Page 119 of Bought for Blood

Then the wall changes.

Stone on both sides. No window. The gray has gone out of the air. It’s dark.

“It’s okay,” Crowe says. “You can stop now.”

I let go.

Everything goes out of me at once, all the way to my fingers, and I go over sideways onto the corridor floor.

For a while there’s just darkness.

Then there’s a coat over me, and a hand under my head. My breathing is coming in and out too fast, and I can hear the wound doing it with me.

“Faine.” Odile’s voice, above me. “Her shoulder.”

Faine crouches at my other side. She puts two fingers under my collarbone and turns me an inch.

“Through and through,” she says. “Front and back.”

“That was twenty minutes ago at least.”

“Yes.”

Nobody says anything else about it. Faine sits back on her heels and looks at my face for a long moment, and whatever she’s thinking she keeps.

I get my eyes open properly.

The corridor is full of people. Two of Odile’s are at the far end with their weapons up. There’s a body on the stairs behind them.

Bastien is on the floor eighteen inches from me.

Somebody has put a coat under his head. His arm is still wrong.

His eyes are open, and they’re on me.

I get onto my elbow. Then my hand. Odile says something and puts an arm out, and I go past it.

I get to him. I get both hands on his face.

He’s freezing. His skin is pulled so tight that all I can feel under my palms is bone.

“I’m here,” I say.

He tries to speak. He can’t.

“Don’t.” My hands won’t stop shaking against his jaw. “Don’t talk. I’ve got you.”

His right hand comes up off the floor. It takes him a long time. It reaches my forearm and closes on it with almost no strength behind it.

“I’ve got you,” I say again.

Then I can’t say anything else. I rest my forehead on his chest, where there’s no heartbeat, and I stay there.

Chapter 35

Bastien

There’s a woman with her forehead on my chest and blood coming out of her nose. Her hair is stuck across her cheek. Her breathing sounds wrong, and every part of her that’s touching me is wet. I know blood well enough to tell it’s not all hers.