A few people on the street glanced our way—agents and bystanders alike—but no one said anything, which I considered a minor miracle. I looked around to see whether I could identify any threats on the street. The click sounded in my ear again.
“Can someone grab the door?” a breathless voice asked over the air. “I had to take the stairs, and I’m not sure I’m going to make it.”
“O’Connor copies direct. I’ve got it.”
I brushed past Lucia and cracked the door to the limo, threading my fingers between it and the frame to make sure it wouldn’t latch again. I wouldn’t open it all the way until he was out—I wanted to be certain no one would be able to throw anything inside—but I wanted to be able to swing it open quickly once he was.
My head was on a swivel, and my eyes were everywhere at once as I tried to size up everyone I could see with a single glance. I wiped the palms of my hands on my pants one at a time and tightened my grip on the doorframe. I hated arrivals and departures. They edged out my second least favorite place, motorcade choke points, and my third, any scenario involving the protectee in a crowd. I always felt like if something went wrong, those would be the most likely places.
“Coming out,” a voice transmitted over the air.
I glanced around one last time and waited a beat for the delegation to start exiting the hotel before I swung the door open completely. I kept my gaze on the surrounding area and held my breath, waiting for the president to get into the car. He was maybe two feet away when he stopped in the middle of the sidewalk to finish a conversation he was having.
My fingers twitched on the door, and I tried not to roll my eyes as I clenched my jaw. I caught movement out of the corner of my eye and turned, but it was just the shift guy who’d had to take the stairs barreling toward the car. He took the door from me with a grateful look.
“Thanks. That elevator was packed.”
I smiled. “No problem. That’s always the way.”
I clapped him on the shoulder as I scooted swiftly by to take up position next to my own car, careful not to touch the president as I slid past him. I’d made it maybe four steps before I ran almost bodily into Lucia. My pulse jumped, and an icy stab of fear pierced my heart. What the fuck? Why was she this close to the limo? I mean, I know some NYPD guys can’t help themselves around a protectee and tend to spend more time watching them than actually doing their jobs, but this was too much. She knew better than to step into the protective bubble. Especially now.
“Luce, what the hell are you doing? Get to your car. We can finish this when we reach the next stop.” I chanced a quick peek over my shoulder toward the president, who was now lingering in the limo’s open doorway shaking someone’s hand.
I moved to push past Lucia, but she grabbed my arm and spun me to face her. I saw a blur and barely had time to register the rage on her face before I caught her left hook on the right side of my jaw.
Pain, jagged and white-hot, exploded behind my eyes, and I heard a loud crack when her fist connected with my face. It must’ve been one hell of a hit, too, because I felt a sharp stab near where my right shoulder met my neck as my head snapped to the side. Not being prepared to be sucker punched by a woman I cared about, I was a little off-balance and stumbled at the impact, smacking the area just above the outside edge of my left eye against the open trunk of the limo where a staffer had been loading bags.
I blinked, dazed for a second or two before I dragged myself up off my knees to yell at her. I winced at the agony in my shoulder as I used the bumper of the car to push myself up. The staffer was staring at me like I was a moron, and I was starting to feel like one.
I glanced toward the limo door, pleased that the staffer was the only one who appeared to have seen what’d just happened. Good. The last thing I needed was for my boss or the protectee to watch me get laid out by an officer of the law. Although we were standing so close to them, I had no idea how they could’ve missed it. Perhaps it was tough for them to see through the press of ever-present hangers-on that always had to surround the president wherever he went.
Embracing the blistering fury roiling beneath the surface of my skin, I sought out Lucia. The angry words died on my lips when I saw her lying on the ground flat on her back. I frowned. How the hell had she ended up there? And where had all that blood come from? A whole lot of it was pouring out of the area near her jugular notch. Holy shit!
“Gun, gun, gun!!” someone screamed frantically. It took me a second to realize it was me.
