Silver Lining

CHAPTER ONE

Elijah

My father was the first man I killed.

He wasn't the last. Combat means seeing death up close and personal. I know the smell of death. The taste. The feel of it weighing down the air. It's heavy as hell.

Death turns the SUV I'm driving into a pressure cooker with me and Holly inside. Every bump on the road threatens to set us aflame. "You're going to be okay," I say, and my voice doesn't crack. I sound confident and sure. It's a fucking lie. "You're going to make it."

Plenty of times in my life, I've wished for death to slip a silent knife into my back.

Quicker that way. Cleaner. Easier.

Not now. Not when Holly is blinking in the passenger seat, her pretty brow furrowed as she looks down at the heart-colored stain spreading across her shirt. She doesn't know yet. Not on a conscious level. Adrenaline is flooding her body, shutting down higher thinking. She doesn't know one of the colonel's men shot her.

She doesn't know the bullet tore through soft flesh.

She doesn't know she's dying.

"Stay awake. Just stay the fuck awake. That's all you have to do." Stay alive.

The sound of the tires on pavement, the roar of the engine, they barely register as sound. Not after gunshots in the small, enclosed space of her apartment. I led her there from my abandoned-church-turned safehouse like a lamb to the slaughter. No, not exactly-I taught her how to shoot a gun before that. I left out the lesson about knowing the odds. Three armed enemies. One Holly. The math doesn't work.

She makes a sound that could be a question-awake? Then her head lolls onto her shoulder. She's passed out from the pain or the shock. Or sleeping. That's a nice thought. I can imagine her resting in the passenger seat instead of bleeding out.

The air gets heavier. Thicker.

I want to get out from under it. I want to breathe. But my lungs can't expand against the pressure and anyway there are things to do. We're two blocks from the church safehouse, where we should have stayed after I kidnapped her. Maybe forever.

Instead I have a limited amount of time to make a phone call.

None of my brothers will do any good right now. None of them can talk to me. That would only put them in danger. Yes, they're tough sons of bitches. Our father would have killed us if we weren't, but even they can't fight the whole of the United States government.

There'll be sirens soon, and when they stop, there will be other government operatives moving in the shadows. The person I need right now doesn't mind the darkness.

Dax answers on the second ring. "You better be on your knees with a firing squad behind you, if you're calling me. That's the only way I'm going to forgive you for going off the grid for two goddamn years. I thought you died. Or got married."

"I'm driving hot," I say between gritted teeth. "Heading toward the Meatpacking District. Got a friend with a GSW. Need medical assistance."

"It's the second one, isn't it? You got fucking leg shackled, didn't you?"

"If you want out, tell me now. I'm in real deep, and anyone near this will end up on a goddamn government watch list for the rest of their lives."

"I would be offended if I wasn't already on it."

Fair enough. Dax is part mercenary for hire, part arms dealer. That's the kind of company I kept before I met Holly, before I brought my brothers back into my life to protect her. For all this time, I tried to go straight. To do honest government contracts and security details. To be the man my brothers believe me to be.

That ended tonight.

I give him the address to the safe house. I've never given this information to another person, not even my brothers. His response is to hang up on me. He'll be here soon.

The church looms in the night, ominous and empty, a black hole in a shitty part of town. There are no lights as I kick the SUV over the curb and behind the building. It's mostly memory that guides me through the brick enclosure to the secure garage.

Steel doors slide open on well-oiled hinges.

Only when they close behind my tail lights can I finally take a deep breath.

You're going to be okay, I think, but I don't know whether I mean Holly or myself.

I gather up Holly's listless body out of the passenger seat. She's breathing. Such a faint movement. So fucking important. I cradle her head against my shoulder and carry her downstairs to a cot. I put a hand on her chin and shake. "Wake the fuck up."

She doesn't.

I head up the stairs for the first aid kit. One. Two. Three.

Around the corner, to the dusty office. Four. Five.

Six. Seven. Eight. Nine.

