All of a sudden, Honor had a sudden vision of all the people in the world trying to fix what was wrong, all of them failing, all of them with nightmares. Trying to hold back the tide of evil and hatred and greed. And failing.
“Honor?” Matt’s quiet voice was patient. He searched her eyes.
Her hands were against his sides, holding on to his incredibly broad chest. Like holding on to a wall, only warm. Something solid and real.
Honor opened her mouth, closed it. Tried to get words out of her too tight throat. Matt waited patiently, as if he had experience with trying to talk about trauma. He probably did.
Finally, the horror of the nightmare lost some of its grip. Not all of it, of course. Because most of it wasn’t nightmare, it was reality. She found her voice.
“I caught both school shootings,” she said simply and saw his reaction to her words.
He sighed, a long release of breath. His eyes turned sad. “Ah, honey.”
Yeah.
Tears stung her eyes and she turned her head sharply away. Though of course there was no hiding from Matt. His eyes were locked on her face.
He reached out and pushed a lock of her hair behind her ear. “Do you want to talk about it?”
“No. Yes.” He nodded, as if that made perfect sense. “You know the basics. Two school shootings in one week.”
Matt nodded again. His mouth had turned down, but other than that he didn’t say anything.
Portland, this nice rainy city where everyone was polite and everyone recycled, had the terrible distinction of having had two school shootings in one week. One in a high school and the other in a grade school. The city was still reeling.
“On that Monday, the police department called, told us that there’d been a school shooting and we were the closest hospital. So we were waiting when the ambulances came. My God, Matt. It was carnage. Do you have any idea what a bullet from an assault rifle does to the human body?”
She stopped, closed her eyes. Of course he knew.
“I’m sorry. We were — we were overwhelmed. We’re used to seeing bullet wounds, even bullet wounds in kids, but — there were just so many of them.”
“Twenty one,” he said quietly. “I followed the news. Trying to understand how anyone could do that.”
“Six dead. Of the survivors, four lost a limb, one will have a colostomy bag the rest of her life and two will never walk again. When everyone had been processed, we looked around and — it looked like a war zone. The hospital ordered us all to have counselling. It had been so horrible. Those kids — they were terrified. One minute they were studying math and Mark Twain and the next they were cowering under their desks, hoping to avoid a bullet. Every part of the ER was overwhelmed. Triage, treatment —” she swallowed. “Resuscitation. I think TV has given people the idea that the emergency department is basically an area under siege but that’s not true. We deal with emergencies, true, but we are a good team, hardly anyone ever waits. But that day we — we were just overwhelmed.”
Honor bent her head forward until her forehead touched his chest. Her hand went up, splayed against his pectorals and just touching him made her feel better. It was like a transfer of energy.
Matt nudged her with his shoulder. “And then Friday.”
Honor started shaking. “Yeah. And then Friday. We were still dealing with the emotional trauma of the high school shooting when a nurse came in to say that there’d been another school shooting and that ambulances were on the way. We could hardly believe it. And then she said that the shooting was at an elementary school.”
Honor’s heart beat heavily, dull thuds that sounded in her ears, that she felt in her fingertips. She knew the heart and how it worked. A complex muscle operating on electrical impulses. The heart was something else, too. The human heart is also a barometer and when it sickens, it means there is something sick around it.
“I think all of us knew it would be bad. I don’t think any of us knew just how bad it could be. Those bullets just … chewed the kids up. They didn’t just blow away limbs but blew away half their little bodies. I don’t think we’d ever seen carnage like that before.”
“Because some fucking incel couldn’t get laid and was rejected by one of the teachers.”
Everything in her chest was cold, like ice water had been poured into her. “Yeah. She was the first to be killed. She never made it to the emergency department, was killed instantly.”
“He pumped half a magazine into her,” Matt said. His mouth was tightly drawn, long lines bracketing it.
