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After so many years, this is the end, and it’s the worst way possible because the one who took me down…the hit I did not see coming. Aria Darklyn will pay if I have to come back from the afterlife to make it so myself. I’ll claw my way up from hell because that’s surely where I’m going.
Gritting my teeth, I drag my hand along the floor. Drag a hand through my blood pooling and cooling already. The cell is still in my pocket. My fingers brush the corner of the phone. It takes every ounce of strength left in my failing body to grab the phone, open it. Make the call and wait for the man on the other end to answer.
“Broderick?” he asks.
“Execute Protocol Albatross,” I grind out.
“...Wait…what? No. That’s not possible. No!”
“It’s up to you now. Protocol Albatross is essential for the Syndicate to continue.”
I don’t remember clicking off and ending the call. I don’t remember much past the call. A shadow, overhead. The muzzle of a gun points between my eyes, and the flash of a wicked grin is the last thing I see before the lights go out.
Permanently.
* * *
The car ride is nothing but a never-ending story of raw agony.
Each time I return to consciousness, the pain comes with me. The pain and the sensation of the razorblade running over my nerves.
“That’s it. You’re going to be okay.” Naomi drives like a bat out of fucking hell and manages to hit every pothole on the road. “Hold on a little bit longer for us, Dev. We’ve got you.”
My gaze trains on the curtain-like fall of Aria’s hair, like blinders around my face. I’m sprawled in her lap, her hands over mine over the wound, her heartbeat a steady pressure I feel through my skin.
“It's going to be okay.” She repeats it like a plea, a prayer, and I wonder who she thinks is going to hear her. “As long as you pull through. Do it for me. Be fine for me.”
I’ve been shot before. Not like it hasn’t happened before.
This time, it’s a serious injury. Nothing I can’t handle. I open my mouth, lips flapping, and no sound coming out. Nothing I can’t—
I come back to, and the car is driving smoothly with flashes of yellow interspersed with red, with gray.
“Where—”
Aria swipes the back of her sleeve across my forehead. “Shh. Don’t talk now. Naomi, can you go any faster?”
“I’m going over a hundred.” The terse reply comes from the front. “How’s our boy doing?”
“He’s sweating and shivering,” Aria says.
“Five more minutes, and we’ll be there. I promise. I’m going as fast as I can without killing us all.”
Time means nothing. There is only the darkness, the pain, the car. Those three things meld together, and I’m swimming, drowning in a sea of it. The next thing I know, someone peels my eyelid open, flashing a brighter than fuck light at me.
There’s a cot underneath me, rolling down a hallway with three nurses manning the ship and Aria at my side. Her fingers are laced with mine.
“You can’t die on me, Devan. I will hunt you down wherever you go, and I will drag you back into this body.” She lifts my hand to her mouth and kisses my knuckles.
“Ma’am, keep talking to him,” one of the nurses urges. Calmly, professionally. “It seems like he’s coming to again.”
Her eyes are watery pools, and as I watch, a tear drips down her cheek, standing a path through blood and dirt. “It’s supposed to be you and me, Tough Guy. We…we never talked about plans, about after, but I wanted it to be us. I wanted it to be us so damn badly. I could almost taste it. The fantasy. And it was better than anything I’ve ever experienced before. None of it will happen if you die on me.”
I don’t want her to cry. I never want her to cry unless she’s happy, and they’re tears of joy.
“Where are you taking him?” she asks the nurses. “Tell me he’s going to be okay now.”
“We’ve got to get him on the operating table,” a person handling the other side of my cot answers. “The bullet went clean through, but he’s been bleeding out steadily, and if we don’t close the wound, then he’s not going to make it much longer.”
