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“No, I can’t leave him.”
Tim was pulling at her, trying to pull her from the house.
“No!” The word was torn from her throat in a scream of rage as she broke from him, turning back to Graham as he was being loaded onto the gurney, the techs working frantically to stem the flow of blood.
“Come on!” Natches’s arm went around her shoulder, his hands stained with Graham’s blood, his expression dark with concern. “Let’s get in the ambulance. You can ride with him.”
“Natches . . .”
“It’s bad, Lyrie,” he whispered, his voice ragged, his eyes darkening as she shuddered, another sob ripping from her. “Come on, I’ll get you in the ambulance with him, but just . . .” He swallowed tightly. “Come on,” he repeated.
It was killing her.
She was dying inside as she realized what he was trying to tell her. Graham could die en route to the hospital, and she had to be prepared for it.
She couldn’t survive losing him like that.
If she had to do without him . . . god, don’t force her to do without him this way. Not like this. Not where she couldn’t at least see him, at least know he was there.
She prayed.
She’d always tried hard not to pray for herself, and other than when she was in danger of dying, she’d kept that rule. But she prayed now, for Graham. For herself.
God help her, how was she supposed to survive if he was gone? If he was no longer a part of her life?
She couldn’t survive.
If Graham died, she may breathe, she may walk, but Lyrica knew, inside where it counted, she, too, would die.
TWENTY-THREE
“I was shot.” Graham sighed as he felt the presence ease up to him and sit beside him.
He was in a white place, a bright place. This was a place he had never been before, even those times Doogan had managed to get him wounded.
“Yeah, son, you were shot.”
He turned his head, resignation weighing heavily in his chest as he stared back at his parents.
Garrett and Mary Brock looked as vibrant now as they had the day they died, as they’d looked hours before they stepped onto that doomed plane.
“Hell.” Rubbing his hands over his face as he stared around him, the total lack of anything but the pure white surroundings and his parents convinced him as nothing else could—he was dead.
His mother laughed, a sound as soft and loving as a breeze.
“You’re not dead,” she promised, easing down to sit on his other side.
He felt her arm slide around his waist.
“Then why am I here?”
“To help you decide if you’re going to fight to live, or if you’re going to give up,” his father answered, that firm, commanding tone of his just as grating now as it had ever been.
He gave his father an irritated look. “There’s days I’m convinced you’re a Mackay.”
It wasn’t a compliment.
Garrett chuckled at the observation. “Rowdy, Dawg, Natches, and I were damned good friends at one time.” He sighed. “But our lives were going in different directions.” He looked around Graham and smiled at the wife who had died with him. “We needed different things at the time, I guess.”