Sam Tirrell. The man who’d been rejected by pretty grade school teacher Floriana Noces. She’d been the first person shot. Then he’d turned his assault rifle on the kids, going from school room to school room, methodically, like doing an arithmetic lesson. One, two, three, four …
“So we — we went to work because that’s what we do. Right? We repair broken humans. We put them back together again. Only — it felt like we weren’t given the right pieces, enough pieces, to put those kids back together again. Too much of them was missing.”
The tears were pouring down her face now. She barely felt them. Tears sprang out whenever she thought of those martyred little bodies and out of self preservation, she forced herself to think of them as little as possible. At least in public.
Honor had never spoken to anyone about this except the hospital shrink. She worked too hard, too long hours, to have many friends, and who could possibly understand? She hadn’t been able to tell her father. He’d been out of the country and it hadn’t occurred to him that she’d caught the school shootings. When he got back from his business trip to China, he’d called up and asked how were things and she’d been completely unable to answer. Simply couldn’t talk. After a long moment she’d mumbled something about someone being at the door and had hung up.
No one could possibly understand.
Except, maybe, Matt.
She was completely bound up in his embrace now, plastered against him, wetting his chest with her tears. He was holding her tightly, cheek resting against the top of her head. There was comfort in his touch. Maybe she should have spoken about it before, with someone. Though there really hadn’t been anyone, until now.
They sat on the bed, Honor leaning heavily against him, holding on to him as tightly as he was holding on to her, for a long time. Time lost all meaning. She finally cried herself out. Stopped crying because her body just stopped making tears. Maybe she was dehydrated. Who knew? All she knew was that she was warmly wrapped in a strong body that was somehow providing strength and comfort.
Her breathing evened out. At some point, their heartbeats synched. She could hear his heart beating solidly inside his chest, strong and slow and steady. It calmed her, and her own heart slowed down.
She sighed, the breath leaving her body in one long slow slide and with it went the sharpest part of the pain she’d been carrying around since the shootings.
She could go on.
“We worked like crazy for hours, but in the end we were only able to save three of the little kids and even they are going to be crippled for life. The rest —” her hand on his chest started to tremble and he covered it with his own, flattening it against him. “The rest were lost. Like the week before, the off-duty emergency physicians came in to help. In the end, almost the entire staff was there. When it was over, we all sat, staring at the floor, some sitting on the floor, slumped and — and lost. Like the other shooting, it looked like a war zone, bloody gauzes and syringes scattered around. No one spoke for a long time and we were all crying. Most of the doctors and nurses — I’d never seen them cry. We’re a tough lot.” She glanced up at him, tried to smile. “Maybe not SEAL-tough, but still. Pretty tough.”
His mouth curved. “I bet.”
Honor leaned her head against him again. It felt good. She felt good, like she’d lanced a putrid boil, let the infection out. Nothing would ever make her feel whole again, not after seeing the lives of high school kids and grade
school kids cut short so savagely by madmen. But just talking about it with Matt, who totally understood, helped.
Matt lay back, keeping her close by his side. They lay there quietly. Nothing had changed, both of them had demons, terrible things were happening, but for now they were in a little bubble of calm and … love?
Was this love?
God, what would she know? Honor hadn’t really ever been in love. Infatuated, yes, briefly. She’d been more in love with medicine and her job than with any one man. There’d been a number of affairs, and she’d felt excitement, fleetingly, but not much more than that.
Matt had saved her life, so sure, she was grateful. They’d had sex and it had been the most exciting sex ever. Was that because she’d had a brush with death? There were all sorts of biological reasons why she felt so close to this man. His testosterone and her estrogen seemed to just click. There was danger and it was ongoing and adrenaline played a big part, too.
Danger was linked to physiological arousal which was very close to sexual arousal. Lots of things in common. Danger gives an adrenaline rush — the brain signals the adrenal gland which then secretes adrenaline, epinephrine and norepinephrine, which cause the heart to beat stronger and faster.
