Page 4 of A Breath of Life (Shadowy Solutions #4)

He pondered a second, and his eyes lit up.

“Yes. Kitty left me pasta in the staff fridge, but I ate it before noon, so it’s been a hundred years.

” He returned his attention to the bag’s contents, shifting things around.

“I got extra plum sauce. I hope you ordered, like, fifty billion egg rolls. Hey, why is there soup in here? I said, don’t get soup.

Never mind. I’ll make room. It’s all good. You’re forgiven.”

“You’re a bottomless pit. I wasn’t worried.”

“I’m a growing boy.” Grinning facetiously, he secured the top of the paper bag and balanced it in one arm so he could take my hand with the other when I offered it. The lovesick look in his eyes told me I’d done well in the initiating affection category.

When he lifted to his toes and pecked a kiss on my cheek, saying, “Love you, D,” I broke eye contact and encouraged him to walk. My face burned hot with an odd mixture of embarrassment, pride, and shame as my heart swelled with reciprocal feelings I couldn’t always voice.

Love was a powerful emotion I was still processing and learning to articulate. I was a man of few words, but those three, I love you , were important to Tallus, so I did my best to use them, even if they were hard to speak, even if they tied my tongue in knots.

It took a block and a half of silence before I squeezed his fingers and mumbled, “I love you too.”

Rewarded with a contented sigh and dreamy smile, I knew I’d done okay.

We took a different route home so Echo got a full walk. She may not have technically been a puppy anymore, but she still had a lot of energy to expel. We veered along several quieter side streets as our food grew cold. The evening did not. A breeze would have been nice, but the air was still.

Tallus leaned against my side as we walked. We didn’t exchange words, and it was those quieter moments between us that stood out the most during times of reflection when Dr. Peterson asked how things were going. Well , I would tell him. Really well.

Tallus and I often took evening walks about the city, and those walks often passed without conversation.

Our silences were never uncomfortable, and I never felt the need to fill them with senseless chatter—not that I ever chattered.

They were peaceful. I liked to imagine no one else in the world got to see this quieter side of Tallus.

The subdued version. I wondered if, as an extrovert, he felt the need to always be on .

If he didn’t long for these calmer moments without an audience.

Even with Memphis, his best friend, it was a constant competition of theatrics. I’d watched them together, and it exhausted me.

Two blocks from home, on a familiar backstreet we often took during our evening walks, Echo came to an abrupt halt, spine stiff and body taut as a bowstring. With her sudden alertness, I was instantly on edge and stopped walking, cocking an ear and scanning the street for danger.

“What is it, girl?” I tightened her leash around my wrist, fearing she might bolt. It wasn’t something she did, but instinct had me reacting regardless.

“What’s wrong with her?” Tallus let go of my hand and shuffled the takeout to his other arm as he, too, scanned the street.

“I don’t know. Maybe—”

A muffled cry reached my ears at the same moment Echo jerked forward, tugging me off-balance as she tried to race toward a nearby alley. Echo never pulled at her leash. She sometimes tested her limits when she wasn’t working, but she was usually content to wander only as far as she was permitted.

Not now. Now, she was determined.

She strained and did all she could to force me along, yipping with an urgent bark I didn’t recognize.

When I didn’t immediately respond, she turned to me and barked in my face as though calling me an idiot.

“What?” I asked like she could tell me.

Another bark, but I still didn’t understand.

Then, I heard it again, a long moan followed by a shout from somewhere in the darkness behind the apartment building we were passing. Echo whined and tried again to force me to move, going up on her front paws and yanking the leash with all her might.

My skin blistered, knowing she knew something I didn’t, knowing the types of dangers that lurked in dark alleys in the city at night.

Someone was in trouble.

I had no choice but to follow.

“Stay here,” I snapped at Tallus. A useless command. A waste of breath.

As I allowed Echo to lead me into the dark, jogging behind her when she set a fast pace, Tallus trailed on my heels, nattering questions I didn’t have answers to.

“What’s going on? Where are we going? My god, these shoes are not meant for running.

Slow down, D. I’m going to drop the food. What the heck is wrong with her?”

Echo barked repeatedly, announcing to whoever was ahead of us that we were coming.

We rounded a corner into a narrower alley in time to see a dark figure dart away into the night.

