Beside the table, wearing medical gloves, Aaron was tearing open packages of gauze from a large red plastic box that sat on one of the chairs. Package after package of gauze.
“Tell me how to help you,” April said.
“Stay back,” he growled.
Malachi’s eyes were open, but the warm gold was glazed to something cooler, something that chilled her bones. April fisted her hands to keep from running to him. She must not be in the way. She didn’t think he could speak, but then his rasp came faintly.
“Aaron.”
“Yeah, Mal.”
“I need to see Rhett.”
“I’m going to pull you through this. You’re going to pull yourself through this. The pack needs you.”
“Rhett,” Malachi said.
Immediately Rhett entered the kitchen and approached Malachi with the schooled expression of a soldier reporting for duty. “The pack’s all here or just minutes away. Pups in the safe room, Jeremy and Lucy with them.”
“My pack.”
“You have my word, the pack is safe. I can’t smell the rogues at all now. They’re out of range and running scared, unless you eliminated them.”
“Your pack.”
“What?” Rhett took a step back from the table. “You’re alpha. The pack is yours.”
“Mine for the rest of my life. Then…if unexpected loss…yours.”
“What…?” He lifted his gaze to Aaron.
Aaron glared. “Get out of the way. He’s not going to die.”
“But if he does, you’re not the next alpha? I—I am?”
“I’m going to save him so you don’t have to worry about it. Now move.”
His face slack and stunned, Rhett turned and left the kitchen. Malachi didn’t seem to notice, his unblinking gaze vacantly directed at the ceiling. Aaron ripped the saturated shirt from Malachi’s torso, and a cry tore April’s throat. So many wounds…
Aaron began to pack them with the gauze. All the while he kept up a low, tense monologue. “Just keep breathing. That’s your one job, okay? You just have to breathe, and I just have to stop the bleeding. I just—just have to stop all the bleeding.”
But Aaron had only two hands, and Malachi’s body bled from eight torso wounds. His breathing was ragged and loud. His lips were pulled away from his teeth in a fixed grimace of pain, though he didn’t groan or cry out.
Standing in the corner, isolated from him, isolated from helping him, April’s own body began to ache worse and worse. She wrapped her arms around herself. She couldn’t bear this. She darted to the far side of the table from Aaron and pressed both hands to a wound in Malachi’s abdomen. Aaron growled.
“I can help you,” April said. “Let me be your second pair of hands. I’ll do anything you tell me.”
“I thought he wouldn’t know you. I thought he’d fight you.”
His tone was flat as he applied fresh layers of gauze where the wounds had bled through. He was in triage mode, survival mode. He wasn’t thinking; he was acting from experience and instinct. April gentled her tone and said, “However badly you were hurt, wouldn’t you know Ember?”
“I…yeah, I would.”
“And Malachi will always know me. Let me help you save him.”
Together they raised Malachi onto his side and packed the exit wounds in his back. Then they packed the leg wound. Halfway up his right thigh, the bullet had missed the artery, so Aaron triaged it last. Constantly they kept pressure on the worst of the bleeding, but Aaron had no way of performing surgery, and Malachi must have multiple damaged organs.
“Aaron, we need help. Has someone called 911?”
