Full Throttle (Black Knights Inc. #7)(18)

Ozzie moaned, and Steady could hear his gut-wrenching struggle for composure beneath Agent DePaul’s repeated pounding on Abby’s door and her screams for Abby to “open up!” Why isn’t she opening her door? Is she too frightened? He’d never figured her for the shrinking violet sort, but—

“He’s still,” Dan said. Steady’s eyes had adjusted to the stygian darkness and could just make out Dan’s shape in the dim red light cast by the glowing KELUAR/EXIT sign tacked to the wall above the door to the emergency stairwell. Ozzie was quaking from head to toe, but he was no longer fighting them. Steady had always suspected Ethan “Ozzie” Sykes, despite his constant joking and bad taste in eighties music, was one tough motherf*cker. Now he knew it for sure.

“Okay.” He nodded. “Now feel around in my bag. There should be a MagLite attached with Velcro to one side.”

He could hear his medical gear clanking and clacking as Dan rustled through his duffel, and he tried not to think about the fact that there was no such thing as a sterile field in this particular situation. Then the glaring beam of the flashlight hit him in the face, and he screwed his lids shut to save his eyesight. “Bueno, good.” He nodded again. “Shine that into the bag so I can find my clamps.”

Dan did as instructed, stuffing the MagLite between his teeth so that he could use both hands to hold Steady’s duffel wide. Steady located his clamps in an instant and blew out a deep breath. “Cover him again,” he told Dan. “This will bark like a bitch in heat.”

“Do it, Steady.” Ozzie’s voice was reedy, thin. “Just do it.”

One. Tough. Motherf*cker.

“Here goes,” he said. Dan threw himself over Ozzie at the same time he shined the light into that awful wound. Steady pushed Ozzie’s torn flesh and muscle up with one hand while pulling the artery down with the other. It was a slippery little bastard, but he managed to block out the thought of what would happen if he didn’t manage to hang on to it. But there was no way he could block out Ozzie’s bloodcurdling wail of sheer, unimaginable agony. It was enough to burst his eardrums, enough to scar his soul.

Finally, finally, he had the artery where he needed it to apply the clamp. Then it was back into his duffel bag for the Hemopure and QuikClot. And, miracle of miracles, the lights chose that moment to come back on.

“Go help Agent DePaul,” he told Dan, blinking against the sudden glare. “I’ve got this now.”

Dan nodded and pushed to his feet. Steady watched him sprint down the hall, then immediately turned back to his patient.

Patient…

Jesús Cristo, Ozzie was so much more than that. A trusted teammate. A best friend. A brother really, in every way that mattered. And if he allowed himself to dwell on what he was doing and who he was doing it to, he’d probably lose his shit. So, sí, his patient…

“Almost finished,” he assured Ozzie. “We’ll get you to the nearest hospital, and after a little blood transfusion, it’ll be all the morphine you can stand. How does that sound, eh, bro?”

“Julia?” Ozzie managed to rasp as he tried to lift his head to peer into the smoky room.

“She’s dead.” Steady wasn’t Willy Wonka. Sugarcoating things wasn’t his style.

“Fuuuuuck.” Ozzie allowed his head to drop back to the floor, a sob shuddering through him. Steady gave his friend two seconds to mourn before he went back to work on that thigh.

Seven years of higher education and numerous bouts of battlefield triage helped him determine exactly where to shake the QuikClot—a powdery clotting agent—to combat the worst of the remaining bleeding. Ozzie moaned and clenched his bloody fists, but compared to what he’d just been through, the burn of the QuikClot was child’s play. Steady was in the process of hooking up an IV of Hemopure when a loud bang! thundered around the space. Instinct had him throwing himself over Ozzie until a double bang! bang! made him glance up.

Penni DePaul, weapon in hand, was firing into the locking mechanisms on the doors of her fellow Secret Service agents’ rooms. Dan followed behind her, kicking them open. And each time he did, smoke billowed out in a thin but corrosive cloud that wasn’t quite enough to trigger the hotel’s fire suppressant system. That is, if the hotel even had a fire suppressant system. In this part of the world, you could never be sure if those sprinkler nozzles attached to the ceiling were functional or just for show.

Regardless, Steady didn’t need to look into those rooms to know what was there. The growing smell of charred flesh said it all. It wasn’t one explosion that’d rocked him in his bed. It was several small, simultaneous ones. Abby Thompson’s security detail was dead or dying. And something inside Steady, something deep and profound, something he wasn’t aware existed, shattered with the realization. Was this the abduction scheme they’d been hearing about? Or something far more sinister?

Abby!

He didn’t realize he screamed her name aloud until he saw Dan turn in his direction, the man’s face a sooty mask of dread. Oh, Abby, no!

“I’m firing at your lock, Abby!” Agent DePaul yelled. “If you’re in there, move away from the door!”

Steady’s skin tried to crawl off his body. He couldn’t draw a full breath. And his heart thundered so loudly he could hear it echoing down the hall. Then he realized it wasn’t his heart. It was footsteps. A lot of them…