Backblast by Candace Irving (brene brown rising strong .TXT) 📗

A split second later, she caught another muzzle flash, this one from the shooter's 226, and its deafening retort.

The entire crowd shifted, turned frantic and ugly as it became every man for himself. Try as she might to locate the shooter, she'd lost him. She could only hope another agent had the bastard in his sights as she spun around to check on the Chaudhrys.

They were fine, if ignobly splayed out on the platform, the chief justice beneath Scott, his wife beneath another DSS agent.

Moments later, the agents were standing, hauling their assigned charges to their feet as well, as they half led, half carried them down the steps of the platform and into the waiting safety of the embassy gates—leaving John behind.

He was lying on the platform, face up, unconscious and bleeding.

He'd been hit.

Regan keyed her mic. "Man down; get a medic!"

She shoved her SIG into its holster as she vaulted to John's side to assess his condition, knowing damned well that there'd be no one to back her up until all the diplomats were behind the walls and safely accounted for. "John?"

Nothing.

Just that gush of blood that had soaked the front of his right trouser leg and his entire groin. It was pooling out around his midsection, spreading over the platform beneath. Worse, the scarlet geyser was jetting into her hands with each beat of his heart.

Artery.

She hooked her fingers into the hole in his trousers and tore them wide open to find the mangled furrow of flesh slashing across his groin, compliments of that bastard's glancing round. She pushed down above the furrow, directly over his right femoral, frantically trying to press the artery into the bone.

There was too goddamned much muscle beneath her hands. And the blood. Her hand shook as it slipped out of place.

More of that precious, scarlet fluid gushed out.

Unwilling to trust her right index finger, she shoved her left into the gaping furrow in his flesh and felt around. No metal, as expected—just far too much shredded muscle and all that terrifyingly hot, critically needed blood.

There appeared to be more outside his body than in.

Desperate, she shoved the tip of her finger deeper and up toward John's groin, relief searing in as the gush finally slowed to a trickle.

She pushed harder, and it stopped.

"Holy fuck, woman." Riyad.

Of course.

Yet, she'd never been so glad to see anyone in her life. Even this man, with that filthy scowl. "I can't move my finger. If I do—"

"I know. Hold on." A second later, the spook was on his mic, barking out orders. Whatever the man was saying blended in with the cacophony from the still frantic crowd. She was dimly aware of Scott showing up as well, but she refused to look up to acknowledge him. She was too terrified of losing her grip. The entire horrific experience with Durrani was slamming through her brain and her heart, taunting her.

No.

She would not lose this man. It had taken her too damned long to find him.

She would not.

She focused on John's groin and her hand, leaving everything else to Riyad.

She caught the blur of suits as more agents converged on the stage. She could even hear the Pakistani president over the loudspeaker, assuring the crowd, in Urdu and in English. Two men had attempted to silence the chief justice and the truth, but they would not let them. Pakistan would not let them. One man was already dead. The other was gone. People must calm down, because everyone was fine.

But everyone wasn't fine.

And then, bizarrely, the Chaudhrys were at her side, the wife kneeling down. Then again, it wasn't so odd. The woman was, after all, a surgical nurse. Sitara Chaudhry kept telling her over and over to keep her hand in place, to hold on. Assuring her that she was doing an excellent job—that the air ambulance was on its way. Everything was going to be okay, just as soon as they got her husband to the hospital.

Regan didn't bother telling the woman that she and John weren't married.

Not with those rings he'd given her swimming in his blood.

And then, the paramedics were there, working around her to heft John's mammoth, blood-soaked body onto a stretcher, even as they joined in with Sitara Chaudhry's gentle orders to keep her hand exactly where it was.

The rest was a blur.

She wasn't sure how she even got over to the chopper, much less inside it.

Her entire left hand and arm ached, this limb now trembling with exhaustion, too, even more than her right. Still, she pressed in.

Before she realized what had happened, the bird had landed at a hospital in the middle of a still darkened Islamabad, backlit by a glittering rainbow of city lights. Within seconds, and against her silently screaming will, her finger was sliding out of its desperate home as a doctor physically pulled her from John's side. And then, a dozen other white coats were rolling John away, leaving her alone in the dark.

Bereft of his warmth.

Wondering if she'd ever see him again.

For the second time in two days, Regan was standing in a shower, attempting to process the horror of what had happened as she stared at those surreal tendrils of red and pink slipping down her body to circle the drain before disappearing forever.

Only this time, she wasn't in a stateroom aboard the Griffith, she was in a bathroom attached to an empty hospital room at the Shifa…and those disappearing tendrils were the vestiges of John's blood.

Harun and Sitara Chaudhry had arrived at the hospital half an hour after the doctors had spirited John away. She'd been sitting right where John had been taken from her, still covered in his blood, in shock. But it wasn't the country's chief justice who'd taken charge, it was his soft-spoken wife. The woman had ordered her husband back to the embassy to deal with the fallout of the night's events, while she brought Regan inside the Shifa, where apparently Sitara