Chapter 4 Gabriel
Gabriel
Sydney lies limp across my knees and tucked against my chest, the tubing from her nasal cannula stretching under the sharp cut of her cheekbone to the oxygen tank pressed against my calf.
My fingertips on the thready pulse at her wrist and the shallow lift and fall of her chest tell me she’s alive. My ribs feel like I took a kick from a horse, but I push back my panic and pain, so I can track that pulse. So I can feel her chest move against my own.
The chopper lands on the hospital helipad in a controlled descent, and I rip off my headset, glancing at Henry as I rise, my body bent and my teeth gritted, to exit with Sydney in my arms.
Sonofabitch that hurts.
Henry holds the oxygen tank in one hand. “Right beside you. Don’t slow down for me.”
The team hits the tarmac, single file, then spreads out on either side of me.
Three hospital staff, led by a familiar man in green scrubs, his golden-brown skin lit by the buzzing exterior lights, run toward us, heads bent as they scan the scene that greets them.
On the flight here, everyone stripped off their armor and weapons. My brother removed my outer layers down to my black T-shirt and pants for me because I refused to put Sydney down.
If I gave more than a passing thought to what we look like—a phalanx of angry and desperate men surrounding the unconscious, too thin, filthy woman in my arms and storming the hospital—I’d marvel that they don’t falter or run in the other direction.
And, if I hadn’t known Dr. Joshua Granthy since we were both kids, I wouldn’t have caught the widening of his dark eyes, his hard swallow, and the flash of horror and pity at the sight of my wife in my arms.
Eyes hardening to urgent efficiency, Josh transitions in an instant to “physician on call.” “Put her on the gurney.”
His voice is as deep and steady as I’d known it would be.
I keep walking, ignoring the pain in my ribs. Josh and the other staff and security flank us.
“Gabe, what are you doing? Put her on the gurney,” Josh insists.
Sydney moves in my arms, burrowing against me and rasps through cracked lips, her voice barely audible, “No.”
Not unconscious after all. Not wholly, anyway. Tears burn behind my eyes and fill my throat. Relief. Pain. Fear. Grief. An unholy combination of all of them.
I tighten my grip. “I have you, Sydney. I’m here. Lead me to a room. I’m not setting her down.”
Sydney goes lax in my arms once more.
“You can trust me with her,” Josh says.
“Of course, I trust you.” Josh would never allow his dislike of me to affect how he treats a patient. But I can’t put her on that gurney.
We enter the building, and Josh places a stethoscope to Sydney’s chest, listening as he keeps pace beside me. Then, he drapes the device around his shoulders. “All right. My dad’s already on his way to take over her care. Who started the oxygen and IV? Henry?”
“Yes.” Henry passes over a pocketful of vials of blood to a nurse and begins a rundown of Sydney’s condition and his stabilizing treatment in terms I don’t know and never will.
Dad says it’s another of his “special interests,” but that’s bullshit.
It goes back twenty-two years to two little boys bleeding in an underground mafia stronghold, fighting for our lives. That night. This one. So much the same.
Nikolai Markov did this to her.
I bulldoze my way through the hallways and double doors toward the glass-walled room waiting for us and slam my rage into a mental box to open and examine later.
Josh ushers us inside and tugs the beige curtains closed. “If you won’t lay her down, then sit. I have to examine her.”
I lower myself to the edge of the gurney, my wife fragile and so breakable in my arms. Hands flutter around us. Josh asks his questions, but Sydney doesn’t respond as he pokes and prods her injuries.
I hold her as they take off her dress, the wrap style with the tie closure making removal simple. It used to be my favorite. She wore it the night I proposed to her.
Sydney doesn’t seem to be aware of what’s happening around her, but she refuses to uncurl her fingers from the red sash-style belt.
I slide my left hand, palm up, under hers. “Hold on to me instead.”
The filthy cotton falls as she transfers her grip. I raise her body with my other arm, so the nurse can tug the dress from beneath her and away. The woman passes it to Henry.
My lungs freeze at the sight of Sydney’s rib cage and the bruises in multiple stages of healing, her visible pelvic bones, and concave stomach. Someone covers her with a snap-shoulder hospital gown.
