
“I don’t know.”
“Leave her for now. These two first.”
We carried them inside.
The doctor’s name was Rainer Müller, and he looked like he had been practicing medicine since before the fourteenth century.
His hands were spotted with age and his back curved with decades of bending over patients, but his eyes were sharp and clear.
He took one look at Thomas, at the blood-soaked coat pressed against his shoulder and his pale face and shallow breathing, and pointed to a table in the next room.
“Gunshot. When?”
“Maybe forty minutes ago,” I replied.
“Blood loss?”
“Significant. He lost consciousness in the car.”
Müller nodded once and moved with a speed that belied his age. Within seconds, he had cut away Thomas’s shirt, exposing the wound. It was an ugly thing, ragged and raw, still seeping blood despite the pressure I’d kept on it.
“Through and through,” he muttered. “Good. There will be no fragments to extract.” He glanced at me. “You. Wash your hands. You’re going to help.”
For the next hour, I held retractors while the doctor cleaned the wound, passed instruments I didn’t know the names of, and kept pressure here and released it there. I watched the doctor’s aged hands move with a precision that seemed almost mechanical.
Thomas lay motionless throughout, his face slack, his breathing supported by a mask Müller had fitted over his nose and mouth.
An IV line ran into his arm, feeding him fluids to replace what he’d lost. A second line delivered blood.
How the old man maintained a ready supply was a wonder I would have to learn about later.
“He will need more blood,” Müller said without looking up. “I have enough for tonight. Tomorrow, we may need a donor.”
“I’m O positive.”
“That is not compatible for whole blood, but we will see.” He made a final stitch, tied it off, and stepped back. “The wound is clean. I found no major damage to muscle or bone. He was lucky.”
“Lucky.” The word tasted bitter in my mouth.
“In this business, lucky means alive.” Müller wiped his hands on a towel and fixed me with those sharp eyes. “He will sleep for several hours. The blood loss was significant, but he is young and strong. He should recover.”
Should.
Not will.
My heart lurched into my throat.
“And the other one?” I asked. “The older man?”
Müller’s expression shifted—something closed off, guarded. “That one is more complicated. He has internal bleeding, broken ribs, and damage to the spleen, possibly the liver.” He shook his head. “I will do what I can, but you should prepare yourself.”
“For what?”
“For the possibility that I cannot save him.”
I sat with Thomas while Müller worked on Otto.
The room was small and sparse, with whitewashed walls, a single window covered by a heavy curtain, and medical equipment that looked older than I was.
Thomas lay on the table, his shoulder bandaged, his face peaceful in a way that made my chest ache.
He looked young when he slept. Younger than he had any right to look, after everything we’d been through.
I held his hand. It was cold, but I could feel his pulse beneath my fingers—steady now, much stronger than it had been in the car. The blood was doing its work. His body was healing itself, the way bodies do when given the chance.
“You scared me,” I told him, though he couldn’t hear. “You’re not allowed to do that. We have rules. You promised.”
His chest rose and fell. The IV dripped.
Somewhere in another room, I could hear Müller moving and the clink of instruments. I could also hear his voice as he talked himself through whatever he was doing.
“In case you forgot,” I continued my monologue.
“Our first rule is that you don’t get to die before me.
That’s always been non-negotiable. I’ve already decided that I’m going to be the one who goes first because I’m older and wiser and because I couldn’t bear to live in a world where you don’t exist.”
Thomas’s eyelids flickered.
I held my breath, but he didn’t wake.
“The second rule is that you’re not allowed to be a hero without consulting me first. This lone-wolf nonsense—taking a bullet and not even noticing—that’s not acceptable. We’re partners. We do stupid things together or not at all.”
The door opened behind me. I turned, expecting Müller, but it was Bisch.
His face was gray with exhaustion, his clothes still stiff with dried blood. Whether it was his own or Otto’s, I couldn’t tell anymore. He looked like a man who had been to war and was still waiting to find out if he’d survived.
“The Baroness,” he said. “She is asking for you.”
“How is she?”
“Awake and lucid.” He paused. “She is fragile in a way I have never seen before.”
I glanced at Thomas. He was still sleeping, still stable. I made myself let go of his hand.
“Stay with him,” I told Bisch. “If he wakes up—”
“I will find you.”
The Baroness was in the kitchen, sitting at a wooden table with a cup of tea cooling in front of her.
Someone—Bisch, probably—had helped her inside and cleaned her up as best they could.
Her face was washed, the blood and grime scrubbed away, revealing the full extent of her injuries.
One eye was swollen completely shut now.
It was an angry purple and black. Her lip was split, and a cut above her eyebrow had been closed with a butterfly bandage.
But it was her hands that made me stop in the doorway.
Müller had re-wrapped them in clean white bandages, but I could see the shape of them. Or rather, I saw the shape they were supposed to be but weren’t. Her fingers were wrong, too short, too flat. The bandages couldn’t fully hide what had been done to her.