CHAPTER 26
Close Call
°°°
Elton Marsh never made it to his follow-up appointment.
Mara knew something was wrong at the fifteen-minute mark, when he should already have been in the waiting room and wasn't, and knew it for certain at twenty-five, when her phone buzzed with a text from a number she didn't recognize that read simply: he's not coming, and neither should you have.
She called Cole before she'd finished reading it twice.
“They made him,” Cole said, already moving, she could hear it in the sudden clipped efficiency of his voice, keys jangling, a door slamming somewhere behind him. “Or they made the meeting. Either way, we're compromised. Get somewhere public and stay there. I'm coming to you.”
“Cole—”
“I'm coming to you, Mara. Ten minutes.”
He made it in six, and by the time his truck screeched into the clinic's lot, Mara was already outside, Yvonne beside her having locked the front door on Mara's own urgent instruction, both of them scanning the street with the dread of people who'd just learned the danger they'd been managing slowly for weeks had stopped being manageable at all.
The car came around the corner fast, too fast for the narrow street, and Mara's whole body understood what was happening a half-second before her mind caught up to the shape of it — not a car passing through, a car hunting, slowing hard right in front of the clinic, a door already opening before it had fully stopped.
Cole was between her and the car before she'd finished processing that it was actually happening, moving with the same terrifying speed she'd seen him use once before at Eli's school, and this time there was no controlled restraint in it at all.
The man who came out of that car swinging something metal caught the full weight of Cole's response, and for several long, chaotic seconds the street became nothing but motion and noise — metal against pavement, a shout that might have been Cole's name, the flat crack of impact that made Mara's stomach drop even before she saw where it had landed.
Cole went down hard against the clinic's brick wall, and came back up favoring his left side in a way that told her, instantly, professionally, that something under that jacket was broken or close to it.
“Get inside!”
She didn't. She'd spent four years training herself to run toward emergencies instead of away from them, and this one had Cole's blood already showing dark against his shirt, and there was no version of her that was capable of retreating from that.
The car peeled away as fast as it had arrived, whoever was driving apparently satisfied they'd made whatever point they'd come to make, and left Cole standing bent over in the clinic's doorway with Mara's hands already working before her conscious mind had finished cataloging the damage — a deep laceration along his ribs, already swelling, breathing that had gone shallow and wary in a way that worried her considerably more than the visible blood did.
“I think a rib's cracked. Maybe two.” Her voice came out more certain than she felt, the same practiced calm she'd built her whole career on, deployed now for a man whose pain she felt in her own chest like a physical thing. “I need to get you inside and actually look at this properly.”
“It's fine.”
“It is not fine, and if you tell me it's fine one more time I am going to leave you exactly where you're standing.”
He almost laughed, even through the pain, the ghost of the same dry humor that had first cracked something open in her at his kitchen table months ago, and let her walk him inside, where Yvonne had already cleared a bed and pulled the supplies Mara was going to need before Mara had even finished asking.
~ ~ ~
She worked fast and clean once they were inside, cutting his shirt away rather than fighting it over the injury, checking his breath sounds with a stethoscope Yvonne pressed into her hand without being asked, watching his pupils, his color, every small sign her training had taught her to read before a patient's words caught up to what their body already knew.
Two ribs, cracked but not displaced. A laceration that would need stitches but hadn't hit anything vital.
Bad, but survivable, the kind of bad she'd learned to work through calmly because falling apart never once made a patient's outcome better.
“You're going to be sore for weeks,” she told him, taping the last of the dressing into place. “And you're going to actually rest, not the version of resting where you're up doing something within an hour because sitting still makes you feel useless.”
“Noted.”
She'd gotten the ribs wrapped, confirmed nothing had punctured a lung, and was halfway through convincing herself the worst of it was actually over when Tucker burst through the clinic's back door with a look on his face that undid every ounce of relief in a single second.
“Renata's place. Somebody drove by twice in the last hour, slow, the same way that car drove past here before it came back around.” Tucker's breathing was ragged, like he'd run the whole way.
“I don't know if it's nothing or if it's them.
But Eli's there, and I can't reach Renata's phone, and I didn't want to sit on it another minute not telling you.”
The relief Mara had been holding onto for exactly ninety seconds collapsed completely, replaced by a fear so absolute it felt almost physical, a hand closing around something vital in her chest and refusing to let go.
Cole was already trying to sit up, wincing hard against the movement, and Mara didn't try to stop him, because there wasn't a version of tonight where either of them was capable of sitting still while Eli's safety hung uncertain again, cracked ribs or not, blood loss or not, every careful plan they'd built the night before suddenly worth exactly nothing at all.