Chapter 28
twenty-eight
Sava’s shoulder slams into my ribs.
Air becomes knives. The floor and ceiling trade places. I’m moving. No, I’m being moved. Arms hooked over Sava’s neck, her grip a vise around my waist. She’s cradling my legs like a baby. Every step she takes punches heat through my side, then drains it away until the heat is gone.
The hallway blurs. Light. Shadow. Light again.
Gunshots crack somewhere far off, then closer, then so close they’re thunder rattling my bones.
It smells like metal and rain that never fell, oil and old dust, burned sugar.
Someone shouts in Russian. Another voice barks back in Italian.
Boots hit concrete like a breath I can’t catch.
“Stay with me, Melinda,” Sava says. “Keep your eyes open.” I try. My eyelids weigh a thousand pounds. Cassius taught me about the waves of pain. Don’t let it take you. Bite down. Breathe through it. Name five things you can feel.
One, Sava’s braid against my cheek. Two, the wet warmth slicking my palm where it’s pressed to my side. Three, the tremor in Sava’s breath as she pushes a door open with her shoulder. Four, the icy cold of my lips. Five, the pain.
“I did it Cassius,” I whisper. It doesn’t sound like me. “Five things.”
“He’s coming,” Sava says. “Keep your eyes open.”
The walls smear. The hall narrows to a tunnel and we’re a flicker running through it.
The ghosts pace us like a shadow escort.
We burst into a larger space and noise slams me.
Bodies in the periphery; silhouettes scattering across the floor.
Smoke grows thick until I can’t swallow my coughs.
Shell casings roll, a bright metallic tinkle under the thunder.
Havoc is here. Even with blurry vision, his broad frame is unmistakable.
He’s dragging a man by the collar like he weighs nothing.
Dominic’s voice slices the room. Someone must grab at Sava because she spins, and the pain from her tightening grip has tears trailing down my cheeks. Thank God she doesn’t drop me.
Sava pushes me into a huge chest in one practiced sweep. She’s already drawing, pivoting, two shots stitching the dark ahead.
Sava takes me again without breaking stride, my weight settling against her chest.
“Out,” Sava says into my hair. “In three. One—two—” She doesn’t make it to three.
A shape lunges. My vision whites out. When it snaps back, the shape is choking on nothing, Havoc’s hand twisted in his jaw, the neck at a wrong angle.
My head rocks against Sava’s collarbone.
She’s steel and leather and smoke. Under it, something warm, like clove and it anchors me.
“Cassius,” I try. My mouth won’t shape the sounds right. “I need…”
“You’ll see him outside,” she says. “I promise. Keep breathing.”
And then I see him.
Not standing. Not stubborn. Limp.
Nikola has Cassius under the arms. Marco’s hooked at his waist. Between them they haul his dead weight, sleeves black with blood. His head lolls against Nikola’s shoulder. His shirt is ruined—dark, wet, spreading. His mouth is parted but there’s no sound. His eyes are closed.
“Cassius.” The word tears out of me, raw. The hallway reels. I lunge toward him on instinct. My body forgets it’s broken and suspended above the ground in Sava’s arms.
“Easy,” she snaps, catching me hard against her. “Melinda, focus. He’s knocked out, not gone. Do you hear me? Not gone.”
I can’t breathe. The world narrows to the line of his throat, the slack in his jaw, the way Nikola’s grip tightens like he’s holding a man from falling into a grave.
Gideon falls in beside Nikola and Marco, shadow marching with Cassius like a pallbearer-in-waiting.
“Don’t you take him,” I rasp at him, raw and useless.
He tips his brim once, solemn, unreadable, and keeps step.
Red-blazer, mascara comet-streaked, sets a phantom palm to my cheek like she can hold my face steady.
“Let me go. Let me go.” The words crumble; panic claws up my ribs.
Sava shoves me back to her shoulder, forearm iron across my spine. “Breathe.” Her mouth is at my ear, steady as steel. “In. Out. Now.”
I drag air that doesn’t want to come. It scrapes. It burns. Cassius’s boot bumps the doorframe as they angle him through, and the sound knifes me more than the pain that possesses my body.
“He can’t see me.” I choke. “Sava. He can’t see me.”
“He will,” she says. “But only if you stay with me. Eyes open.”
I wrench them open. Night air hits my face. Sava adjusts her grip and runs.
“I’ve got you,” she says. “We’re not losing either of you tonight.”
Outside is another planet. Headlights blur into shooting stars.
