He nods quickly.
“Okay. Okay.”
Elijah takes a corner too hard and the car swerves slightly, the tires catching gravel before he corrects it, and Jackson curses at the same time I feel the pressure shift under my hands.
“Watch it!” I snap, louder than I mean to.
Silence hits for half a second.
Then Elijah’s voice comes back, rough and dangerous and held together by nothing but force.
“I am watching it.”
I don’t answer.
Because he is.
He’s just also driving like if he doesn’t beat the road into submission, it’s going to take her from us.
The headlights cut across another stretch of empty road. Trees. Darkness. More road. It all looks the same, and the knowledge of how far we still are from anything solid presses harder into my chest with every passing minute.
She shouldn’t have been on that floor.
That thought flashes through me with such sudden violence it almost knocks the breath out of me.
She shouldn’t have been lying there bleeding while he touched her, while he leaned over her, while...
No.
I force it down.
Not now.
Not while my hands are the only thing between her and whatever happens if I lose focus.
“She’s cold,” Jackson says suddenly, panic sharpening the words. “Why is she cold?”
I look up then, properly, and for a second I hate it because the second I stop looking at the wound I can see all of her instead. The pallor in her skin is wrong. The softness in her mouth is wrong. The way her body just lies there in his arms like she’s too far under to even fight the pain is so wrong it makes my stomach twist hard enough to ache.
“Shock,” I say, and I hear how tight my own voice is. “She’s in shock.”
The words hang in the air.
Jackson’s face changes when he hears them.
Not confusion.
Understanding.
The worst kind.
“No,” he says immediately, like refusing the word might do something. “No. No, she’s not...”
“She is,” I cut in, because lying to him isn’t going to help. “Jackson, listen to me. Keep her warm. Keep talking to her. Don’t let her go quiet.”
He nods too fast.
Too many times.
