Chapter 8 #2
Three hours later, I was three blocks from the courthouse, stopped at a red light, running through the list of documents she'd asked me to bring. Her car was in the next lane over, closer to the median. I tracked it automatically, the way I tracked everything: threat, position, distance, vector.
The light turned green.
Her car began to ease forward. And then the black SUV that had been idling to her left moved. Not forward. Sideways. A sharp, deliberate angle that wasn't acceleration.
It was intentional.
"No!"
The word ripped out of me as metal met metal.
The sound was something I will never be able to describe and will never stop hearing: a shriek of tearing steel that I felt in my teeth, in my bones.
Her sedan was so much smaller, so much lighter.
The SUV shoved it sideways like a toy, and I watched her car spin toward the concrete guardrail, and my hands were off the steering wheel and on the door handle before the car stopped moving because my body had already decided what to do while my brain was still processing what had happened.
I don't remember putting my car in park. Don't remember opening the door. The blare of horns around me was noise from another dimension. I was running. That was all. Running.
Someone grabbed my arm and I threw them off without registering who they were or why they were touching me. The distance between my car and hers was forty feet. I covered it in seconds that lasted hours.
The driver's door was buckled, bent inward from the impact. I grabbed the handle and pulled. Nothing. The metal groaned but didn't give.
"Lindsey!" Her name came out of me in a voice I didn't recognize. Raw. Animal. The kind of sound you don't make unless something fundamental has gone wrong.
Through the spiderwebbed window, I could see her. Head slumped against the deflated airbag. Blood, bright, terrible red, tracing a path from her hairline down her cheek. Her eyes were closed.
I braced my foot against the frame and heaved. The door shrieked, metal folding, and then it was open, and I was reaching for her, and my hands were shaking so badly I couldn't work the seatbelt on the first try. Or the second.
Her eyelids fluttered. Opened. Dazed. Unfocused. But open.
"Will?" Her voice was a thread.
"Don't move." Third try on the seatbelt. It released. My fingers were clumsy and useless and I needed them to work. "Just stay still. I've got you."
"That's not... how today was supposed to go."
A joke. She was bleeding and broken and making a joke. Something in my chest did became violent and uncontrolled, and I swallowed it down because feelings were not useful right now. What was useful was getting her out of this car.
"I'm going to lift you," I said. "It might hurt."
"Everything already hurts." But she nodded, her hand coming up to grip my shoulder as I slid one arm under her knees, the other behind her back.
She whimpered when I lifted her. A small, tight sound, bitten off.
The sound of someone trying very hard not to scream.
I held her against my chest and walked away from the wreckage, each step measured, careful.
Her blood was soaking into my shirt and her hand was gripping my collar and her breath was coming in shallow, pained gasps, and I cataloged all of it the way I cataloged everything, except nothing about this was operational and I couldn't pretend it was.
Sirens wailed in the distance. People were gathering, phones out. I found a patch of curb away from the shattered glass and sat, and she was in my arms and she was alive and the shaking in my hands would not stop.
"Will." Her voice was slightly stronger now, though still thin. "You're crushing me."
"Sorry." I didn't loosen my grip.
"Seriously. I have ribs. They're broken but they're still mine and you're..."
"Sorry." I loosened my grip. Marginally. "You're talking. That means you're breathing."
"Your logic is... very you."
"Shut up and stay conscious."
"So bossy."
The EMTs arrived and tried to take her from me.
I knew, rationally, that they were medical professionals doing their job.
I knew that transferring her to the gurney was necessary and correct and in her best interest. I knew all of this.
My arms did not care about any of it. My arms wanted to keep holding her, and the effort required to let go was physical, measurable, like putting down something that weighed more than muscle should be able to bear.
"Sir, are you injured?"
I looked down at myself. Blood on my shirt, my hands, my arms. Her blood. "No."
"You should let us check..."
"I'm fine." I was already moving toward my car. "Which hospital?"
The drive was a blur. I ran two more red lights.
I parked in a space that was definitely not a parking space.
I gave the admissions desk her information from memory: full name, insurance, allergies, blood type.
I'd memorized it from her personnel file on day one.
