Chapter 10
"His blood pressure is crashing!" Julian screamed over the roar of the engine, his hands slick with crimson as he pressed a sterile pad against Alistair's chest. "His left ventricle is failing! Ronan, he won't make it to St. Jude's!"
"We're not going to St. Jude's!" Ronan snarled through the partition, his knuckles bleeding where he gripped the steering wheel. "We're going to the manor! The private infirmary! You have the surgical bay set up!"
"He has no blood left to give!" Julian wept, openly crying now. "You don't understand what you've done! You fool, you arrogant, blind fool!"
"Shut up and keep him breathing!"
Ronan threw the car through the estate's iron gates, sliding the heavy vehicle sideways into the courtyard before slamming on the brakes.
Before the tires had even stopped spinning, Ronan was in the back. He shoved Julian aside, scooped Alistair’s limp, shuddering form into his arms, and sprinted through the reinforced steel doors of the underground wing.
The private infirmary was sterile, brightly lit by cold surgical lamps, lined with monitors, oxygen tanks, and rows of surgical steel trays.
Ronan kicked the doors open and laid Alistair gently onto the center operating table.
Alistair looked dead.
His face was waxen, gray-blue, his head rolling loosely to the side. The high collar of his shirt was completely soaked in dark, thick crimson, and every breath he drew was a shallow, agonizing rattle that barely moved his ribs.
"Get the defibrillator! Get the plasma!" Ronan ordered, spinning around toward Julian, his hazel eyes bloodshot, wild with the fury of a dying animal. "Fix him, Julian! Fix him or I swear to God I'll burn this whole province to the ground!"
Julian stood in the doorway, his hands trembling at his sides, staring at the table with utter, hopeless despair.
"I cannot fix this, Ronan," Julian whispered, tears streaming down his wrinkled cheeks. "No surgeon on earth can fix this."
"What are you talking about?!" Ronan roared, lunging forward and seizing Julian by the lapels of his white coat, lifting the old doctor several inches off the floor. "He's bleeding out from the inside! Find the wound! Stitch the artery! Do your damn job!"
"Look at him!" Julian screamed back, slamming his fists against Ronan’s broad chest. "Look at him, you arrogant bastard! Look at what you made him carry!"
Ronan shoved Julian back, turning slowly toward the table.
Alistair’s pulse monitor was screaming—a rapid, erratically descending series of high-pitched beeps.
*110... 95... 70... 55...*
Cardiac arrest.
"No," Ronan breathed. "No, you don't. You don't die on me."
Ronan rushed to the side of the table. He grabbed a pair of heavy surgical shears from the tray, his hands covered in Alistair's blood, ready to cut away the clothing, expose the sternum, and begin chest compressions.
*Snip. Tear.*
Ronan desperately sheared away Alistair's blood-drenched velvet coat, tossing the heavy, ruined fabric to the floor.
He drove the shears through the soaked silk of Alistair's white dress shirt, ripping the linen open from collar to navel with one violent, frantic pull, exposing his master's bare chest to the harsh fluorescent glare.
Ronan’s hands froze.
The shears slipped from his numb fingers, clattering loudly against the stainless steel tray.
The breath was ripped straight out of Ronan’s lungs. His heart stopped dead in his throat.
There, centered perfectly over Alistair’s collapsing heart, was a fresh, ragged, smoking entry hole—blackened with gunpowder burns, torn through muscle and bone, bleeding arterial crimson in rhythmic, dying pulses.
It was the exact, unmistakable entry wound of the 7.62x51mm armor-piercing sniper round Ronan had intercepted on the ballroom floor ten minutes ago.
And surrounding that fresh, fatal hole was a horrifying, intricate roadmap of scarred tissue.
Dozens of silver surgical scars crisscrossed Alistair's pale torso.
A round, puckered bullet scar right over the ventricles—matching the point-blank caliber .45 round from Pier 9.
Four jagged, parallel track marks slicing across his left ribs and forearm—matching the high-tensile razor wire from the rail spur yesterday morning.
A spray of tiny, pitted shrapnel scars across his collarbone and shoulders—matching the blast Ronan had absorbed moments before the sniper fired.
Every single fatal hit Ronan had ever taken for him.
Every lethal bullet Ronan had laughed off.
Every blade, every blast, every impossible, miraculous survival Ronan had bragged about over the past five years—they were all carved into Alistair’s fragile, broken body.
Alistair was dying. Not from an illness. Not from weak lungs or fragile blood.
He was dying because he had absorbed every ounce of death Ronan had ever thrown himself into.
"Alistair..." Ronan choked out, his voice collapsing into a broken, ragged sob, his large hands hovering over Alistair’s bleeding chest, terrified that touching him would shatter what little remained. "Alistair... what did you do... what have I done to you..."
A faint, shuddering breath escaped Alistair’s parted lips.
Slowly, fighting through the dark pull of cardiac arrest, Alistair’s gray eyes fluttered open one last time.
He looked up through the haze of blood and tears, his gaze finding Ronan’s shattered, horrified face.
With the very last shred of vitality left in his failing heart, Alistair raised a trembling, blood-drenched hand. His icy fingers reached up, touching Ronan's tear-streaked cheek with an agonizing, all-consuming tenderness.
Alistair looked at him—hopelessly, lovingly, desperately—and whispered:
"Ronan... you fool... please stop making me bury you."
