“Oh God.” Adam laid motionless on the floor, encircled by flames and a bath of blood.
She approached him through the thickening smoke, sliding along the floor as she coughed, if only to get to him quicker. “Please be alive. Please be alive.Pleasebe alive.”
The first of her smothered tears fell when she saw his face. Beaten to a purple, swollen mess, she couldn’t even tell if his eyes were open or closed. Holding his head in her arms, she brushed a caress through his hair, down his jaw, and onto his neck where she felt for a pulse.
Dim, but it was enough.
“You have to get up!” she shouted as she pushed him. But it was getting so hot. The air too thick. The flames were getting so close.
She wrapped her hands underneath his arms and braced her legs as she dragged his limp body along the warehouse floor. Her muscles screamed in protest, but she promptly told them to shut the fuck up. She dragged him away from the fire, away from the melting metals, until they were safely outside on the docks.
Her own tears mixed with Adam’s blood and coated her hands in wetness as she pressed into his wounds to create pressure. With her teeth and hands, she ripped apart the shirt at her midriff, wrapping the strips around the gaping holes in his body, tightening them so he might hold on until she could get help.
He was still breathing—just barely, though—she confirmed by holding an ear to his mouth.
Picking him up by the arms again, she dragged him all the way to her car and loaded him into the backseat. Just as she had flopped his body down, the warehouse exploded behind her.
Using the car door as shelter, she ducked as pieces of fragmented metal flew through the skies. The place where they were previously sitting reduced to flames and a wreck of collapsed tin.
She slammed into the driver’s seat and hurtled backward. When she looked back at the front of the warehouse, she spotted a small crew of Blake men guarding Dan, Carlos, and Paul.
Dorian, Yani, T.B., and Antonio were nowhere to be found. Good. They’d gone already.
Shifting into Drive, she pushed off the docks, barreling toward her friends. Covered in a haze of smoke from her tires, she propelled forward, skidding along the concrete.
She was still in the middle of her drift when she pointed her gun out the window and, in a succession of five bullets, shot the remainder of Dorian’s men.
Carlos and Paul were running to her as soon as the guards dropped. Dan, who’d been sobbing on the floor, rose to his feet, a painful, pleading look in his eye.
“Help us! Please. Adam’s in the back.” She screamed so loudly that it shocked her, only just noticing how much her heart pounded.
Dan, Carlos, and Paul jumped into action, diving into the backseat to tend to Adam as Mercedes stared straight ahead, out the windshield, eyes wide and hands shaking as they gripped the wheel.
All the strength and emotion she had gathered seemed to suck from her body at the same moment as she realized that no matter what she’d just done, it could already be too late.
Paul and Carlos put pressure on the wounds to stop the bleeding while Dan performed CPR.
“Oh, thank God, he’s still alive,” Carlos said, hands already reddened with blood as he made the sign of the cross. “You gotta get him to the hospital.”
“We can’t go to the fucking hospital,” Dan said, still pumping. “Blake will know and he’ll be dead anyway.”
Mercedes shifted in her seat, desperately looking to Paul. More desperate than she’d ever been. As desperate as she’d ever have to get to ask what she was about to. “Paul, you gotta take us to Brooke.”
Paul’s face hardened. “No.” He shook his head. “We can’t.”
“We have to! We don’t have a choice!”
“Paul this is our f–” Dan said.
“I know that,” Paul said, looking like he were frozen quite literally between two immovable forces.
“We have to,” Carlos said. “We owe him.”
Paul’s eyes shuttered, filled with an unexplainable cocktail of distraught, guilt, and relief. “Fine, go.”
Mercedes sped off again before they could even properly close the doors.
* * *