I dropped to my knees, straddling Lucia’s body, and covered the wound in her neck with my hands as I felt two hard hits to my back, like someone had whacked me with a sledgehammer. I glanced over my shoulder but didn’t see anyone.
I shifted my weight to my right knee and leaned in that direction to give myself room to turn Lucia to my left and into the car, but as I did, I felt another jolt on the back of my right hip. I rolled back left and tried to shimmy Lucia and myself closer to the limited cover the car provided, but not before I felt a painful slash on the outside of my right thigh.
I looked up again and saw that the working shift was busily attending to their “cover and evacuate” protocol with the protectee. As I watched, the detail leader shoved the president’s friend out of the way, elbowed a few staffers, and hurled the president bodily into the car before leaping in after him and pulling the door shut. All around me were shouts and scuffling and car doors slamming. Someone’s foot caught the edge of my biceps in their attempt to escape, and I cried out as the impact caused my shoulder to burn.
I gazed down into Lucia’s eyes and saw her terror. My heart seized, and bile rose in the back of my throat. I applied more pressure to her wound with my hands, trying to staunch the crimson flow without suffocating her. My own breathing was ragged, just this side of hyperventilation, and the horror on her face scared me.
“Go, go, go!” someone was shouting.
More car doors slammed, and the motorcade started to take off with a squeal of tires. Unfortunately, with such an enormous motorcade, it took what felt like an eternity for it to actually get rolling. It probably wasn’t more than ten or fifteen seconds but seemed like forever.
The entire situation was surreal, so close to mirroring a training scenario that I half-expected to hear a booming voice yelling, “Actual stop,” halting the action around me so we could huddle up and debrief. I would’ve given anything for that to have happened, but unfortunately no JJRTC instructor was waiting to save us by calling an end to this nightmare.
I was shaking now, perhaps a result of exertion, shock, or pure terror. Not that it mattered. It was becoming increasingly difficult for me to hold myself up enough to keep steady pressure on Lucia’s throat without cutting off her air supply completely. I wanted so badly to just collapse on top of her and close my eyes. I had to force myself not to give in.
“Luce, hang in there, baby,” I told her, trying to appear calm.
I tried to use my elbows and my knees to scoot us closer to the front of the PI car, still sitting at the curb next to us. I winced and sucked in a harsh breath at the raging inferno the motion produced in my right shoulder, clenching my teeth. Why was the car even still sitting there? Why hadn’t it started rolling with the rest of the motorcade? But I didn’t care, as it provided at least a little cover.
Darkness was creeping around the edges of my vision now, and fear shot through me. Every breath I drew was agony, and a woman I cared about was bleeding out on the street corner while I watched, powerless. The red of her blood contrasted sharply with the whiteness of my skin, loudly blaming me for this.
“Somebody call an ambulance!” I screeched, panicking. All sorts of shouting and commotion were echoing up and down the street, but I heard it only dimly and in snatches, as if someone were constantly adjusting the volume on the world at large. I think I was only tuning in long enough to attempt to determine whether help was on the way and then immediately tuning back out again. Apparently, I could no lon
ger multi-task.
Lucia gripped my wrists, jostling my shoulder, and I yelped. Tears welled up in my eyes, and I swiped them away with the back of my hand. Her chest was rising and falling rapidly, and the crimson stain trickling from between her lips told me she was aspirating on her own blood.
“Luce, sweetie, just hang on. I’ve gotta turn you over, okay?”
I tried to rotate her onto her side, but my body wouldn’t cooperate. Moving my right arm at all made me see white flashes in my periphery, and I simply didn’t have the necessary strength. I settled for curling up as tight as I could over Lucia’s body and pressed my forehead into hers. Squeezing my eyes shut I murmured to her over and over again to hang on, that help was coming, that she’d be okay.
She was gasping now, or trying to, and it was agony to hear the sound of the blood rattling in her airway. Each strangled wheeze was a red-hot ember being dropped down my throat to burn in my chest. I pressed harder against her neck as tears streamed down my face. My sobs sounded like thunder to my ears and mingled discordantly with hers, seeming to drown out everything else.
