Relentless (35 page)

Her hands were numb, knuckles white as they maintained their death grip on his wrist, summoning every ounce of strength in her failing body. The loud buzzing of the alarm died away in her ears, replaced by the deafening rush of blood as it raced beneath her skin. Her pulse pounded in her head, blotting out the sound of their grunts and panting breaths, her heartbeat a hollow echo reverberating through her body.

She felt the betraying quiver in the muscles of her arms and legs. Beginning to fail. The edges of her vision grew hazy as the bruising pressure increased around her neck. The blade dipped down another inch, her flesh shrinking from the whisper of the tip against her collar.

No air. Can't breathe.

She sucked in a gasp, hands slipping. Arms and legs going leaden.

With a scream of anguish, she reared up with her remaining strength, wrenched her head around and latched her teeth onto the wrist holding the knife. Bit him so hard her teeth punctured his skin, filling her mouth with warm, salty blood.

Shirani let out a bellow and jerked his hand away, the other arm loosening around her throat. She gagged and swallowed, refusing to let go, but he wrenched away.

Gasping, Nev threw her head backward and connected with a sharp crack against his jaw. His head snapped back and slammed hard into the wall, giving her the precious second she needed to fling herself away. Without waiting, she drove her elbow into his wounded shoulder. Goose bumps covered her skin when he howled like a wounded animal and instinctively brought his knife hand up to cover it. She stuck out with her heel at the hand holding the knife, but he swung away and rose to his feet, eyes glittering with rage.

Gasping for breath, she stumbled back and raised an arm as he slashed down with a snarl. The blade sliced deep into her right forearm. She screamed and jerked away, cutting right down the inside from her elbow to her wrist as she moved. With the pain ripping through her flesh he came at her again, but slipped on the blood-slick floor. His arms came out as he fell, grabbing her and taking her down with him. They hit the marble with a bone-jarring thud, her weight landing on his injured arm. His scream almost shattered her eardrums and the knife clattered to the floor, skidding over the slick surface.

Flipping over, she lunged for the knife. The fingers of her uninjured arm closed around the handle and clamped down tight. She brought it up in her fist, whirling on her knees to face him. She swallowed a cry when he launched himself at her, raising the blade even as she shrank back.

Shirani hit her with the force of a defensive lineman, knocking her into the wall so hard the mirror fractured, slamming the air out of her lungs. Her fist made contact with flesh and bone. Pinned beneath his weight, she fought for air and tugged on the knife. It was stuck. Jerking her startled gaze to his, Nev stared up into his wide, shocked eyes.

The blade was lodged deep in the side of his throat, the handle dripping with blood. She'd stabbed him.

Frozen, she watched his hands came up to curl around the handle, his mouth opening in distress. Then he slumped to the side and slid off her.

Scrambling from beneath him, Neveah scuttled away like a crab and curled up against the opposite wall, never taking her eyes off him. Oh Jesus, she'd stuck him right through the jugular. She flinched as he struggled to pull the knife out, withholding her shout of warning. The blade emerged from his flesh inch by inch, then clattered to the floor. The instant it cleared his skin the blood poured out, gushing over his chest and shoulders in a hideous ruby waterfall. Her hands went to her mouth to stifle her cry, her right arm screaming in protest from the throbbing wound there.

His eyes stayed on hers, glassy with panic as he tried to stem the flow with his hands, but the blood poured out despite the pressure he applied. He flipped onto his back with an awful gurgle, still staring at her. “H-help... ”

She was shaking so badly she couldn't get her muscles to work. Her gaze darted to the knife. It was within his reach, but he was too badly wounded to use it on her even if he did have the strength to grab it again. He was bleeding so badly his blood covered his clothes and pooled in a spreading lake around him. At the rate he was losing it, he'd bleed out within a minute.

“P-please... ”

His choked rasp brought her gaze back to his. The doctor in her couldn't ignore the plea. She couldn't just sit there and let him bleed out, knowing she'd killed him. Her stomach lurched.

Crawling to him despite the pain and her own blood soaking her, she laid a trembling hand over his and used her body weight to add more pressure.

