Page 120 of Bought for Blood

She came for me.

I had stopped expecting anything. I sat in that corner and watched the glass turn gray, and I was ready for it. Then the door swung open, and it was her.

“Get her off him.” Odile has one knee down on the concrete. “Careful. That’s a gunshot.”

“Don’t move her.”

“Bastien, you both need attention—”

“Then move us both.”

They move us both.

There’s a room under that building with no window in it. A boiler runs along one wall, and they put me on the floor againstthe warm side of it. Somebody unfolds two coats and tucks them around us. Odile lays Serenity down close enough that I can get my right hand onto her arm.

My right hand is all I have. The left one won’t do anything I ask.

Faine crouches on the other side of her. She turns Serenity an inch and looks under her collarbone. Then she puts two fingers behind the shoulder and finds the exit wound, and she stays there much longer than the wound needs.

“That went through the top of the lung,” she says.

“Then she should be dead.”

“Yes.” Faine settles back. She doesn’t look at me. “She should.”

One of her people brings a field kit, and Faine dresses the wound herself, front and back, without asking anyone. The entry wound has already stopped bleeding on its own. Nobody says anything about that either.

Every person in this room carries the medicine that would close that hole in an hour. Nobody offers it. The law I broke is the reason she’s breathing, and the same law is why no one here will mention it.

I don’t say anything. Faine has been alive long enough to know the signs, and I can’t tell her anything that would improve my position.

When she’s done, Faine leans back and meets my eye.

“Not today,” she says, and stands up.

One of her people crouches over me with a blood bag in his fist and holds the corner of it against my mouth. It’s cold. It’s been in a cool box, and it tastes like it.

I drink it fast, with no dignity about it at all. It does the work. My arm starts knitting inside the hour. The iron burns start closing at both wrists.

My foot doesn’t. Nothing the sun does ever does.

We’re in that room all day.

The captives they saved are upstairs in the loading bay. Every half hour or so, Faine comes down the stairs and tells me where things stand.

“Still no update on the trucks that got out.”

“How long until Aurora’s here?”

“They’re not coming.” She stops in the doorway.

“Parlance won’t be impressed that you did this without him.”

“I don’t answer to Parlance.”

Serenity sleeps through most of it. Around two, she wakes and turns her head until she can see me.

“The sun. You…” she says.