Chapter 34
The paramedic had been patient for about as long as Blade was going to allow. She’d been talking at him for ten minutes. Pressure here, hold this, don’t move that. He’d complied, but when she reached for the saline flush, he put his hand over hers.
“I’m good.”
She gave him the look that all paramedics gave people who said they were good when they were clearly not good.
“Sir, you have a broken nose, two cracked ribs, a laceration on your bicep that needs stitches, and your knee—”
“I know what I have.” He stood. His knee made its opinion known immediately, but he kept moving. “Where’s Dr. Crew?”
She pointed.
Tori was sitting on the edge of a gurney, a second paramedic working on her side. She had her chin up and her eyes on the ceiling. She didn’t see him coming until he was three feet away.
She looked at him the way she had in the closet after the stalker attack. Like she was checking to make sure he was real.
“Give us a minute, will you, Deb?” Tori asked the paramedic.
The woman applied one last strip of tape to the gauze on Tori’s wound and pulled her gloves off. “I’ll be back in a few minutes.”
He eased down beside her, their shoulders brushing. Across the room, techs crouched, dropped yellow placards, swept flashbulbs across blood and broken glass. The adrenaline had burned down to nothing, leaving behind a bone-deep exhaustion that put lead into every muscle.
“Nice shooting,” he said.
“You too.” She glanced at his knee, his nose, the bandage already dotted with blood on his arm. “You look terrible.”
“I’ve looked worse.”
“No,” she said. “You really haven’t.”
That made him chuckle. He hadn’t lost her. He knew exactly what she was to him. He just hadn’t said it out loud yet.
“You know what I keep thinking about?” Tori asked.
“What’s that?”
“How quiet it is now.” She gestured toward the CSU team setting up their equipment. “All that gunfire, all that noise, and now it’s just . . . work. Regular police work.”
Blade watched a technician photograph Wells’s body. “Feels weird, doesn’t it? Being on this side of it.”
“Yeah. Usually I show up after all the shooting.”
“Usually, we don’t have to do the shooting.”
She turned to look at him. “You okay with that? What happened in here?”
“Are you?”
“I asked you first.”
Blade considered the question. Three men were dead. He’d been in a fight that could have gone either way. Tori had killed two people to save his life and Stryker’s.
“Yeah,” he said finally. “I’m okay with it. They made their choices.”
“Good answer.” Tori’s eyes locked on him. Her skin close, her breath right there.
He wanted to pull her in for a long kiss. Tell her how much he loved her. Get down on his bruised knee and ask her to marry him. But he shoved the want down.
Not here. Not like this.
Instead, he kissed her forehead and let her lean into him. Blade felt the connection. A love that had survived everything life had thrown at them.
His eyes drifted to where Stryker lay on a stretcher. IV lines snaked from his arm. An oxygen mask covered his nose and mouth.
Stryker’s eyes fluttered.
Blade’s knee screamed as he jumped to his feet.
“Tori, look.”
Stryker’s eyelids twitched. They opened a sliver. Barely there then gone. Like a body trying to drag itself back from somewhere deep.
His eyelids cracked open, but Stryker didn’t move. They were already by his side at the gurney.
Tori’s hands wrapped around Stryker’s with the kind of desperation that made Blade’s chest ache. “Stryker? Stryker, can you hear me?”
Stryker’s eyes tracked to Blade’s face, recognition flickering. His mouth moved, but no sound came.
“Don’t try to talk,” Blade said. “Save your strength.”
The older man’s gaze shifted to Tori, to the paramedic, to the officers in the corner, then back to Blade. Questions lived in those eyes. Questions that would have to wait.
“We’ve gotta get moving,” one paramedic said. “This man needs to get to the hospital.”
Tori stepped back and said, “Call Corbin King, he’s a Special Agent with FDLE. He has medical power of attorney.”
They took Corbin’s number and rolled Stryker toward the exit. His eyes were closed again.
More voices rang through the building, shouting orders. Two grim-faced FDLE investigators Blade recognized and trusted had taken control of the scene. No BSO uniforms. No FBI. Not yet.
Crime scene tape had gone up. Photographers documented everything. The studio that had been a serial killer’s shrine was now little more than evidence.
Blade gave his statement to Special Agent Marsha Bondi, a twenty-year veteran of the FDLE whose word carried weight in court.
The facts came out clean and simple. A detached account that felt like a story about someone else. The knife attack on the beach. Acting on Garrison’s intel that brought them here. The confrontation with Dean Barclay and Sebastian Wells. Shots fired in self-defense and defense of others.
Marsha recorded it on her phone, stopping him now and again for clarification.
When Blade had finished, Marsha released a loud sigh. “Well, this is one for the books. I’ll need to get Dr. Crew’s statement.”
“She’s with the EMTs.” Blade nodded toward the gurney, where Tori had returned to have the paramedic clean the cut on her arm she’d reopened along the way.
“And the older gentleman? The one they took to the hospital?”
“Kidnapping victim. I doubt he can give a statement. He’s been in a coma for months.”
Marsha stared. “Oh—okay then. I’ll coordinate with the hospital.”
For years, Tori and Blade had trusted a man who’d held a secret.
Stryker had walked away from that crime scene in 1998 knowing exactly what Barclay had buried.
He’d watched Tori train in his gym for years, watched her chase a past she couldn’t remember, and never said a word.
One day he’d have to answer for that. But the man had been in a coma for nearly a year and he’d just survived a kidnapping.
The reckoning could wait. Healing came first.