How unprepared I was for this situation. We’d trained relentlessly in the academy, going through assault scenarios repeatedly until it became second nature to put your protectee’s life ahead of your own. And yet, as many times as they’d made me practice, I couldn’t help thinking they’d failed me in this. They’d taught me how to take a bullet, how to trade my life for someone else’s, how to die so someone who didn’t even acknowledge my existence could live. They’d taught me to have pride in that mission and to accept it as easily as a corporate employee would acknowledge the reality of Monday-morning meetings. They’d failed to teach me, however, how to cope with watching someone I cared about shoulder that burden.
And then I stopped thinking altogether.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
An unbelievably annoying beeping sound disturbed me who knows how long later. At first, I fuzzily thought it might be someone’s watch or cell phone, but it just kept going, making me want to scream. Each beep felt like someone was stabbing me behind the eyes.
When I tried to snipe at someone to turn it the fuck off, I noticed a tube down my throat and felt like I was suffocating. I heard a low sort of strangled hissing sound, and my lungs burned as they were forcibly filled with oxygen. My heart rate soared, which only increased the tempo of the beeping, and I struggled to open my eyes and sit up. My right shoulder was in agony, and I let slip a muffled grunt. Only one eye would open all the way, and that didn’t help me stay calm.
The deluge of air stopped, and I gratefully exhaled before trying to suck in a breath on my own. I tried to grasp the tube with my right hand, but my arm was fastened to my body somehow, and the struggle to free it caused me unnecessary pain. The hiss came again and with it the unsettling feeling of being inflated like a balloon against my will. Panic rose in the back of my throat, and I gave up on my right arm and reached for the tube with my left.
I’d just started to yank, determined to get the damn thing out of me so I could breathe on my own, when cool fingers closed over mine.
“Ryan, calm down,” a voice said authoritatively. It sounded eerily familiar, and I opened my good eye, casting around wildly as fear threatened to choke me. A soothing hand stroked my forehead, and I finally managed to focus on my sister’s face as she looked down at me.
“Don’t fight the machine, Ay-vo,” Rory advised me. “I know it’s uncomfortable. Just give me a second, and we’ll get it out of you, okay?”
I nodded and tried to concentrate on lying still and remaining calm, but my body was still fighting to breathe without aid, and I was shivering. The sensation of drowning even though my lungs were being pumped full of air was maddening.
I heard the faint, low sound of switches being flipped, and the hissing stopped. My relief was immediate, and I started to pull.
Rory chuckled. “Hang on a second. You don’t want to pull that out just yet.” She turned away from me again, and I felt a pressure in the area just below my throat loosen. Rory’s face drifted back into view, and she nodded. “Knock yourself out.”
With a stifled sort of gasping sob, I tugged. The pull of the tape as I ripped it away from my cheeks stung, but I ignored it and soldiered on. My throat was on fire as something scraped against the length of it for what felt like an eternity. And suddenly, it was out and I could breathe.
I sucked in greedily, gulping the air, ignoring the burning sensation all up and down my windpipe. I was thrilled I could breathe on my own and blinked furiously as a lone tear trickled down my right cheek.
Rory wiped it away tenderly, then brushed the hair back off my forehead as she shone a tiny light in my eye. I scowled and batted my eye against the painful intrusion, trying to pull away from her. My feeble struggle didn’t appear to faze her.
After a bit, she flicked her pen light off and tucked it back into the pocket of her white coat. In the same motion, she reached up to retrieve a stethoscope, which’d been slung carelessly around the back of her neck. I must’ve been really doped up because I didn’t notice her attire until then.
“What’re you doing here?” I asked, as though the surgical scrubs and white lab coat with her name embroidered on the left breast didn’t provide enough of a clue. My voice sounded rough and raw, barely more than a whisper. My throat was a raging inferno. Each syllable that passed through my lips was like swallowing broken glass, and a sharp, stabbing sensation encompassed the entire right side of my back in time with every breath I took.
