AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Two purplecoats stumbled into the clearing. “Two down. I’ll get stretchers,” one said, running back toward the wall.
“Check his pockets,” Lila told the other one, the same chubby-checked militiaman she’d met a few hours before. She might have been bleeding, the wound might have begun to sting, but she still had work to do. “He’ll have something inside that’s jamming the radios. Give it to me.”
Jackson did as she commanded, withdrawing a device the same size as a palm. Lila took it from him, turned it on, and found a menu in English. Breezing through the screens, she tapped a few buttons with bloody fingers.
She had to fix their radios. Too many people were injured.
She tapped one last button, and Jackson’s radio screeched on his shoulder. He crouched like a bee had stung him, and batted at it until Lila found the correct sequence. The noise had startled her as well, the pain in her side dialed up to a new level.
Dixon ripped hers off her shoulder and tossed it away.
“Testing, testing, testing,” they heard over the radio, static still oozing below the words. “Monitoring to anyone, anyone at all. Testing, testing, testing.”
“Shut up and let someone get a word in,” Jackson grumbled into the radio. “Intruder is tranqed outside the compound. One of the outsiders has been hit. We need Dr. McCrae now. It looks bad. Real bad.”
Lila dropped her head back to the dirt, the leaves tickling her ears while the chief cursed and shouted orders over the radio, specifically calling for Olivier not to be harmed.
All at once, Lila’s adrenaline petered out. The pain rushed over her like fire spreading throughout her body, centered near her belly.
She’d lose the baby, just a few hours after the temptation to keep it had begun snaking through her mind.
Jackson reached for Olivier, shoving him onto his back. The intruder’s face had been torn and bloodied and smashed by Lila’s attack, leaves glued to the sticky red.
She’d done that.
“Don’t you touch him,” Lila cried out, panting through the waves of pain, the temperature dropping all around her as though she’d fallen into cold bath. “We need to know what he knows, got it? I didn’t get shot for nothing. If that man dies, I’ll be coming for you first, and I won’t be coming with tranqs.”
Jackson held up his hands and moved away from Olivier’s sleeping form.
On the ground, she shivered and dug her head into Dixon’s thigh for warmth, his woolen trousers scratching her skin. Lila didn’t think about losing the baby any longer, not after glancing at Dixon’s expression, not after she’d finally recognized the words flying past his lips.
Dixon had begun praying to the gods.
Chapter 28
Lila’s eyelids fluttered. She found herself in a room of stainless steel counters and cabinets, including a tall bedside table with casters. Gray linens covered her bed, with matching gray pillows. A purple blanket had been tucked under her arms. A painting of a silver-haired woman in a purple robe and tight bodice watched over her, arms raised as though casting a spell.
A healing spell.
“You’re awake,” someone said.
Lila winced at the too-loud noise in the too-bright room. Her brain had fogged. Her limbs weighed a million kilograms, and every time she moved, a dull ache spread through her, shooting from her side.
“Lila?”
She swiveled her head back toward the voice. “Helen?”
The doctor grasped Lila’s wrist, watching the clock. “Surgery went well.”
It took Lila several moments to remember Olivier’s chase, the gunshot, and the aftermath, being put on a stretcher and carried out of the clearing, the clouds passing overhead far too slowly for comfort. A pale-faced Connell had snatched up one end of her stretcher, hauling her into the back of a cart with Dixon’s help, muttering something about his lover’s visions and orders and blood.
He’d already had a great deal of blood on his uniform before driving her to the clinic, the asphalt lane through the compound so smooth that she hardly felt any bumps or tremors. Connell had hopped out of the cart along with Dixon, the stretcher’s wheels smacking against the ground as they carried her into clinic’s emergency entrance.
Helen had been waiting inside. When she’d seen Lila in the stretcher, something had passed over the doctor’s face. Shock. Fear. Perhaps belief.
Helen had scrubbed in for surgery, holding Lila’s injured hand while Dr. McCrae injected her line with anesthesia, assuring Lila that she’d stay in the operating room the whole time.
A hundred questions passed through Lila’s mind as Helen let go of her wrist, but the first one to pass her lips surprised her. “Did I lose the baby?” she asked, extending and retracting the fingers on her right hand, each knuckle bruised and sore.