I’ve never seen my wife this pale, not even when she was sick for three days on gas-station sushi she ate solely because I told her not to.
“Stubborn woman,” I choke out. “Be stubborn now. Open your eyes and fight.”
Josh lifts Sydney’s eyelids and speaks in the background. His questions sound like they’re coming from underwater. He has to ask twice before I shake my head.
My brother talks. Explains. We don’t know what drugs are in her system. He suspects benzodiazepines . . . mild dehydration . . . malnutrition . . . signs of concussion . . . toxicology report . . . I hear the conversation between Josh and Henry but absorb very little of it.
Sydney’s battered face is the only thing I see. Her reedy breaths through the hiss of the oxygen tank are the only sounds that penetrate.
Someone replaces Henry’s temporary oxygen setup for one of their own. They hook her up to a different IV solution.
I push matted strands of dark hair away from her face.
“Gabriel, you need to put her down now. She needs a CT scan and an MRI.” Frederick Granthy, Josh’s father, has arrived.
He’s been our family doctor my entire life. He cried when he saw the bloody mess carved and burned into my ten-year-old body. Then he’d blinked his tears away and told me everything was going to be okay.
Dr. Granthy will help Sydney.
But my arms remain tight around her. She needs me more. So, I sit with my wife in my lap and rock her in place as time passes into seconds or minutes that I can’t feel. “You’re safe now. You’re safe.”
“Son, put her on the gurney,” my dad says.
I shake my head. When did my parents get here?
Mom brushes her hand over Sydney’s forehead, then dabs my face with Kleenex. “Put her down so they can make sure she isn’t bleeding internally. You have to do it, honey. You got her out. Now, it’s time to let go.”
I lift my head, her words sinking through the fog of fear and grief. I rise and attempt to lay my wife on the gurney, but she flinches and jolts. So I remain bent over, maintaining contact with her. I reach blindly behind me. “Get me a pillow. A blanket. Something.”
Someone places a cotton blanket straight from the warmer into my hand.
I roll it into a bolster, rip my shirt over my head to wrap around it, then press the makeshift pillow against her, arranging her arm over it and fitting a piece of the shirt into her fist. It’s not me, but it’s something to hold on to.
“I’m not going anywhere, Sydney. When you wake up, I’ll be right here waiting for you. ”
Her twitching subsides. Hospital staff snap the safety rails up and guide the gurney out of the room. I follow, only realizing we’re picking up a parade of family and friends when someone takes my hand.
I look down to find my mother, her Arctic-blue eyes misted with grief or rage or hope. I can’t tell which. Maybe she doesn’t know either.
“You need to have someone look at that.” She indicates the bruising on my left side.
“It’s not important. Nothing is broken.” I keep my eyes on Sydney’s pale form as we move through the corridors.
My sister, Bronwyn, joins us, looking like a younger version of our mother. “You can’t know that for sure until you’ve been checked out. You’ve got BABT from backface deformation.” The “you idiot” is silent.
Of course, I have Behind Armor Blunt Trauma.
The Kevlar absorbed and redistributed the kinetic energy of a bullet.
“They’ll separate us, take me to an exam room, then send me for X-rays just so they can tell me afterward to ice it and take something over the counter for pain.
It was small caliber. The vest worked exactly as intended. Let it go,” I say.
“I’ll find you an ice pack and Advil,” Henry mutters behind me.
Mom releases my hand to pass me a green hospital-issued scrub top.
“Thanks,” I say gruffly, wincing as I drag the thing over my head.
The smell of disinfected linen briefly supplants the stench of Sydney’s captivity. Wherever Nikolai Markov originally held her reeked of mildew.
When Sydney was in my arms, I thought in this moment and this moment and this one. Without her, unfiltered pain threatens to escape the leash of my self-control. Years ago, I’d have pulled out a flask to take the edge off.
Tonight, I rub my chest and brace myself to ride it out. Sydney is the strongest person I’ve ever known. She’s going to wake up soon. She’ll look for me. Reach for me. And when she does, I’ll be here waiting . . . stone. cold. sober.