Blade reached for me again. “Harper. Harper. Harper.” My name was a chant on his lips, and he lifted his head, tried to kiss me.
I pushed him back down, his head bumping the floor with a thump. He grinned.
“I’m not feeling you up, you big oaf. I’m making sure you’re not hurt.”
He looked down his body, and I followed his gaze, saw the thick outline of his cock beneath his pants. Yeah, he was fine.
Something dark and twisted in my chest loosened and tears gathered on my lashes. I fought them back, kept myself together. I did not lose my shit during triage. Period. Instead, I forced myself to grin down at him, tears in my eyes, and leaned over to kiss his cheek. “Don’t ever do that again,” I ordered. He’d saved me. His David Beckham kick had sent the bomb away from the center of the room, away from most of the people in attendance.
“I will do whatever
I have to, Harper, to keep you safe.”
That proclamation earned him another teary kiss, but I had to move on. My nursing instincts were screaming at me to get moving. People were going to bleed out. Die.
I nodded in response, then turned from him, scanning the room. “Others need my help.”
Without waiting for him to respond—since he might decide to keep me from helping—I went to the nearest legion member not moving. Yellow. Blue. Green. Red. Silver. I ignored the arm bands as I triaged, assessing wounds. Right now I didn’t care what political bullshit this moon base had going on. People were hurt.
Blade struggled to his feet as Styx followed me, handed me makeshift bandages from the cloth I’d given him, dutifully tearing it into pieces for me. When a ReGen wand appeared at my shoulder, I reached for it and smiled my thanks up at my beautiful, powerful mate. He never left my side. He assisted me in my tasks, but didn’t hinder.
Even when I came to him. I gasped. “You,” I breathed.
He was conscious, sweating, his face devoid of color. The reason was obvious. Blood spurted from a large cut in his thigh, high. Thank god the blood wasn’t spurting with every heartbeat, but the amount of blood seeping through his fingers was telling. If I’d had to guess, I’d say his femoral vessel had been cut. And while his hands covered it, tried to tamp the flow, that wasn’t going to stop him from bleeding out in the next couple minutes.
“Do you know this Kronos male?” Blade asked from my opposite side.
I ignored his question. It was irrelevant to my patient’s survival. “Give me a strip of cloth or a belt. Now, or he’ll die.”
The Kronos male I was treating had just tried to hurt me, hurt a lot of people with that explosion, but I was in nursing mode now.
All life mattered. Even his. What he’d done didn’t matter in this instance.
I had no idea who held a strap from an ion rifle over my shoulder, but it wasn’t Styx. I didn’t care if magical fairies delivered it. I grabbed it, nudged the dying man’s hands out of the way, tucked it around his thigh and tugged. Made a tie, then tugged again.
“Grab this side,” I told Blade with a calm, commanding voice when he knelt beside me, holding out one end of the strap for him to take.
He gripped it and I pulled, cinching the band tighter and tighter until the bleeding slowed to a trickle and I could knot if off, making a tourniquet.
“This wound is too severe for a wand. He needs a ReGen Pod. Tell the doctor to repair that vein before he removes the tourniquet. If he doesn’t get medical attention now, he’s going to lose that leg.”
Two big guys picked him up, one beneath the arms, the other at his ankles and carried him from the room. As I moved to stand, Blade stopped me with a hand on my biceps.
“You recognized him. Why?”
Our hands were bloody, Blade’s face covered in soot. I could only imagine I looked just as bad. The injured were being carried away or treated where they were with ReGen wands. I saw the female leader, Astra, tending to someone with a small cut to the forehead. I could take a moment and clear my head, slow my breathing and listen. The smoke had cleared, but the scent of charred wood and a burning that reminded me oddly of fireworks from the Fourth of July still filled the air. I was sweating beneath the black uniform.
I saw the narrowing of Blade’s eyes. The heightened awareness as he waited for me to respond. Not only did he want an answer, but he was on alert for any new danger. Perhaps that was why I could subconsciously take a breath because I knew he would keep me safe. He’d done it with the softball shaped bomb, and I knew he could do it again.
“Yes.” I took a deep breath, let it out. All the good endorphins from the hallway orgasm were gone. Now I was coming down from an adrenaline high. “From the ambush on Latiri. I recognized him. He was one of them. One of the men from the shuttles.”
Blade frowned. “I didn’t know there were any Kronos in the battle.”
“Those with yellow arm bands? There weren’t,” I countered.
Blade stood abruptly, tugged me up with him. “Styx!” he shouted.
Within a second, Styx appeared, looked me over, ran his hands down my arms, then took my hands, flipped them over so the sticky, stained palms were up. “You are injured?”