Total pages in book: 109
Estimated words: 103719 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 519(@200wpm)___ 415(@250wpm)___ 346(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 103719 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 519(@200wpm)___ 415(@250wpm)___ 346(@300wpm)
Likewise, someone was gasping right behind her—
“Two minutes.”
At Ehlena’s announcement, everything stopped. The chest compressions. The bagging. The movement in the whole world.
Xhex’s eyes locked on the monitor, on that flat line. On those very bad numbers.
“Come on, we need to go—”
It was that male voice again, in her ear, and then strong hands gathered her from the floor and removed her from the room even though she pushed at them, fought against them.
Manny called out, “Pushing epi—”
As the door shut on its own, she knew that that antiseptic, tiled room, with its stainless steel instruments and medical equipment, was the last place John needed to die. He should be in her arms; she should be holding him.
Rehv’s face got right into hers. “Look at me—”
“What happened?” She gripped the front of his fine silk suit. “How was he injured!”
But like the details mattered anymore? Details only counted when you could do something with them to change the outcome.
She looked around at the faces that surrounded her, ones she knew so well, ones who had brought her here from the club, who had come for her in person, a lineup she knew she never, ever wanted to see.
“How did it happen—”
“He took a bullet for me.”
The anguished intrusion brought everyone’s head around. Tohr was leaning out of the exam room next door, blood running down his face and coating his bare chest with a red sheen.
“We were in the field,” he said hoarsely. “Chasing two shadows…”
Behind him, Xhex’s mahmen, Autumn, appeared, her pale hand resting on her mate’s bloody forearm. As her terrified eyes lifted, all Xhex could think of was…
Motherfucker. They were both going to lose the love of their life tonight if John died.
Tohr was never going to get over this, especially given how much he had already been through.
The Brother wiped his face with a trembling hand. “We ran right into a drug deal going wrong. The three humans were shooting at each other—and the second they saw us, we became their targets. I was hit twice, and then John jumped in front of me. He… he took the bullet that would have gone right into my head. He just leapt up and…”
As the words were choked off, the look of anguish that came over the male’s face galvanized Xhex. Before she knew she was going to move, she shoved Rehv out of the way and launched herself at the Brother, bringing him down to her level by the shoulders as she reached for her mahmen as well.
“Tohr—”
“Oh, God,” he moaned. “He took it to save me. The bullet…”
As the fighter dropped his head onto her shoulder, Xhex dragged her mahmen in close and had a strange moment of release—not from her terror, but certainly from her sense that, however much the Brotherhood and other fighters were hurting, the magnitude of her emotions separated her from everyone else: Now there was one other person who felt this tragedy as deeply as she did—
Autumn returned her embrace, the female’s arms reaching around as much as she could of her mate and her young.
Make that two people who felt this as deeply as she did.
That single bullet, which had been so anonymous when it had left its muzzle, had somehow managed to target and wipe out an entire family.
Xhex turned her head and looked to the OR’s door. She had an impulse to read John’s grid, but she was too scared. If she sensed nothing at all? She just wasn’t ready for that. And if she did read something? What if the energy she took from him was the tipping point that sent him over the edge?
No, she thought as she squeezed her eyes shut. Better to just wait.
As if her not knowing the outcome somehow forestalled what she feared was his fate. And by extension… her own.
* * *
As Rehv stood next to Xhex and her immediate family of only two, he shifted his mink duster to the crook of his elbow—and felt a raw hunger for revenge that nearly knocked him out of his ostrich loafers. The fact that he was off his dopamine sharpened everything inside of him, from his emotions to what he intended to do with them. And playing witness to the tight knot of suffering in front of him, the grief and fear, the powerlessness? Well, didn’t it all make him a downright vicious motherfucker.
There was a good, goddamn reason symphaths were isolated from others—
Down the corridor to the left, V stepped out of the office’s glass door. As the Brother strode toward the crowd that had formed outside the OR, he brought a cloud of aggression with him, his long strides, his black-leather-clad body, the expression on his face, all proclaiming him for the menace he was.
“I’ll be right back,” Rehv murmured to Xhex, even though he doubted she heard him.