Nine seconds I leave her alone, and then I stop counting. There's work to be done if she has any hope of survival. She's exactly where I left her, arms curled up under her chin. I pull them away and rip her shirt in two, the fabric giving way to pure rage, exposing her pretty bra and the bloody wound on her side. I spill the first aid kit onto the foot of the cot and rip out sterile gauze. I'd clean the wound but there's too much blood. Have to stop the bleeding first. She groans when I press my big palms over the gauze and push hard.

Pressure. We need steady pressure. Her breathing is shallow, barely perceptible. And I'm only breathing through force of habit and circumstance. My habit is to keep exchanging oxygen and carbon dioxide even when I'm under enemy fire, and Holly is still alive.

For now.

More steady pressure. Her face is bone-white. The fire of her blood reaches my palms through the gauze. She needs an emergency surgical team, not battlefield first aid. I curse at the red liquid and focus my whole being on keeping what's left of her life in her body.

If she pulls through.

It won't just be murder. It will be treason. An electric urge moves through me and I ignore it. I can't move her now. Can't get her out of the country now, can't save her unless she lives. Can't do much of anything, except this.

I'm going to run out of gauze.

There's nothing else in the church aside from old wool carpet. Nothing up there is going to help me. Not the old prayers whispering in the ceiling. Not the abandoned pews.

And not God, if he's even there.

Dax arrives seven agonizing minutes later, one hand on the strap of a black backpack slung over his shoulder. He assesses the situation without flinching. That's why we're friends, me and Dax. He's seen the darkest shit this world has to offer, including a beautiful woman dying.

He drops the backpack to the cool stone floor. "Sitrep?"

"A single gunshot wound. One entry. One exit. I think it hit-" My throat clenches hard. A tiny piece of steel polymer ripped through her internal organs at a speed of two thousand feet per second. The fact that it went clean through is a good thing. It's a question of kinetic energy. Of physics, but it's not enough. "I think it hit her liver. She's not coughing blood."

She's barely breathing, but I don't say that out loud. He can see for himself.

He pulls his medical shit out of the backpack and drops things one by one in the empty spaces around Holly's body. Holly. Not her body. She's still inhabiting her body. It hasn't been abandoned yet. Dax checks her pulse. It's the neutral touch of a medical professional, and still, his fingertips against her skin make my teeth grind together. I'm like a wild animal backed into a corner. Only a matter of time before I bite.

Holly turns her head, her lips forming words that make no sound.

Dax is the one with the medical knowledge, but I've seen enough as a soldier. Enough to know that her odds are unknown right now. Incalculable. The bullet might as well have been a roulette ball around a wheel. It's a goddamn gamble. People get shot through the heart and live. They got shot through the liver and die. There's no logic to be found.

I have both palms splayed across the gauze, across Holly's side. My hands feel inadequate for the job set in front of me. Other jobs in my life have seemed bigger. Killing my father. Burying his body. But now those things are painfully, uselessly small.

They were nothing in comparison to this.

"I can't fix a bullet wound blind, Eli. Gonna have to move your hands." A sharp look in my direction. "Move your goddamn hands."

It's urgent. I know it is. It's a goddamn emergency. But how am I supposed to stay sane without my hands on her? Without being able to feel that she's warm and alive?

I give myself to the count of three, then gently lift my hands away.

Dax shoulders me out of the way, taking up all the space on the side of the cot. My bloodied hands hang uselessly at my sides. I should go wash them, but I can't. I'm stuck here, staring, past the event horizon of a black hole. Couldn't look away if I wanted to, and I don't want to. She doesn't react to the pinch of the needle. The goosebump sensation of superstition tiptoes up my back and grips me around the back of my neck. If I keep looking, she'll stay alive.

"I don't see a wedding band," he says, and it takes me a second to catch. The fight or flight response taking my body only allows for things like violence and fear.

"We aren't married."

"She say no?"

"I didn't ask her."

"What the fuck's taking you so long?"

What the fuck is taking me so long? Was I waiting for her to be shot? Was I waiting for her...