Marrow

JACK

Blood coats my hand. The warmth of Kyrie’s diminishing body heat creeps up through the slats of my fingers. I apply direct pressure to her stomach, trying to staunch the rapid flow of blood.

She’s lost too much.

She’s lost consciousness.

But I can still feel the faint pulse of her heart.

“Kyrie…please. Goddammit. Don’t do this to me.” I curl my arm around her shoulder and lift her against my chest. “Don’t fucking give that worthless, piece-of-shit Hayes the final word. You can’t. It’s damn impossible for you not to have the last word, petal.”

She doesn’t respond. Her pulse weakens further. And a wild rage tears through my chest wall, the world searing at the edges of my vision.

I remove my hand just long enough to strip my dress shirt and use it as a suture to wrap her injury, securing it around her abdomen. Desperation leaks into my trembling limbs as I retrieve the phone from the inseam of Hayes’s jacket.

With a shaky thumb, I punch in 9-1-1. At the operator’s calm inquiry, I say, “Dr. Kyrie Roth has been severely injured. She needs urgent medical assistance.” I rattle off the address, then inhale an unsteady breath as I kneel beside Kyrie, sensing her drift further away. “Get them here right the fuck now.”

I hang up on the dispatcher’s useless questions that will do nothing to help me save her. The phone slips from my blood-slicked hand. I let it drop to the cream carpet with a quiet thud. I collect it quickly and then brace Kyrie closer, sweeping the tangled length of her dark hair away from her eyes—those perfect blue embers I’m desperate to see flare to life.

“Open your eyes,” I whisper against the shell of her ear. “Come on, lille mejer. You deliver death, little reaper. You’re a force. You crashed into my world and shook me to my fucking core…and this isn’t how it ends between us.”

Her blood dampens the carpet, soaking into the very fibers she loathes, and I’m drawn into a wormhole through time. Where I watched, emotionless, cold and callous, as the dying girl stained the cream carpet with her blood as death tried to claim her.

All while she silently fought to live.

“I need you to fight now, Kyrie, elskede.”

It’s my fault. I’m the one to blame. There was another predator in my midst, and I failed to see him. If I had, if I had recognized Hayes for what he was all those years ago, my ego not so fixated on stalking and eliminating the competition in my hunting ground, I could have eradicated the threat of Hayes long ago.

Or when Agent Eric Hayes showed his face in that conference room, and I noticed Kyrie’s reaction to him… I should have followed him out of the building and wrapped a ligature around his thick fucking neck.

I should have protected her.

Now, that power has been stripped away, and all I’m able to do is seal my hand over her wound, begging my soulmate not to take her sunshine and leave me in the cold.

As her pulse grows fainter, a fierce growl crawls from the abyss of my black soul, and I climb to my feet with her in my arms. I take Kyrie outside and lay her on the ground.

Then I turn to face the house.

With fury blazing the numb cavities of my heart, I gather the items from my trunk and deposit them in the same room as Hayes’s lifeless body.

A quick sweep of the kitchen proves Hayes kept it stocked with the essentials. Sugar, flour, cooking oil. The perfect ingredients to bake a cake—or burn down a house.

I unload the ingredients around the dead man in the center of the room, stopping when I reach the Glock, where I kneel beside him.

“I have no doubt I’ll meet you in hell, Hayes,” I say. “But if she dies… I’m coming for you sooner.”

I only wish we could kill him twice.

After I twist a towel around my hand to block GSR residue, I pick up the Glock. I notch the muzzle under his chin and squeeze the trigger, sending a bullet up through the base of his skull and blowing out the top of his head.

I lay the gun in his open hand, toss the towel aside, then remove the shard of wood Kyrie used to stab his jugular. I stand over him and douse his body with oil, then remove the silver Zippo from my pocket.

With a final strike of the flint wheel, I light the wick, stare into the heat of the orange flame.

Then let the lighter fall to his chest.

I walk away with the heat at my back as his body catches fire.

Stepping into the cool air, I go to Kyrie and scoop her near lifeless body into my arms, my chest dangerously close to caving as I struggle to feel her pulse. I walk us to the front of her old yard, where the wail of sirens cracks the silence. The strobing flash of lights bloom in the near distance as the ambulance comes into sight.

As the paramedics throw open the doors of the emergency vehicle, one of them asks me a question. I don’t respond while I place her on the gurney, my sole attention on her and the man searching for her heartbeat.

“Sir, is there anyone else in the house?” The paramedic next to me asks again.

I look him in his light eyes, mine hard as stone. “No. She’s your only concern.”

“Are you injured, sir?” He forces another question.

Meeting his gaze again briefly, I consider the fact that he may question whether I’m Kyrie’s attacker, and I say, “I’m not sure.”

That’s enough for the paramedic to sequester me inside the ambulance where I’m seated at the front. Hands clenched into fists, I watch them cut away Kyrie’s shirt and the one I secured around her. They place electrodes on her chest and forearms and a Mylar blanket over the lower half of her body. I stare, unblinking, as her weak vitals appear on the screen of the cardiac monitor.

The whoop of police sirens compete with the blare of a firetruck horn as the overcast afternoon outside the ambulance descends into a bright swirl of colors and chaos.