Just like seeing Matt unexpectedly did.
Then of course there was the fact that he was … hmmm. Built. In every sense of the term. And of course women were primed to respond to beefcake. In danger, in life or death situations, humans were reduced to animals and she might be responding to Matt in the basest possible way. Acute survival instinct leading her to find the biggest strongest man she could.
Plus, he was protecting her. Those were big points.
Thoughts jostled in her head as she lay on his chest, ear right over his strong steady heart as she tried to figure out why she responded so strongly to this man.
Her head was a jumble, but her heart wasn’t. Her heart was sure. He was the one. The one she’d been looking for all along, though she didn’t know she’d been looking. All those dinner dates, all those coffee dates, the occasional lovers — no wonder they hadn’t worked, hadn’t moved her.
She’d been waiting for Matt, all along. Waiting for this feeling of certainty, of two hearts melding.
Even lying on him felt familiar and exciting all at once. She knew his smell by now. Musk and leather, though where the leather came from she had no idea. He wasn’t soft anywhere but he made a fabulous pillow. She nestled her head a little, somehow finding an Honor-shaped hollow where his shoulder met his neck. His arms tightened around her. She was surrounded by hard, warm male. It was wonderful.
He was erect. She could feel him, hot and hard, against her thigh. And though she wanted sex, she didn’t want it right now. No energy. All she wanted to do was lie half on, half off him, listening to his breathing, feeling his heart beating against her ear, feeling him somehow becoming a part of her.
He wasn’t pushing her for sex. Matt could tell that though she was in favor of sex with him, generally speaking, now wasn’t the moment.
The sex would come later. Though somehow this was sex too. It sure felt more intimate than the sex she’d ever had before, even if their bodies weren’t joined.
Their hearts were, though.
She’d purged part of the pain of the school shooting. It would never be gone, but the sharp edges of it had dulled. Talking to him, having him understand completely, had helped.
Honor hadn’t slept a full night since the second shooting but she thought maybe, now, she could. Tonight. She’d sleep tonight.
A small digital clock showed that it was six thirty in the morning. Soon it would be time to get up. He’d feed her. The food would be delicious. Then they’d talk, as they got ready to go to LA. Because Honor was adamant. She was going with them. No question.
In the meantime, ASI would be doing their thing. This complex piece of machinery that was ASI would be working ceaselessly to figure out what was going on. They’d find her father. They’d stop the heroin shipment.
Justice would prevail, as it so seldom did.
“It’s so hard when they’re kids,” Matt rumbled.
Honor stiffened a little. “Yes.”
“Mine died, too. All of them. Those poor, shivering, bald little sacks of bones. They broke my heart.”
Her breath was heavy in her chest and she didn’t have the strength to speak. Just nodded, her hair catching in the scruff on his chin.
They lay there in each other’s arms, Honor thinking of her ordeal and his. At least some of ‘her’ kids survived. Matt said that all of the kids he’d rescued died. How had he described them? Bald little sacks of bones.
She shuddered, thinking of the terrible stress that caused alopecia in all of them.
Though …
“Wait.” Honor sat up, looking into Matt’s startled eyes. “Did your kids have skin burns?”
He frowned but answered. “Yeah. Like all of them had been burned but not by a hot instrument. More like they’d been held too close to a fire.”
“And you say they were bald?”
Matt nodded, face sad. “They’d lost their hair due to stress. All of them.”
“Matt, do you have any photos of those kids?”
“Sure.” He reached over to his phone. “It’s not a pretty sight, though.”
“Understood.” She did. She was used to human suffering. It was never a pretty sight.
Matt picked up his phone. “Here’s the boy who was being abused. His name was Ahmed, that’s all I could get out of him. He was just terrified.” Matt scrolled through his phone and was now holding out the screen. On it was a boy in bright sunlight, squinting. In the background was a tall tan mountain, with scrub and a rocky scree. The boy was standing next to a military vehicle with a canvas top, one small thin hand against the fender.
