by Julie Rowe
“Rabies? Slow down. What happened? Was Akbar involved?”
Pain exploded in the side of her head as someone knocked her down and ripped away the phone. Disoriented, she tried to grab the phone, but it was kicked away.
Akbar stood over her, bleeding from multiple cuts on his head and neck. His lips peeled back to expose his teeth at her and he grabbed her by the neck with one hand. Then he dragged her through the boxes and crates she was hiding behind and past the hospital’s cots, occupied and not.
He didn’t seem to care if she avoided any obstacles or hit them with her body.
Once they reached open sand, he ruthlessly forced her to the ground on her back, his hand tightening on her throat.
“You have cost me far more men, money and time than I can afford.”
She tried to talk, but his hold on her throat was too tight. She tried again anyway. His curiosity must have got the best of him, because after the third try to talk, he let off on the pressure so she could speak.
It was probably a fool’s errand, but she was going to try talking to the human being who used to inhabit this monster’s body.
“Why?” she asked in a tone made harsh by the pressure he’d already put on her neck. “These people didn’t hurt you. Why kill them in such a horrible way? Why kill them at all?”
For a moment she thought her question might have reached him. Might have given him pause, perhaps a moment to realize just how terrible the things he’d done were. He looked at the hospital, at all the people, some of them dying only a few feet away of a virus he’d given to them. His face relaxed a little, his jaw sagged and he sucked in a breath.
A moment later, yelling and gunfire turned his face to stone.
She sucked in a breath while she still could.
His hand tightened on her neck again and this time she knew there would be no reprieve. He was going to kill her. An insane smile spread over his face as he pressed harder. “Every one of the people I love has been murdered. Why should anyone else be free of the pain and suffering I live with every day? Until I know peace, no one else will know it either.”
Goddamn it, she hadn’t beaten cancer as a kid, then become the youngest medical doctor in the USA with a double speciality, just to cave in to the whim of a madman.
She closed her eyes, fisted some sand and threw it in Akbar’s face. He reared back, so she lunged up and managed to punch him on the side of the head, hoping his current injuries made him more susceptible to a strike there.
It loosened his grip on her neck and she slid away, but he followed, backhanded her and grabbed her again. This time he had both hands around her neck.
She wasn’t going to get away. Death was looking at her and he seemed much too happy to see her.
She’d accomplished one of the two things she wanted to do before she died. She’d done something worthwhile. Something worth dying for.
Please, let Connor be safe.
Spots crowded her vision and she struggled to take in a breath, began to panic, claw at his hands until blood coated her fingers, but the world was going dark and...
The vise around her throat suddenly disappeared.
She coughed and sputtered, her battered throat still tight as she sucked in air. Wonderful air.
Nearby, a sharp cry of pain caught her attention. Two men were struggling together, fighting, one with a knife. Connor and Akbar.
Connor should have been able to subdue Akbar, but he’d been stabbed in the thigh and lost a lot of blood. And Akbar had noticed. He kept punching Connor’s leg.
She forced herself to her feet and moved to interfere in their death match, but three of Akbar’s armed guards were running toward them. Akbar’s back was to them or they likely would have shot Connor. As it was, their shouts distracted Connor enough for Akbar to break away.
He yelled at his men and pointed at Connor and Sophia.
Their weapons came up.
Sophia dove behind a crate, her attention split between Connor and Akbar’s goons.
Connor hesitated.
“Con!” she shouted. He’d promised, promised her he would stay alive.
At her shout he threw something at one of the gunmen. His knife struck the chest of one of the men so hard, he fell backward.
The others scattered, their shots going wide.
A distant gunshot rang out and one of the men dropped to the sand. The other two ducked and backed away just as another shot hit one of them in the neck.
Akbar grabbed the injured man’s rifle and he tried to wrestle it away, but the next shot hit Akbar in the arm.
The uninjured man grabbed him and ran, putting the hospital between them and whoever was shooting at him.
Sophia crawled over to Connor and began to check him for new injuries. Her shirt bandage on his thigh had come loose and he was bleeding again. She clambered to her feet and moved to look for a proper bandage, but he grabbed her hand and pulled her back down.
“Stay down,” he growled at her. “Can’t you see someone is shooting at us?”
“Whoever it is,” she said, jerking her hand out of his grip, “isn’t shooting at us.” She got away from him this time and went to the supply area Akbar had used her as a battering ram to destroy.
Aha, she had upended a box of bandages. She grabbed a couple, then went back to Connor, who was now sitting up and looking grumpy.
“You didn’t know the shooter wasn’t shooting at us.”
“I did the moment he didn’t shoot us.”
“What the hell does that mean?” he demanded.
She took a long look at his leg, then inserted her fingers through the tear in his pants and ripped it open.
“Ow!”
“Oh, shut up, you big baby.” She gave him a glare as she bandaged his leg. “Or would you rather bleed to death?”
People were running around, but between the explosion, fire and gunshots, most of them were giving Sophia and Connor a wide berth.
