Page 32 of You, Only You

Through the spiderwebbed window, I could see her. Head slumped against the deflated airbag. Blood, bright, terrible red, tracing a path from her hairline down her cheek. Her eyes were closed.

I braced my foot against the frame and heaved. The door shrieked, metal folding, and then it was open, and I was reaching for her, and my hands were shaking so badly I couldn't work the seatbelt on the first try. Or the second.

Her eyelids fluttered. Opened. Dazed. Unfocused. But open.

"Will?" Her voice was a thread.

"Don't move." Third try on the seatbelt. It released. My fingers were clumsy and useless and I needed them to work. "Just stay still. I've got you."

"That's not... how today was supposed to go."

A joke. She was bleeding and broken and making a joke. Something in my chest did became violent and uncontrolled, and I swallowed it down because feelings were not useful right now. What was useful was getting her out of this car.

"I'm going to lift you," I said. "It might hurt."

"Everything already hurts." But she nodded, her hand coming up to grip my shoulder as I slid one arm under her knees, the other behind her back.

She whimpered when I lifted her. A small, tight sound, bitten off. The sound of someone trying very hard not to scream. I held her against my chest and walked away from the wreckage, eachstep measured, careful. Her blood was soaking into my shirt and her hand was gripping my collar and her breath was coming in shallow, pained gasps, and I cataloged all of it the way I cataloged everything, except nothing about this was operational and I couldn't pretend it was.

Sirens wailed in the distance. People were gathering, phones out. I found a patch of curb away from the shattered glass and sat, and she was in my arms and she was alive and the shaking in my hands would not stop.

"Will." Her voice was slightly stronger now, though still thin. "You're crushing me."

"Sorry." I didn't loosen my grip.

"Seriously. I have ribs. They're broken but they're still mine and you're..."

"Sorry." I loosened my grip. Marginally. "You're talking. That means you're breathing."

"Your logic is... very you."

"Shut up and stay conscious."

"So bossy."

The EMTs arrived and tried to take her from me. I knew, rationally, that they were medical professionals doing their job. I knew that transferring her to the gurney was necessary and correct and in her best interest. I knew all of this. My arms did not care about any of it. My arms wanted to keep holding her, and the effort required to let go was physical, measurable, like putting down something that weighed more than muscle should be able to bear.

"Sir, are you injured?"

I looked down at myself. Blood on my shirt, my hands, my arms. Her blood. "No."

"You should let us check..."

"I'm fine." I was already moving toward my car. "Which hospital?"

The drive was a blur. I ran two more red lights. I parked in a space that was definitely not a parking space. I gave the admissions desk her information from memory: full name, insurance, allergies, blood type. I'd memorized it from her personnel file on day one. Standard practice. Know your team's medical details in case of emergency.

Standard practice. That's what I told myself as I recited her information to a nurse who looked at me with the particular sympathy reserved for people who are visibly holding themselves together by a thread.

"Are you family?" the nurse asked.

"Yes," I said without hesitation.

They let me wait outside the curtained bay where they worked on her. I stood against the wall with my arms crossed, my jaw clenched, and her blood drying on my clothes, and I ran threat assessments. That was what I did. I identified the SUV model, estimated its speed at impact, calculated the angle of collision. I thought about who Reeves would have hired. What the chain of command looked like. How many people knew about the operation. Where the order had originated.

I thought about all of these things because they were useful. Because thinking about them meant I wasn't thinking about the sound she'd made when I lifted her, or the weight of her in my arms, or the way she'd said my name through the spiderwebbed glass like it was the first word her brain could find.

I wasn't thinking about any of that. I was being operational.