“Seven minutes,” he breathes.
“Fuck seven minutes,” I whisper, barely able to make sound. “That’s her.”
Smoke’s jaw tightens. For all his cynicism, for all his mess, he understands what that means. We crouch lower, watching the house like it might blink and give itself away.
The muffled sound comes again from beneath the window we have approached and rested near, sharper this time, like pain.
I see red. I see blood.
Peeking through the crack in the sheets covering the glass of the window, I get the first glimpse. I see her wrists bound behind her, blindfolded, scared out of her mind. Her scrubs are covered in blood. Beside her a man lays out on a make shift bed under a tarp. His blood everywhere, but a fresh bandage covering part of his abdomen.
So they needed her.
My hands shake so hard I nearly drop my gun. Smoke leans in close enough that I feel his breath. “When they roll up,” he murmurs, “we go like hell.”
My throat burns. I nod once, slow.
Because I can’t go in yet. Not if it means losing her.
So I retreat back into the tree line, every second a torture.
I listen. I watch. And I hold myself back with every scrap of will I’ve got left.
Because every passing minute is an eternity, and it’s also the difference between rescue and regret that never stops eating you alive.
Eighteen
Danae
The house holds its breath. Or like the clocks have stopped.
That’s what it feels like, like the walls are listening, like the air itself is waiting to see who breaks first. The men move around me in short, impatient bursts, boots on old floorboards, voices low and edged. Someone curses in the hallway. Someone laughs too loud and too mean. The injured man—Duke—makes a sound that turns my stomach, half groan, half gasp.
I keep my hands busy. If my hands are busy, my mind can’t fully collapse.
I press gauze to the wound and count his breaths under my own. I keep checking his pulse at the wrist, fast and thin, and my nursing brain keeps spitting out words like shock and infection and internal bleed while the rest of me wants to curl up and vanish. I got the bullet out by some miracle it wasn’t deep. I only had to expand the entry wound a little. They did provide a small surgical kit that had a scalpel at least. I have a weapon, it gives me a little comfort.
“Peaches,” the president says from the doorway, voice calm like we’re discussing the weather. “You done yet?”
“I’m working,” I answer, too tight.
He steps closer, his shadow falling across my hands. “You’re stalling.”
“I’m trying not to kill him,” I snap.
A couple of the men laugh.
The president’s eyes narrow, but he doesn’t hit me. Not yet. He seems to enjoy the control too much to waste it on anger.
I force my voice back into clinical territory. “I need him to hold still. I need light. And if you have anything stronger than whiskey, now would be a good time to share it.”
“Whiskey’s what we got,” someone says.
Of course it is. Duke’s head lolls. Sweat beads on his upper lip. His eyes keep slipping shut.
“Duke,” I say, leaning close. “Stay with me.”
He blinks slowly, like it costs him everything.