A tall man wearing a robe about six inches too short for him walked toward them like a panther approaches prey.
“Hello, Smoke,” Sophia said. “Please tell Connor you were the one who shot those guys over there and made Akbar stop trying to kill us.”
Smoke shrugged. “Okay.”
“Oh for fuck’s sake,” Connor said. “Did you actually do all that?”
“Yeah.”
Connor shook his head, frustration and irritation making him look dangerous, wild and out of control.
“Max called,” Smoke said. “He’s on his way. We should see some support in an hour or so.”
“Wow, I almost don’t know what to do with that good news,” Connor said with more sarcasm than Sophia felt was required.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
“Bad news, Akbar left in a truck,” Smoke said.
“Feel better now?” Sophia asked Con, rolling her eyes as she wrapped a second bandage around Con’s thigh.
He wanted to shake and yell at her for taking the insane risks she constantly took. “No. You could have killed yourself lighting the lab up like that.”
“I wasn’t going to let Akbar take my equipment or me with him.”
Her steady tone had him on the verge of exploding. “So, it would have been okay if you’d died?”
She didn’t look up from tying off the bandage. “Yes.”
Wrong answer.
He took her by the arms, gently because she already had too many bruises, and brought her nose to nose with him. “Who the fuck brainwashed you into valuing yourself so little?” Whoever it was, he was going to hurt them.
“Who brainwashed you?”
“What?”
“You wanted to die, don’t try to tell me you didn’t. I’m a cancer survivor, remember? I’ve seen lots of
people make the decision that death would be better than living. Sometimes, when you thought no one was looking, you’d look like that. Like you were telling your battle buddies you just had one more mission to do before you joined them.”
His mouth tightened. He should have known she’d figure it out. For someone so young, she saw with old, wise eyes.
“I don’t feel like that now.”
“Good.” She sighed and all the starch seemed to go out of her. “We’re all going to die someday.”
“Flippant comments like that are going to get you handcuffed to a bed so you can’t get into any more trouble.” He wasn’t kidding.
She reached out and stroked one hand down his face with a sad little smile on her face. “Sounds like fun to me.”
She was all misty eyed, like his sisters got when they were really emotional. It was so unlike her, a tsunami of cold concern washed away his anger in one sweep. “What the fuck is wrong with you?”
She laughed, but it was bitterly sad. “Would you like the entire list or just the highlights?” A tear tracked its way down her face.
“Sophia?”
She blinked at him, a little frown creasing her brow. “I don’t feel very good.” A trickle of blood came out of her nose, her eyes fluttered shut and she sagged in his hold.
Con cradled her against his chest and yelled, “Smoke, I need some help here!”
Smoke swept into Con’s field of view. “Find Dr. Blairmore. Sophia just passed out on me.”
Smoke took one look at Sophia and disappeared into the hospital.
“Come on, gorgeous, don’t do this to me,” he whispered. He wiped the blood off her face, but it kept coming in a slow, steady drip that worried him more and more with every passing second.
Dr. Blairmore arrived, took one look at Sophia’s bruised arms and bloody nose and sucked in a breath. “Was she tortured?”
“She says she has a clotting problem,” Connor said. “But this is the second nosebleed she’s had in the last few days. She gave herself a plasma transfusion at the base in Bahrain before we left.”
Blairmore shifted on his feet with the anxiety of a man who had really bad news for someone. “Can I do a couple of tests?”
Con glanced at the woman he held. He’d let her have her secrets because he had no intention of living past his chance for revenge. She’d changed him in ways he was still trying to process, but two things were clear. Death no longer appealed to him, no longer offered the solace he longed for. She gave him that and he wasn’t letting her go. “Absolutely.”
Blairmore drew some blood, then disappeared with it. An aid worker found a cot for her and Con moved it so it was next to River’s. The staff started an IV with saline for Sophia and after a look at Con’s leg, one for him, too.
“Without the supply drop this morning we wouldn’t have been able to help,” the aid worker said. “We haven’t seen a new case of the illness in six hours.”
Because Akbar had run out of his poison.
“Do you think the worst is over?” the aid worker asked.
“Probably,” Con said wiping the blood off Sophia’s face for the umpteenth time. “Unless someone starts a riot.”
“People are much calmer now. Someone would have to work really hard to start a riot today.”
Smoke set up a patrol around the hospital, keeping an eye on everyone and everything.
Blairmore came back, and from the lack of color on the man’s face, the news was going to be bad. The doctor cleared his throat. “She’s very sick. Not with rabies,” he said quickly. “But her platelet count is dangerously low, the rest of her cell counts aren’t good either.”
A numbing cold flowed over him. “She had leukemia as a child,” Con told him. “It went into remission.”
Blairmore just nodded. “Most childhood leukemias are curable now, but there are always a few that...come back after the patient is an adult.” He swallowed, then added, “I’m not certain, you understand. I can only do cell counts here. She’ll need further testing at a fully equipped hospital to determine if I’m right.”
