“Let me see,” she said, lifting the sweater from the wound.
The bullet had grazed his side, taking out a chunk of his flesh. He sucked a breath through his teeth as she poured antiseptic on the wound.
“This needs to be sutured,” she said, looking up at him with apologetic eyes.
“Do it,” he said through gritted teeth.
She grabbed the sterile strips from the box and tore open the package. Blood seeped from the wound, wetting the area. He watched her face as she washed and dried the wound, pinching it together.
“I need you to hand me these strips,” she said, keeping the wound dry.
Pain radiated from his side, and he groaned. But he took the packet and opened the suture strips. “Here,” he said, handing her the first one.
Siren worked methodically until she had the wound closed with suture tape. She then covered it with heavy gauze and taped it down.
When she was done, he was breathing heavily, the pain almost unbearable. “You need to lie down,” she said, helping him onto the bed.
He rested against the pillow, and she stood at the foot of the bed, staring at him. “I told you to run,” she said in a low voice.
“I wasn’t going to leave you to fight three to one.”
“So, it was a decision. That was a controlled shift?”
“Yes. I chose to stay and fight beside you. You might be my bodyguard. But I’d never leave you to fight alone.”
His eyes were half closed. But he watched her standing at the end of the bed, hands on her hips. Her expression raw and unguarded.
“We need to keep moving,” she said. “Try to get some rest.”
Chapter
Twenty-Four
The Manhattan skylineappeared in the distance, hazy through the smog rising above the marshlands. It grew slowly as they crawled through Newark, past the port cranes, container yards, and the oil refineries with their burning stacks.
The slow line of cars fed into the Holland Tunnel like blood flowing through an artery. Concrete walls closed in on either side. They came out of the tunnel into lower Manhattan.
There were six-story brick buildings and delivery trucks double parked on the narrow streets. A guy with a dolly full of boxes crossed in front of them without looking. A taxi laid on its horn when Siren screeched to a stop.
She navigated through the mess. Stop and go. Red lights every block. Pedestrians weaving between cars like crosswalks were a suggestion. It took twenty minutes to go ten blocks.
The buildings grew taller, blocking the sky. The federal building was forty-one stories of brown concrete and narrow windows. Brutalist architecture at its ugliest.
They found a parking garage and tidied themselves up before gathering their documents. Siren didn’t bother with her cover. She was back in jeans and leather, but she left her gun in the car.
Reed had healed up slightly in the hours they’d sped across Pennsylvania and New Jersey. Siren had driven the whole way, drinking gallons of coffee to keep herself alert. She’d called Kate from the road. She was expecting them.
Siren and Reed walked into the federal building through security. “We have an appointment with Special Agent Kate Brennan at 3 PM,” she told the security guard as they passed through the metal detectors.
They took the elevator up to the seventh floor. Kate was waiting when the elevator doors opened. She looked the same as the last time Siren had seen her, the years barely noticeable.
She was tall with dark hair tied back in a low ponytail. They shook hands, exchanged a brief greeting before Kate led them into her office.
It was a roomy space with one of those narrow ugly windows looking down on the street. Bookshelves lined the wall behind her tidy desk. Siren saw titles on history, Soviet intelligence, and psychology. There was a large, framed photo of the Berlin Wall coming down over the filing cabinets on the other side of the room.
Kate invited them to sit on the chairs opposite her desk as she sat down.
“Tell me you brought me something good, Reaper. I’ve been chasing white-collar assholes for six months, and I’m dying for something with teeth.”
