Actual Stop (Agent O’Connor #1)(84)

I wrinkled my nose. “Ew.”

Rory’s expression now was vaguely sympathetic. “I can take it out if you want. Or we can wait for your doctor to do it.” She shrugged. “Your call.”

I looked away from her but didn’t reply.

“Or I can tell you about your injuries.”

When I refocused on her, I saw she was expectant. This appeared to be a sticking point for her for some reason. I attempted to sit up, the movement pure agony.

Through my haze, I watched Rory roll her eyes and wordlessly push a button on the automatic bed. With a low hum, it slowly folded me into a sitting position, which was still painful, but slightly less so. It was worth it not to be lying down anymore, though. I frowned again as I let my gaze drift around the room.

“Am I on drugs?” It took a while for me to make that connection.

“Oh, yeah. Dilaudid. Why? Are you in pain?”

“Some,” I murmured lazily. “But mostly I just feel out of it.”

“So, now would not be the best time for me to tell you about your injuries.”

“Asha, you could tell me when I’m completely sober, and I still wouldn’t understand half of what you’re saying.” My mouth felt sluggish and beyond my immediate control. I wasn’t even sure my words were coherent.

She chuckled softly. “When you emerge from your drug-induced haze, I’ll explain. I promise to use small words and prop dolls the way I would with the little kids.”

“Fine.”

A long pause. I’d just closed my eyes and decided it was okay to give in to the sweet siren song of sleep when Rory’s whisper broke the relative quiet.

“You scared the shit out of me, Ryan.”

I struggled to open my eye again so I could look at her. She was worrying at her lower lip with her teeth, and her brow was creased. The sight nearly broke my heart. “I’m sorry.”

Rory appeared faintly annoyed. “Don’t apologize. It wasn’t your fault that some crazy person decided to—” She bit her lip again.

“Decided to what?” The dim snatches of memory swirling around in my subconscious came into sharper focus, but I still couldn’t identify exactly what’d gone down.

Rory swallowed and lowered herself so she sat perched on the edge of my hospital bed, the bedpan lying in her lap. A wobbly smile touched the corners of her lips, and her attempts at bravery tugged at me almost painfully. She took my good hand in one of hers.

“I know this is what you signed up for, but I never in a million years thought it would ever really…” She shifted her focus so it rested on our intertwined fingers.

“I was shot.” It wasn’t a statement, but it wasn’t exactly a question either. Hell, even as drugged as I was, I was able to tell my injuries weren’t consistent with something as mundane as a fall or a car accident. My mind worked overtime to put the pieces together, and I winced at the sharp stab of pain the effort produced.

“Five times,” Rory confirmed quietly.

“Bummer.” I may or may not have actually said that out loud. Bits of the incident were coming back to me slowly. I closed my eyes again, and this time I could almost hear the chaos that’d erupted when everything had broken bad. But the recollection was rather muffled and distant.

“Your right shoulder got the worst of it,” Rory was saying from far away. She seemed unable to help herself. Clearly, she needed to get this running diatribe of my injuries off her chest. “The bullet tore through your trapezius, which was actually lucky. The shoulder’s a complicated joint. If it’d struck lower, it would’ve shattered bone, and you might never have recovered full use of the limb. Of course, if it had—”

“Mmm.”

I was missing something. Speaking of bones, I could feel it deep in the marrow of mine. In the theater of my mind, I was trying to replay the events as best I could, but they were broken, out of focus, not in the correct order. When I was a kid, I used to dive to the very bottom of the pool and look up at the world above. My memories were wavy like that, and I felt insulated from them as though submerged under ten feet of water.

Sounds were easier. I remembered clearly, for example, the sound of the motorcade taking off, the punching roar of the engines, and the screech of tires attempting to gain traction against pavement. In my head, I could hear distant voices shouting, though I couldn’t make out precisely what they said. The slam of doors. The stamp of boots against concrete. I remembered hearing lots of different things. But I couldn’t see any of it. Not really. Just useless flashes. The delegation being rushed into the cars. Feet dashing by my head as I lay on the ground. The curve of a tire next to a curb. Nothing useful. Nothing that helped me put together exactly what had happened. Why not? What was I forgetting?

“Your leg’s a bit mangled,” Rory went on, though whether she thought I was even awake at that point was unclear. Maybe she simply didn’t care. On TV, people talked to their unconscious loved ones all the time. Perhaps that’s what she was doing now. The sensation of her fingers tracing gentle circles on my hand was soothing. “One of the bullets grazed the outside of your right thigh. You’ll have a scar, but there was no major muscle or tissue damage.”

I sighed. The urge to just let go for a while and put off remembering until much later was seductive. I wanted so badly to give in to it. I started to drift off, Rory’s voice floating to me as though from the other end of a long tube. She was saying something about lungs and kidneys and internal bleeding, but her words weren’t hitting home with me. I tried to murmur good night to her but couldn’t quite rally the energy to move my lips. I’d tell her later. She’d understand.