Up close she got a good look at the wound. It was almost four inches across. The knife must have twisted in his neck when she stabbed him. Christ, she'd just stabbed a man to death. Shock immobilized her. Of its own volition, her gaze traveled up his bleeding throat to his face. Staring back at her, his eyes held the awful realization of his own death. A shiver rippled down her spine.

Shirani's trembling fingers curled around hers. She swallowed, resisting the urge to jerk away.

“S-so sorry... ”

She glanced away, unable to look into those wide black eyes.

The fingers squeezed. “L-let go.”

She shook her head and squeezed her eyes shut. Guilt threatened to smother her, rising up over the protest that he would have killed her. It would have been her bleeding out on the elevator floor if she hadn't done it.

The pressure increased as he tried to pry her hand away. “Allah's... will,” he whispered.

Her eyes opened. His were turning glassy, growing unfocused. So much blood. Soaking both of them. He had to have lost several liters of it. His heart would go into ventricular tachycardia, then into ventricular fibrillation. Then it would stop.

Clenching her teeth, she watched him turn paler with each heartbeat, eyes fixing on the ceiling. The grip on her hand loosened, his fingers growing lax.

His breathing changed from shallow to sparse. His limp hands fell away from his throat. She waited a few more seconds before sliding her fingers up to check his carotid pulse.

Nothing. He was gone.

Falling back onto her heels, Neveah slumped against the wall and stared at their reflection in the blood-spattered mirrored panel. Shirani slumped dead in a lake of blood. She was saturated with it, her face so pale she was almost as white as he was.

In the sudden stillness, the loud buzzing of the alarm pierced her consciousness. The pain in her stab wounds intensified, bringing her attention back to her right arm. Her forearm lay wide open from inside the elbow to just above her wrist, the gap about two inches across and deep. Was that the edge of her radius she saw in the light? Her stomach lurched sickeningly.

As she watched, blood pumped out of the wound in spurts. The brilliant scarlet color made her heart clench. Jesus, he'd hit her radial artery.

She slapped her left hand over the deepest part and squeezed the edges of the wound together to lessen the blood loss, trying to assess the damage. There was too much blood to know how much of it was hers, but judging from what she'd just seen, it was possible she'd lost about a liter of it herself. She'd been too jacked up on adrenaline to notice until now.

The world spun. She collapsed onto her back and stared up at the recessed lights in the ceiling, gripping her forearm as hard as she could and raising it above her pounding heart to slow the bleeding. Her mind spun with what was happening. She had to slow her heart rate. The faster it was, the more blood she'd lose.

Fighting to calm down, she focused on breathing deep and slow despite the fear clawing at her. What if she'd survived the attack only to bleed to death beside her would-be killer?

No
, she told herself sternly.
You will calm down. You're still alive, and Rhys will come for you.

She called an image of his handsome face to mind and held onto it, struggling to suppress the sobs rising in her chest. Tears trickled down her temples and into her hair, the cloying odor of fresh blood so thick it almost choked her.

Cold seeped through her, so deep it made her teeth chatter, her muscles jerking so hard it hurt. Emotional shock or hydrostatic shock? The fear crept over her like a fog until it was all she could feel. She didn't want to die. She'd fought so hard to live. She had Rhys, and he loved her. She needed to see him.

“R-Rhys... Wh-where are y-you?”

Fighting to hold onto consciousness, she dimly noticed the sudden silence when the alarm stopped and the gentle lurch of the elevator as it began moving.

Rhys was ready to tear the elevator doors apart with his bare hands as he watched the numbers on the display. The waiting fucking killed him. His heart was slamming so hard it reverberated throughout his body.

Beside him, Ben raised his weapon. He needn't have bothered.

Rhys's finger tightened on the trigger. Every muscle in his body was drawn to the point of pain. The instant those doors cracked open he was going to take the mother fucker out, right between the eyes.

His teeth ached from grinding them together. How the fuck had he missed him? The instant he'd known who the mysterious Ahmed was, the guy was a dead man walking. But he'd fucking
missed
. He'd only winged the bastard, then come around the corner as the elevator doors shut Neveah in with a murderer.