Rory ignored my inquiry. Instead, she inserted the stethoscope into her ears and placed the pad against my chest, inside the neck of my hospital gown.
“Breathe in for me,” my sister directed. Her sea-foam green eyes were unfocused as she concentrated.
I complied, though even that simple act was an effort. The right side of my body from my shoulder down to my knee felt like someone had worked it over with a two-by-four.
Rory relocated the stethoscope slightly farther down my chest. “Again.” And when I’d followed that order, she repeated the process. The entire experience couldn’t have taken more than thirty seconds, but time felt slippery, the whole thing dreamlike.
Once she’d finished, she replaced the instrument so it dangled off her again like a fashion accessory and took my wrist. She consulted her watch as she held me and then nodded, appearing satisfied.
A heavy-set woman with a cheerful face and a chaotic halo of curly ashen hair entered the room. She, too, wore scrubs and was carrying a folder, but I was too busy trying to keep my eyes open to make much sense of anything. The woman’s sparkling eyes landed on me, and she beamed.
The newcomer shifted her attention to my sister and consulted the folder briefly. “Evan O’Connor?” Her tone was questioning, as though she was trying to verify the information. “E-A-V-A-N. Is that how you say that? ‘Evan’?”
Rory held out her hand, silently asking for the papers. “It’s pronounced ‘even,’ actually. But we just call her Ryan.”
Confusion drifted across the woman’s merry countenance much the way clouds float in front of the sun. She glanced back at the papers in her hand before handing them to my sister. “Where did you get ‘Ryan’ from?”
“Her middle name. Aeryn.”
“Oh. Well, that’s different.” The woman somehow managed to sound happily excited by just about everything, which amused me for some reason. She nodded and smiled at me again. “Nice to finally meet you, Ryan. I’m glad you’re awake.” She turned back to Rory. “I’ll page her doctor now. Unless you need me to take care of something else first.”
Rory was flipping through the pages of what I could only presume was my file. “No,” she murmured distractedly. “I’m fine. Thank you.”
The woman left, and my sister and I were alone. I was exhausted and struggled to keep my eyes open, drifting for a while as Rory read. I wanted to go back to sleep but was afraid of what I’d miss if I did. I had no idea ho
w much time passed before Rory spoke again.
“How are you feeling?”
I shot her a dirty look. Well, as dirty as a look could possibly be with the full use of only one eye, which, if her facial expression was any indication, wasn’t very. “Fantastic.”
She ignored my sarcasm. “Any headache or nausea?”
A smart-ass response welled up within me, but I didn’t let it loose. I considered the question. “Headache. No nausea.”
She set my chart down on the nightstand and gently probed the swollen tissue surrounding my left eye. I hissed at the unexpected pain and tensed, which didn’t help the aching sensations in the rest of me.
“Your stitches look good. The swelling is definitely going down.”
“Hooray,” I murmured. I was trying to recall how I’d ended up here, but my thoughts were sluggish.
As if reading my mind, Rory asked, “Can you tell me what happened?”
I frowned, ignoring the dull throb the motion brought to the area of my injured eye. Dim flashes of memory swam around in my head, broken and disjointed. “Maybe.”
Something flickered in Rory’s eyes as she watched me, and while my brain fog wouldn’t let me identify the exact emotion I saw playing there, I did know I didn’t like it. My heart-rate monitor picked up speed in time with my racing pulse.
“Well, these definitely aren’t injuries I want to read about in my baby sister’s chart,” Rory informed me, changing the subject abruptly.
I sighed, but my thoughts had strayed back to recent events. I mentally catalogued the battery of aches and pains plaguing me, trying to assign a cause. Something was nagging me, and I was determined to figure out what.
Rory regarded me for a long moment, her countenance serious. Her hair was a little messy—which was unheard of for her—and she looked nearly as exhausted as I felt.
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