Con looked at the woman who held his heart, his life in her hands, and vowed to make sure she got the best care there was. “Thanks.”
Smoke drifted over after Blairmore left. “Does she know?”
“She had a nosebleed back in Bahrain. She knows.” And she didn’t tell anyone, not him or Max.
“Huh,” grunted Smoke. “I thought you were the suicidal one.”
“Not anymore,” Con said. Unconscious and without the force of her personality, he noted how pale Sophia was, how black her eyes were. Her bones stood out against her skin and her lips looked bloodless.
She’d come close, perilously close to working herself to death. If she thought he was going to stand back and let that happen, she was in for a rude surprise.
A unit of Army Rangers arrived first. They secured the entire camp and Smoke finally ceased his unrelenting watch over the hospital and crashed on a cot alongside Sophia’s.
They were going to need their own wing at this rate.
Max arrived three hours later, took one look at their beat-up-looking group and ordered them all back to the base in Bahrain. River was going to need surgery, Con a blood transfusion and Smoke was ordered to take forty-eight hours to rest.
When Max found out about Sophia’s cell counts he calmed down to an extent Con knew was not good. He stopped talking, standing and looking at her for so long, Con had to say something.
“She lied to us?”
“Yes.” Max’s gaze met his own and Con could see that her lies had hurt the other man deeply.
“Why would she do that?”
“I don’t know.”
“You’re both stupid,” Smoke said.
When they looked at him in confusion, the big man added, “Cancer doesn’t just hurt the victim.”
“She didn’t tell us because she didn’t want either of us to worry?” He was going to spank her ass when she was better.
Max nodded. “Yes, that feels right.”
“Fuck, Smoke,” Con said to his friend. “Ever think of becoming a therapist?”
For a moment Smoke looked completely disgusted. Then he said, “Killing bad guys is my therapy.”
“I’d say that’s fucked up, but I’ve been doing the same thing.” Con shook his head. “What about you, Max?”
“Let’s just say I’m a workaholic and leave it at that.” He gave Sophia another long look, then nodded at Con and Smoke. “Keep an eye on her. Consider it an order.”
Max left to take care of a number of details left behind after Akbar’s departure, not the least of which was replacing the water tank and making sure the water was clean and safe to drink.
He came back and woke Con from a deep sleep. “A medical helicopter will be here in thirty minutes to transport you all back to the base. Keep me apprised as information comes in.” The last sentence delivered with a glance toward Sophia.
“Yes, sir.”
She was still asleep. How had she managed to do all the shit she’d done? It spoke of a mental fortitude that was stronger than anyone’s he’d ever met.
The chopper arrived and everyone got loaded on. They’d been in the air for twenty minutes when she woke up.
The first thing she did was grab for his hand.
Who needed painkillers when all it took to make him feel like a superhero was her reaching for him without thinking?
He was sitting next to her gurney, strapped into the large helicopter. He leaned close and yelled, “You’ve been asleep for a few hours. I think all the crap we’ve been through caught up with you. We’re heading toward Bahrain and Max wanted to keep us together. River is going into surgery as soon as we land.”
She relaxed more and more as
he talked. When he finished, she closed her eyes briefly, then smiled at him.
“Max gave strict orders,” Connor added. “You’re not allowed to do anything until he comes back.”
That made her frown.
“I did, however, talk him into letting me continue to give you Tai Chi lessons.”
She grinned and nodded.
The big sneak. He knew she’d never be satisfied with that. She dozed for the rest of the trip, but he could see her reliving things in her mind. Her fists would clench and a couple of times, she screamed as a rough bump woke her.
He’d hold her hand until she got herself out of the nightmare or memory, then settle in to covertly watch her.
Back at the base, all of them were taken to the medical clinic for a thorough check.
Connor had lost more blood than he thought and got a couple units.
River made it through the surgery. A small hole was drilled into his skull to relieve the pressure from his concussion. He woke up wondering what the hell happened.
Smoke ended up getting a unit of blood, too, then slept for almost twenty-four hours straight.
Sophia tried to tell the staff that blood tests weren’t necessary. Even argued with them, until Con asked for a minute alone with her, then told her quietly, “Blairmore did some cell counts while you were out. He told us they were really low.”
“Big mouth,” she muttered.
“No, he was doing his job.” Con thumped her gently on the head. “What were you thinking, going into an outbreak situation with an unknown pathogen, knowing you were sick?”
“I was thinking this was my chance to do something important.” She dropped her gaze and picked at the blanket under her fingers.
“You’re not going to pull that shit again,” he told her in a hard tone. “You’re going to take care of yourself and do everything you can to get better.” He should take his own damned advice.
“Wow, listen to you, Dr. Button,” she shot back, pink warming her cheeks.
“I’ve been hanging around you long enough for some of it to sink in.”
She seemed pleased by that.
“So, why did you do it?” Con asked her.