Chương 19 - Under Siege
The rocket streaked through the night air like a flaming arrow, leaving a corkscrew trail of gray smoke behind it.
“Jump!” Soren roared, kicking the passenger door open with superhuman force.
He grabbed Blythe by the waist and hurled both of them out of the Maybach just as the projectile struck the engine block.
The explosion tore the luxury vehicle apart in a deafening eruption of fire, steel shrapnel, and burning rubber. The concussive blast tossed Soren and Blythe across the concrete highway, slamming them hard against the steel guardrail overlooking the river.
Blythe’s head struck the metal. Stars exploded behind her eyes. For a few seconds, all sound was replaced by a high-pitched, ringing whine. The smell of burning fuel and scorched hair filled her throat.
She pushed herself up on trembling hands, coughing through the black smoke.
Ten feet away, Soren lay on his side against the barrier.
His submachine gun was shattered on the asphalt. Blood was pooling beneath his shoulder, dark and arterial, soaking through his dress shirt and spreading across the concrete. A six-inch jagged piece of steel shrapnel was embedded deep into his upper left torso, just below the clavicle.
“Soren!” Blythe scrambled across the burning debris on her hands and knees, ignoring the sharp shards of glass slicing into her palms.
She reached him and dropped to her knees. His face was ghostly pale, his breathing rapid and shallow—the unmistakable signs of acute hemorrhagic shock.
“Blythe…” he whispered, his teeth stained with red. He tried to raise his right hand to push her away. “Run… take the service stairs to the river… run…”
“Shut up!” she yelled, her professional instincts overriding every shred of fear.
She ripped the hem of her emerald evening gown, tearing a long, wide strip of thick silk fabric.
“Listen to me, Soren,” she said, her voice dropping into the commanded tone of a trauma surgeon in a collapsing ER. “The shrapnel is nicking your subclavian artery. If I pull it out, you bleed out in ninety seconds. If I leave it in and move you, the metal severs the vein completely. I have to pack the wound and clamp it right here.”
Gunfire echoed fifty yards away. Mikhail and the surviving security detail were forming a desperate firing line, trading bursts with Kozlov’s advancing mercenaries to buy them seconds.
“Mikhail can’t hold them,” Soren ground out, his vision blurring. “Leave me, Blythe. You don’t owe me this.”
“I’m not doing this for you,” Blythe hissed through clenched teeth. She reached into her boot, pulled out the titanium knife Soren had given her, and held the blade over a puddle of burning engine oil to sterilize the tip. “I’m doing this because I refuse to let an old bastard in a trench coat take what’s mine.”
Without hesitating, Blythe sliced open his shirt, exposed the wound, and made a two-inch incision along the entry track to relieve the pressure building in his pleural cavity.
Soren let out a strangled roar of sheer agony, his fingers digging into the concrete until his knuckles turned white.
Blythe didn't flinch. She used her fingers to clamp the torn vessel against the bone, packed the torn silk deep into the bleeding pocket, and secured a tight, improvised tourniquet around his shoulder with the leather strap from her evening purse.
The bleeding slowed from a torrent to a sluggish seep.
Soren slumped back against the rail, his chest heaving, his gray eyes looking at her through a haze of pain and complete, unadulterated awe.
“You… are insane,” he wheezed.
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“And you’re alive,” Blythe said, wiping the sweat and blood from her forehead with the back of her wrist. She picked up a discarded automatic pistol from a fallen guard and racked the slide with clinical precision. “Now get up, King Vanek. We have an empire to defend.”
***
