Actual Stop (Agent O’Connor #1)(82)
Darkness was creeping around the edges of my vision now, and fear shot through me. Every breath I drew was agony, and a woman I cared about was bleeding out on the street corner while I watched, powerless. The red of her blood contrasted sharply with the whiteness of my skin, loudly blaming me for this.
“Somebody call an ambulance!” I screeched, panicking. All sorts of shouting and commotion were echoing up and down the street, but I heard it only dimly and in snatches, as if someone were constantly adjusting the volume on the world at large. I think I was only tuning in long enough to attempt to determine whether help was on the way and then immediately tuning back out again. Apparently, I could no longer multi-task.
Lucia gripped my wrists, jostling my shoulder, and I yelped. Tears welled up in my eyes, and I swiped them away with the back of my hand. Her chest was rising and falling rapidly, and the crimson stain trickling from between her lips told me she was aspirating on her own blood.
“Luce, sweetie, just hang on. I’ve gotta turn you over, okay?”
I tried to rotate her onto her side, but my body wouldn’t cooperate. Moving my right arm at all made me see white flashes in my periphery, and I simply didn’t have the necessary strength. I settled for curling up as tight as I could over Lucia’s body and pressed my forehead into hers. Squeezing my eyes shut I murmured to her over and over again to hang on, that help was coming, that she’d be okay.
She was gasping now, or trying to, and it was agony to hear the sound of the blood rattling in her airway. Each strangled wheeze was a red-hot ember being dropped down my throat to burn in my chest. I pressed harder against her neck as tears streamed down my face. My sobs sounded like thunder to my ears and mingled discordantly with hers, seeming to drown out everything else.
How unprepared I was for this situation. We’d trained relentlessly in the academy, going through assault scenarios repeatedly until it became second nature to put your protectee’s life ahead of your own. And yet, as many times as they’d made me practice, I couldn’t help thinking they’d failed me in this. They’d taught me how to take a bullet, how to trade my life for someone else’s, how to die so someone who didn’t even acknowledge my existence could live. They’d taught me to have pride in that mission and to accept it as easily as a corporate employee would acknowledge the reality of Monday-morning meetings. They’d failed to teach me, however, how to cope with watching someone I cared about shoulder that burden.
And then I stopped thinking altogether.
Chapter Twenty-six
An unbelievably annoying beeping sound disturbed me who knows how long later. At first, I fuzzily thought it might be someone’s watch or cell phone, but it just kept going, making me want to scream. Each beep felt like someone was stabbing me behind the eyes.
When I tried to snipe at someone to turn it the f*ck off, I noticed a tube down my throat and felt like I was suffocating. I heard a low sort of strangled hissing sound, and my lungs burned as they were forcibly filled with oxygen. My heart rate soared, which only increased the tempo of the beeping, and I struggled to open my eyes and sit up. My right shoulder was in agony, and I let slip a muffled grunt. Only one eye would open all the way, and that didn’t help me stay calm.
The deluge of air stopped, and I gratefully exhaled before trying to suck in a breath on my own. I tried to grasp the tube with my right hand, but my arm was fastened to my body somehow, and the struggle to free it caused me unnecessary pain. The hiss came again and with it the unsettling feeling of being inflated like a balloon against my will. Panic rose in the back of my throat, and I gave up on my right arm and reached for the tube with my left.
I’d just started to yank, determined to get the damn thing out of me so I could breathe on my own, when cool fingers closed over mine.
“Ryan, calm down,” a voice said authoritatively. It sounded eerily familiar, and I opened my good eye, casting around wildly as fear threatened to choke me. A soothing hand stroked my forehead, and I finally managed to focus on my sister’s face as she looked down at me.
“Don’t fight the machine, Ay-vo,” Rory advised me. “I know it’s uncomfortable. Just give me a second, and we’ll get it out of you, okay?”
I nodded and tried to concentrate on lying still and remaining calm, but my body was still fighting to breathe without aid, and I was shivering. The sensation of drowning even though my lungs were being pumped full of air was maddening.
I heard the faint, low sound of switches being flipped, and the hissing stopped. My relief was immediate, and I started to pull.
Rory chuckled. “Hang on a second. You don’t want to pull that out just yet.” She turned away from me again, and I felt a pressure in the area just below my throat loosen. Rory’s face drifted back into view, and she nodded. “Knock yourself out.”
With a stifled sort of gasping sob, I tugged. The pull of the tape as I ripped it away from my cheeks stung, but I ignored it and soldiered on. My throat was on fire as something scraped against the length of it for what felt like an eternity. And suddenly, it was out and I could breathe.
I sucked in greedily, gulping the air, ignoring the burning sensation all up and down my windpipe. I was thrilled I could breathe on my own and blinked furiously as a lone tear trickled down my right cheek.
Rory wiped it away tenderly, then brushed the hair back off my forehead as she shone a tiny light in my eye. I scowled and batted my eye against the painful intrusion, trying to pull away from her. My feeble struggle didn’t appear to faze her.