Page 169 of Shadowing You

He pulled them from a bag and handed them to her, and she cut away Ethan’s clothes.

The entry wound was high on the left, below the arm. She pressed the heel of her hand over it. Warm blood welled between her fingers, a steady seep, not the bright pulse of a severed artery. She bore down.

“Through and through.” Daniel worked the exit at his back. “His arm must’ve been up.”

It had been. She’d watched him lift it, watched him spread himself wide and turn his body into a wall between Lu and her. She shook off the picture.

Ethan’s chest rose, fell, rose again, shallow but steady. She slid two fingers to his throat. His pulse ran fast and thin beneath them, but it ran.

He was breathing. He was alive.

Thank You. Keep him. Please, keep him here.

Daniel passed her a folded pad, and she packed the wound while he did the same at the exit wound. They worked together, bearing down, counting in silence, settling into the rhythm of two people who’d done this before. Her knees were soaked. There was so much blood—too much for a wound already starting to clot.

“It’s not all his.” Daniel said it as though he’d heard her thoughts. He tipped his head toward a still shape in the weeds beyond Ethan. “A lot of that belongs to him.”

“Is he⁠—?”

“He’s dead.”

She tore her gaze away and took in the dark spray dried across Ethan’s collar. There was darker blood on Ethan’s jacket and pants. It wasn’t all Ethan’s—it couldn’t be.

Light swung through the trees, white and jolting, and then paramedics were there—new hands, new voices. “We’ve got him, ma’am. Step back.”

She didn’t want to let go. Daniel came around to her and lifted her hand from the wound. “It’s okay,” he said. “They’ll take care of him.”

They lifted Ethan, and in the glare of their flashlights, his face was gray and slack and streaked with blood.

Maybe he would live.

She let herself hope.

CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

The room was peaceful beyond Ethan’s eyelids, as quiet as it ever was when nurses were doing their jobs on the other side of the door.

He took inventory. His pulse felt steady. He had a catheter at the back of his right hand and a bandage wrapped around his left shoulder and back, figure-eight style. His chest burned with every breath.

He’d been in the hospital for two nights. Three, if he counted the time spent in the ER, but since he didn’t remember any of that, he didn’t count it.

Blood lost, ribs cracked, a lung that was agonizing to fill. A bullet that would’ve killed him if it had hit a couple of inches to the right—his heart, his neck, any arteries. Somehow, it didn’t hit anything but skin and muscle.

Funny how much skin and muscle could hurt.

But the warmth along Ethan’s good side was the only feeling that mattered.

Mei Lin had folded herself onto the mattress beside him, one hand resting over his sternum, lifting each time he inhaled.

The eleven-to-seven nurse had tried to get her to move to the chair the night before. “He needs his rest. You must give him space so he can sleep.”

Mei Lin had looked at the woman with wide eyes and answered in a long, apologetic stream of Mandarin, spreading her hands, shaking her head, seemingly understanding none of it.

The nurse tried twice more, and Mei Lin smiled and nodded until the nurse gave up and walked out.

Ethan had made the mistake of chuckling and paid the price in pain.

The nurse was probably right, and if Ethan were his patient, he’d make her sleep elsewhere.