Standard practice. Know your team's medical details in case of emergency.
Standard practice. That's what I told myself as I recited her information to a nurse who looked at me with the particular sympathy reserved for people who are visibly holding themselves together by a thread.
"Are you family?" the nurse asked.
"Yes," I said without hesitation.
They let me wait outside the curtained bay where they worked on her.
I stood against the wall with my arms crossed, my jaw clenched, and her blood drying on my clothes, and I ran threat assessments.
That was what I did. I identified the SUV model, estimated its speed at impact, calculated the angle of collision.
I thought about who Reeves would have hired.
What the chain of command looked like. How many people knew about the operation. Where the order had originated.
I thought about all of these things because they were useful.
Because thinking about them meant I wasn't thinking about the sound she'd made when I lifted her, or the weight of her in my arms, or the way she'd said my name through the spiderwebbed glass like it was the first word her brain could find.
I wasn't thinking about any of that. I was being operational.
A doctor emerged eventually, a tired woman in scrubs who looked me over with professional assessment.
"Mr. Steele. The patient is stable. Concussion, two broken ribs, and significant bruising. She's lucky; if the guardrail hadn't stopped the momentum, we'd be having a very different conversation."
Lucky. That word again. The word people used when the margin between alive and not-alive was a concrete barrier and a few inches.
"When can I see her?"
"She's being moved to a private room now. She's asking for you." A pause. "Rather insistently."
The private room was small and too bright. Lindsey was propped against pillows, her face pale beneath the bandage on her forehead, bruises blooming along her jaw and cheekbone like dark flowers.
"There you are," she said. Her voice was hoarse, but her eyes were clear. "They wouldn't tell me if you were okay."
"I wasn't in the crash."
"You were covered in blood."
"Your blood."
"Technicality." She held out her hand. Not a grand gesture. Just her hand, extended across the hospital blanket, palm up. "Come here."
I crossed to the bed and took her hand without thinking. Her fingers were cold. I wrapped both of mine around them, and sat in the chair beside her, and the shaking in my hands finally started to ease. Not stop. Ease. Like her pulse against my fingers was recalibrating something.
"You scared me," I said quietly.
"I scared myself." She squeezed my fingers weakly. "One minute I was thinking about whether you'd notice I took the last of the chili flakes, and the next I was looking at my airbag wondering why the world was sideways."
"Do you remember the SUV?"
"Black. Big. Hit me from the left." Her hand tightened. "It was deliberate, wasn't it?"
"Yes."
"Reeves."
"Most likely."
Neither of us let go. The hospital monitors beeped.
The fluorescent lights hummed. Somewhere in the hallway, a cart rattled past. Normal hospital sounds.
Normal world continuing to exist around two people who were holding hands like it was structural, like letting go would cause something to collapse.
"You should see the other car," she said finally.
The sound that came out of me wasn't a laugh. It was closer to something breaking. "That's not funny."
"It's a little funny."
"You have a head wound."
"My judgment is fine." Her eyes met mine, and beneath the pain and the exhaustion, something warm was there.
Something that had been building for days in the storage unit and the kitchen and the eighteen inches between our workstations, and it was here now, in a hospital room, under fluorescent lights, and it was not the setting I would have chosen but it was undeniable.
"You pulled me out of the car. With your bare hands. "
"The door was jammed. It was a mechanical problem."
"Will. You ripped a car door off its hinges."
"It was already compromised from the impact. The structural integrity was..."
"You ripped a car door off its hinges." She said it again, slower, like she was making sure I heard it. Like the fact mattered to her in a way that wasn't about structural integrity.
I didn't know what to do with the way she was looking at me. I didn't have a protocol for it. So I did what I always did when I didn't have a protocol: I pivoted to something actionable.
"You're done," I said. The words came out before I'd fully decided to say them, which should have been a warning sign.
I didn't make unplanned statements. But my brain was running scenarios at full speed, threat vectors and exposure calculations and the image of her car spinning toward concrete, and the conclusion was clear. Simple. Clean.
Get her out. Get her safe. End the exposure.
Lindsey's hand tightened on mine.
"Excuse me?"