Motorcycles idle, thunder bottled. Someone is yelling for gauze.
Someone else is swearing about exits and a second car and gridlock.
Gravel bites my bare feet when they catch the ground.
Sava lowers me beside a black SUV and drops to her knees so fast the ground jumps.
“Lower left,” she says, already tearing my shirt with trauma shears. Cool air kisses hot skin. Then her fingers find the hole. She’s unflinching, so sure, unshaking.
“Exit?” Dominic calls.
She rolls me just enough to check my back.
“No exit.” Her jaw sets. “Okay, Melinda, this is going to burn.” A foil-wrapped roll appears, gauze dusted with something gritty.
She shoves it deep into the wound and the world detonates.
I bark a sound that isn’t a scream only because there’s no air left to make one.
“Good,” she says. “Again.” She packs more, fist over fist, until the bleeding slows from a flood to a seep. She slaps a huge bandage across my shoulder that’s heavy like cloth and drags elastic tight around my hips, cinches the pressure until stars pop at the edges of my vision.
“Bend her knees,” Sava orders as she lifts me off the ground again. She slides me into the backseat and someone shoves a rolled jacket under my legs. The tearing pull across my belly eases by a hair.
“Do not fall asleep,” she says, palm steady on the bandage, her body braced to keep pressure. She rips open a crinkling blanket, tucks it over me. “You’re going to feel cold. That’s shock. You’re okay.”
I’m shaking. No matter how hard I bite down, I can’t control my teeth chattering.
“No water,” she adds when someone tries to press a bottle to my mouth. “Turn her head if she gets sick. Keep the pressure. We move now.”
“Copy,” Dominic says. Doors fly open. Sava climbs into the SUV with me, one knee on the seat, one hand welded to the bandage, the other gripping the oh-shit handle for leverage as the car lurches forward.
Before her door shuts, a voice cuts through the chaos. “Melinda.”
My head jerks toward it. Outside, under the wash of headlights, Nikola and Marco are loading Cassius into another SVU. There’s a dressing pressed to his chest by Dmitry’s red-slick knuckles. His eyes slit open, unfocused, trying.
“Cassius,” I rasp.
His head turns a fraction. He finds me like a magnet finds north. “Stay… awake,” he gets out, thin as thread.
“I’ve got her bleeding controlled,” Sava calls to him without looking away from me.
His mouth twitches like he’s trying to nod. “Good… girl.” The words scrape. He sways. Nikola tightens his grip.
“Don’t leave me,” I scream. It comes out broken.
“Not… happening,” he breathes. “Not ever.”
“Load him!” Dominic barks. Cassius tries to dig his heels in, stupid, stubborn, mine. I lift my hand, two fingers, like I can reach out and touch him in the space between us. He lifts his, trembles, almost meets me across the dark. He keeps his eyes on me until the angle steals me from his sight.
“Eyes on me,” Sava says, face close, calm as a prayer. Her face doubles, then settles. She’s sharper than the rest of the world. She always is.
“This is survivable,” she tells me. “You hear me? You are going to survive this.”
“Hurts.”
“I know.” She leans closer, and the sound of everything else slides away. “Count my breaths.”
I do. One. Three. Five. Anchor yourself, darling. Find a rhythm that isn’t the pain. Her hand never leaves my wound. The bleeding holds. The dark backs off one inch. And I keep breathing.
Lights strobe past. Pavement hums. The pressure on my side never lets up.
My fingers curl in Sava’s jacket. Red-blazer checks the bandage with a look that makes no sense but still settles me.
And as Dominic flies through the city, Logan sits quiet in the passenger seat.
A beautiful, smug angel. My throat tips toward a laugh that’s mostly a sob.
“Tell me something magical,” I mumble. It feels important.
She thinks for a beat. “He is the strongest man I know,” she says, voice quiet enough to live in. “And I have never seen him look at anything the way he looks at you.”
The dark presses in. I push it back with the picture of his eyes when he first saw me in that room. With the way his hand shook and reached for me. With his voice and breath threaded through my ribs like stitching.
I count Sava’s breaths again. One. Three. Five.
“Stay,” someone says. Maybe Sava. Maybe me.
I hook my pinky in Sava’s sleeve so I don’t float off the seat.
I swallow copper. I stare at the ceiling until it stops moving.
I am not dying. I repeat it until it sounds like truth.
Until the black softens at the corners and turns into somewhere to rest instead of somewhere to disappear.