His blood ran cold at the knowledge. Was she alive? Had she been able to fend him off long enough? He couldn't accept anything else. Wouldn't, until he saw differently with his own eyes. And if she was dead, he'd...

He couldn't even go there in his head. He'd lose it.

Beads of perspiration broke out over his chest and face as he followed the agonizingly slow movement of the elevator.
Come on,
he urged, ready to scream from the tension. He was lit, ramped up higher than he'd ever been before, liable to break Ahmed's neck with one brutal twist of his bare hands when those doors opened.

The high-pitched ding of the bell seemed to echo in his skull. As the elevator settled before him with a soft thud, the smell hit him.

Fresh blood. Lots of it.

His stomach plummeted like a concrete balloon. “
Neveah
!”

Ben sucked in a sharp breath, but Rhys couldn't tear his eyes away from the seam in the doors. They edged apart with maddening slowness. The instant he could see light in the crack between them, he thrust the muzzle of his weapon in and shoved them apart with his shoulder.

The sight that met his eyes drew him up short.

Ahmed was already dead, lying in an obscene amount of blood. Neveah was on her back, gripping her forearm as blood pumped out from between her clamped fingers, the knuckles as white as her face. The bloody knife lay between them on the floor, which was covered with a thick layer of gore. His heart lurched painfully.

“Nev,” he croaked, dropping his weapon and falling to his knees beside her. The inside of the elevator looked like a goddamn slaughterhouse. “Baby... ” He leaned over her and took hold of her forearm, squeezing hard to staunch the flow of blood. She flinched and whimpered, opening dazed eyes to stare up at him.

Relief had tears burning his eyes. His hand trembled as he brought it up to cradle the side of her face. “I'm here,” he whispered, guilt-ridden. He couldn't even think about what she must have gone through in the past few minutes. All he could do now was block her view of Ahmed's body and keep her calm until they could get her to the hospital.

Her gaze focused on him, but the glazed look in her eyes made his guts clench. Her skin was cold as the marble floor he knelt on. “M-my r-radial artery,” she mumbled. “He g-got it.”

“It's all right,” he soothed, holding the pressure steady and keeping his face in her line of vision so she couldn't see her arm and the amount of blood she was still losing.

Ben came up behind him, meeting Rhys's gaze in the mirrored panel and taking in the situation with a single glance. “How bad?”

“Get the truck,” he bit out. Ben took off without another word. While Nate and some others came in to survey the scene, Rhys bent over her. “Are you hurt anywhere else?”

“Sh-shoulder. Ribs. Not as b-bad.”

His eyes swept over her bloody form and found the other wounds, sick at the knowledge of what she'd faced alone.

She turned her head, but he moved into her line of vision to block her view of the body. A frown creased her brow. “I... I k-killed him.” Her teeth chattered, her whole body wracked with shivers.

“Shhhh. Don't talk right now. Just look at me.” He waited until her eyes met his, then forced a reassuring smile even though he wanted to throw up. “Everything's going to be fine.”

“B-bleeding b-bad.”

“You're going to be fine,” he repeated. “Ben's gone to get the truck, then we'll take you in for some stitches.” The lie rolled easily off his tongue. She'd need emergency surgery to stop the bleeding and repair any damage—

“F-fingers,” she complained, mouth bracketed with lines of pain. “C-can't move.”

He glanced at her hand above where he held so tightly. It was pale and bloodless, the fingers curled loosely. Had the knife severed her nerves and tendons as well? “It's just shock, Nev. That's why you're so cold.”

She closed her eyes, that little frown remaining.

Someone handed him a jacket and he draped it around her with his free hand. Tucking the folds around her, he stroked the blood-matted hair away from her face. His heart ached for her. Goddamn, she'd had to fend the fucker off with nothing but her bare hands because he'd missed the head shot. The pain built inside until it threatened to suffocate him.

A little sob jerked through her. “D-don't let me d-die.”

He got right in her face. “You're not going to die,” he almost snarled, deliberately making his voice harsh to grab her full attention. “You're going to calm down and keep looking at me.”

She blinked as though he'd shocked her, but at least she was focused on him rather than the blood.

“Slow your breathing and relax. I'm here and you're going to be fine. Hear me?”