The ambulance door slams shut on the sight of flashing lights and a blazing inferno trapped inside Kyrie’s childhood house.

I tear my hands down my face, the powerless feeling at not being able to save her strangling my control. I reach for her hand, only to have one of the paramedics halt my movement, and the only thing that prevents him from losing his life is my need for him to save hers.

As the slow but steady beep begins to emit from the monitor, some foreign emotion grips me whole—something akin to hope. My entire being clings to this sensation as the paramedics place an O2 mask over her face and run an IV line to administer isotonic fluids.

One of the medics draws near and drapes a blanket over my bare shoulders as the other continues assessing Kyrie, then attempts to check me over for injuries. I stare directly in his eyes. “Not me,” I tell the guy, controlling the lethal quake in my tone. “Her. Focus on her.”

Breath bated, I watch the paramedics work with frantic but organized effort to stabilize Kyrie while slowing the blood loss, applying hemostatic gauze and direct pressure. One paramedic pulls a unit of whole blood from a cooler next to me and places it in a portable warmer as the other man readies the line for an emergency transfusion. They can put back what she’s lost, I try to tell myself as I watch the blood travel down the tubing and into Kyrie’s body. She can make it.

One moment, hope is an unfurling blue poppy with the promise of her open eyes…the next it’s snuffed out.

The monitor blares a grating alarm.

“She’s crashing. PEA rhythm. Start CPR,” the senior paramedic says.

My entire world fractures.

I’m on my feet and standing over her motionless body, staring down at her pale face as the paramedics begin chest compressions and bag-mask ventilation as Kyrie’s lungs spasm with the reflex of her dying inhalations.

I stop breathing. I want to tear my lungs out to kill the ache.

Every moment of CPR burns like a year in hell. It’s endless. Torturous. And it feels like the ambulance is hardly moving.

“ETA,” one of the paramedics shouts to the driver over the sirens and monitors and the aggressive honking of our ambulance.

“Ten minutes,” the driver replies. I hear his fist slam down on the wheel, another blare of the horn. “Congestion on the bridge. There’s just been an accident ahead. We’re down to one lane.”

“Can we turn back? Take another route?”

“No,” the driver says, his voice low. “We’re trapped.”

I catch the strained, dismayed glance between the paramedics as they continue CPR, checking the monitor for any signs of change. I hear the driver talking to dispatch, asking for police to help clear our path. And as I watch, helpless, fucking useless, I can feel her slipping away.

The ECG alarm changes. A steady beep sounds from the machine.

The line flattens across the screen.

The paramedics exchange another glance. One looks to the bag of blood before he shifts his gaze to the monitor. I know he must be weighing Kyrie’s chances for survival.

“ETA,” he barks again to the driver. We’ve barely moved.

“Police are on the way to open us up, but no change.”

The flat line races on, the extended beep of Kyrie’s absent pulse growing louder in my ears.

The rhythmic pumping of the bagged ventilation slows and stops. The chest compressions halt as the senior paramedic blows out a breath and hangs his head—and fury churns in my viscera.

I will not lose her.

No one dares to approach me as I lean over Kyrie, lowering myself close as the paramedic pulls the mask away from her face. I place a kiss to her cold lips. “It’s time to wake and come back to me, sleeping beauty,” I whisper.

My breath stalls in my lungs. The ache builds until all I crave is the fire of her touch.

I fold my hands over her sternum and start chest compressions.

“Sir… You can’t do that. Sir—”

He must see something deadly in the steely resolve of my gaze, because he physically recoils.

I stare down at her, desperate to see the vibrant blue of her beautiful eyes, her chest bowing beneath the force of my desire to bring her back to me. I hardly notice the ambulance gather momentum and weave through the opening traffic, my sole focus on Kyrie’s pale face.

There’s a crack beneath my palm, a rib or her sternum fracturing under pressure. Some kind of anguished sound fills the ambulance and it takes me a moment to realize it just passed from my lips.

I do not stop. I can’t.

Another snap of bone carves an indelible memory into my hand.

She’s so delicate. I’m breaking her. But I will do whatever it takes.

“I will shatter you to pieces if that’s what brings you back to me,” I grit out past the raw ache in my throat. “So you’d better fight me, elskede.”

The blaring beep stretches on. A fucking lifetime of agonizing torture. Until hope slowly unfurls once again.

An alarm blares from the machine.

“We’ve got a V-tach rhythm,” the senior paramedic says, unable to subdue the surprise in his voice. He moves to the defibrillator mounted on the interior wall and preps the paddles, the other paramedic scrambling to fit the mask over Kyrie’s face to start forcing air into her lungs. “She’s shockable.”

He moves me away with an elbow and presses the paddles to her chest. And then: “Clear.”

Kyrie’s body jerks with the shock. All eyes turn to the monitor.

The steady beat of her heart appears on the screen.

And mine beats for the very first fucking time.

The two paramedics take over, and in moments that feel as long as eternity, we pull into the hospital and lurch to a halt. The ambulance doors swing open and Kyrie is wheeled toward the emergency entrance as doctors and nurses rush to take over.

As I follow her into the cacophony of the emergency ward, it wasn’t just Kyrie who came back to life only moments ago. Watching the steady pulse of her heart across the screen, I feel the echo of each beat in my cells.