He looked scrawny, as if only his hand was holding him up. Ahmed was thin, dressed in rags, face pale beneath the dusky skin. Hairless. Even without eyebrows. He looked too small for puberty but if he had achieved puberty, Honor suspected that he would have lost his pubic hair too. She scrolled through five pictures of Ahmed. In one, the tunic covering the arm holding onto the vehicle had fallen back and Honor could see reddish burns, plus the purple bands where he’d been shackled. Some of the skin had started to slough off.
It must have been excruciatingly painful, she thought sadly, but the boy’s stoic face showed nothing. It was entirely possible that all he’d ever known in his short life was pain.
Scrolling, she came across a group photo of the liberated boys. All bald, all with reddish burns, all with the sick hollow look Ahmed had.
All doomed. But not only because they’d been mistreated.
“Matt.” He’d been looking at the photos too, sadness in his face, but his gaze shot to her face at her tone. “These boys didn’t die of stress or malnutrition. What I’m looking at is radiation sickness. At some point in the recent past they’d received massive doses of radiation.”
“Jesus.” Matt’s eyes widened.
“You know what?” Her mind was connecting all the dots, now. “I don’t think that ship is carrying heroin. I think someone is trying to smuggle radioactive material into the United States in one of my father’s ships.”
Fuck.
Matt thought he’d seen it all, heard it all. He thought he’d plumbed the depths of Chamness’s perfidy but this — this was worse than his worst nightmare. A ship’s cargo of tons of heroin was bad enough. That was a cargo of shattered lives and broken souls. But if what they were dealing with was a shipload of radioactive material …
“Get dressed, honey,” he said, gently lifting Honor away from him. She moved immediately. Matt loved that about her. She never made a fuss about minor things. He knew lots of women who would bristle at being told what to do. Matt wasn’t ordering her around. She needed to get dressed, now, because they had to spring into action and Honor showed that she understood that, fully.
In a moment, she was dressed i
n a dark blue sweater, gray sweat pants and soft boots. Ready for anything. He was dressed, too. The only thing missing was a weapon and he wasn’t going to leave the Grange without one.
It didn’t even occur to him to question her reading of the photographs. He could tell by the instant recognition inside himself that she was right. Maybe if his head had been in a better place, Matt would have recognized what Ahmed and the others were suffering from. As it was, seeing the kid violently abused, seeing the emaciated boys shackled to the wall, it had seemed obvious to him what they were suffering from.
The cruelty of the world.
Instead, they’d not only been exposed to the cruelty of the world but they’d also been exposed to radiation.
Honor was moving quickly, taking her cues from him. “Where could radioactive material have been held? Why wasn’t everyone in the village sick?”
Good question. Matt pulled a thin wool sweater over his tee shirt, pulled on his jeans. Socks, boots. From the top drawer of the bedside table he pulled out his P226 Sig Sauer and pancake holster. Honor watched, wide-eyed, but didn’t say anything.
Yeah. This was gun time.
Matt put a hand to her back and hurried them across the Great Hall to the conference center. His legs were longer than hers and when he had to, he could move fast. But she kept up. No flies on this woman, no sir.
He held the door open for her and she made right for the place where the remote was kept in a recessed slot in the conference table.
They sat and Matt picked up the remote.
“It’s early,” she murmured. She glanced up at the big clocks on the wall showing time across all parts of the globe. “Barely seven.”
“He’ll be up,” Matt promised. “And even if he’s not, he won’t mind being woken up for this. He’s made it clear that if it’s important, we can call 24/7.”
Matt tapped a number on his cell that connected with Midnight’s cell, then turned on the wall screen.
John Huntington’s face appeared. His hair was mussed and he was unshaven but his eyes were clear and he was alert. “Matt. What’s up?”
Midnight Renegade (Men of Midnight Book 7) Page 20