He closed his eyes. Eye. Whatever.
“How many minutes left,” he asked roughly.
“Two, now.”
“Will you tell Lucan that he must go back for the nurse.”
“If that is what you wish, to put in harm’s way a couple whose future together—”
“Will you please stop talking,” Kane groaned. “And what the hell can I do in this condition.”
Closing his eyes—eye—again, he told himself that as grateful as he was to Nadya, he was not responsible for her, not in the way he was to a mate. Cordelhia had to be first.
He had not been there when she had most needed the protection of her male.
He would not forsake her again.
“Let me go,” he said, unsure of who he was talking to.
Resolved to his fate, he exhaled what little breath there was in his lungs… and prepared to fade unto the Fade. In the quiet, his wheezing grew louder and louder, and yet there was something else inside the hut. Something…
It was the burbling brook. Behind the ragged sounds of his respiration, the rushing water continued to flow, but it was growing in volume. Once soft, the river became all that he could hear, as if the water was closer by. And getting closer.
As if it had legs and was walking to him.
Then again, maybe it wasn’t water, but the coming of the Grim Reaper to claim what was left of Kane’s body.
How could Nadya have poured any effort at all into such a hopeless case as himself, he wondered. She had never faltered in her faith in his survival, however. Not once.
And she had never left him.
CHAPTER NINE
It all came.
Everything Nadya had asked for, each drug, all the supplies, even food and water, and more blankets and proper cots, arrived in a steady stream. The guards were good packhorses, coming in laden with duffels and baskets or rolling in carts. They also continued to take direction very well. She created an inventory system quickly, ordered the males around, and got the new provisions to her clinic sorted. Then she asked them to remove the body of the dead guard and dismissed them to get to work.
“One more suture and we’re done,” she murmured to her patient.
When there was no response, she glanced up. The guard whose thigh wound she was stitching closed had his eyes shut and his hands resting on his bare stomach. She had had to cut his clothes away because there had been blood all over him, but his nakedness was just a necessary part of taking the inventory of his condition. He had no injuries to his privacy, and no doubt, assuming he survived, that would be something to rejoice over. The laceration on his head had been severe,however, and she had worried whether he would pull through. So far, so good, though.
Down on his leg, her last stitch was at the base of a ragged wound, and as she tied a knot and clipped the string, she graded her handiwork. The injury had been a tearing of some sort, as if the leg had gotten caught, and in the pulling free, the skin had given way. The bruising was extensive, the swelling getting ever worse, the redness under the skin already going to purple.
“But you’re going to live,” she murmured as she wiped everything down with peroxide. “We have to be positive.”
After she had triaged all the guards—with him being least acute, which was why she was treating him last—she had parceled out pain relief in pill or shot form, and settled in to deal with what she could. She had worked as fast as her hands would allow, and as her back began to ache and her limp grew more painful, she ignored her own discomfort.
The fact that it had taken a full squad of guards being injured to get the kinds of prescriptions and bandages she needed made her angry. Back when they had been at the subterranean location, she had once gone to the Command and begged for things to cure, to ease, to help. She had never asked again. Some lines walked were too dangerous, and how could she do any good at all if she herself was dead?
Ever since they had been relocated to this abandoned hospital, she had had a lull in her patient volume because so many had died during the evacuation as a result of the stress and the travel. But she knew there would be more who’d come to her, there were always more, and so she had claimed this storage room as her own clinic. After the Executioner, who had been the prison camp’s second-in-command, had assumed the leadership role, he’d been far more pragmatic than his predecessor. He’d recognized the financial interest he had in ensuring his workforce could do what he required of them. He had known that unless more inmatescame in—which, for whatever reason, they were not—he needed to take better care of those he had.
So he’d allowed her to maintain the clinic.
Which was now full of guards.
After bandaging her set of stitches, she got up off the hard floor and disposed of the detritus of wrappings. Then she limped over to a cart full of fresh bread loaves, knots of cheese, and plastic bottles of water. In quick succession, she fed herself, hydrated, and felt little improvement in terms of energy. What kept her going? Her promise to herself, forged long ago.
She would let no one die or suffer if she could alleviate what ailed them.