I wasn’t about to make chase, so I ground to a halt, using my strength to stop the frantic dog, but Echo whimpered and kept tugging the leash .

“Stop it, Echo. I’m going to send you back to class if you don’t relax. We aren’t running down strangers. What is wrong with you?”

Nose aimed ahead, she barked and barked, determined I should listen.

It was then that I saw a second figure halfway down the alley. A shadowy form lay unmoving on the ground under a fire escape.

“Oh shit.” Tallus noticed the person when I did and darted past Echo and me, shouting, “Oh my god. Oh my god, D. Hurry up.”

“Tallus,” I shouted, but he didn’t stop. Of course he didn’t fucking stop. Tallus could be so single-minded-focused that he would run into oncoming traffic if I wasn’t there to hold him back. “For fuck’s sake. Don’t touch anything,” I hollered, bounding after him.

Echo trotted beside me.

“Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit.” Tallus ground to an abrupt halt a few feet from the man, and it was indeed a man. In fact, it was the same man we’d crossed paths with on the way to the restaurant. The one who had inquired after the time. He of the Edwardian wardrobe, accent, and theatrics.

And the gentleman had been beaten to within an inch of his life.

Tallus froze. I forced Echo’s leash into his hand and shook him until he blinked his attention away from the spectacle and met my gaze. “Call an ambulance. Do you hear me?”

He nodded, wide eyes flicking to the crumpled body and back.

Once I was certain he understood and would follow through, I dropped to my knees beside the gentleman and scanned him head to toe.

His fancy clothes were torn and rumpled, but it was the pooling of blood across his stomach that drew my attention.

The dark color of his vest camouflaged it at first, but the object embedded in the gentleman’s abdomen told its own story.

A knife .

I cursed, scanning for more injuries, determining if the stab wound was the worst of his problems or if there was something else of greater concern.

The gentleman was awake and alert, if not petrified.

His battered face stood out in the scant light that stretched down the alley from the main street in the distance.

Several deep abrasions bled. Purple bruises bloomed to life along his cheekbone and eye socket.

His nose was broken, his lip was split, and part of his ear lobe was torn, but none of that worried me.

It was the strangled gasps for air, the frantic opening and closing of his mouth that set off red flags.

The man couldn’t breathe.

Instead of grasping for the knife in his gut, the gentleman dragged his fingernails along his bruised neck in desperation, sucking thin whistling threads of air through his injured throat. Fear radiated from his widened eyes as he tried to translate the emergency.

His neck. He’d taken damage to his neck.

I forced his hands away and was greeted with a canvas of darkly mottled skin. Bruises in the shape of fingers. Whoever attacked him had likely done severe damage to his windpipe. If it was crushed, he was fucked. Either way, internal swelling was likely cutting off his air supply.

“He can’t breathe,” I shouted at Tallus, who was on the phone with emergency services. “Tell them to hurry the fuck up, or he’s going to die.”

I’d taken first aid and CPR ages ago when I worked for the department, but hell if I remembered what to do in a case like this.

Mouth-to-mouth would be useless if the swelling was obstructing his throat, so I kept hold of the man’s wrists, preventing him from doing more damage, and offered him something I could barely give to most people on a good day: Calm and reassuring words .

“Slow breaths. Nice and easy, pal. You can breathe. I can hear the air whistling in your throat, but if you panic, it’s going to feel like you’re drowning. Do you hear me? Slowly. Inhale. Exhale.” I demonstrated, urging him to copy.

Tallus moved around me, his phone still pressed to his ear. “Holy fuck, Diem. He’s been stabbed.”

“I know, Tallus. We have bigger problems.”

“Bigger problems? The man has a knife in his belly.”

“I know.” The stab wound felt less important than the man’s lack of oxygen. Besides, I didn’t know what to do for that either. If memory served, I wasn’t supposed to remove the knife, or he could bleed out. “Is the ambulance coming?”

“They’re on their way. 9-1-1 wants me to stay on the line. She wants to know the extent of his injuries.”

I didn’t have time for a fucking briefing. A man was dying.

When I refused to entertain Tallus’s question, he told the operator, “He’s been beaten and stabbed in the gut. That’s all I know.”

The gentleman must have been listening and understood our exchange. He peered down at his stomach, where the handle of a large knife protruded from his belly. Even in the dark, I saw the moment he realized how dire his situation was.