Page 61 of Beware of Dog (Lean Dogs Legacy #6)

Her brothers piled into the room, like a wave crashing, voices overlapping.

“What happened?”

“I heard shots.”

“Is Cass—shit.”

“Is she breathing?” The last from Fox, who crowded in beside Shep and reached to press two fingers to Cass’s throat, checking for a pulse.

“Yeah,” Shep choked out, but he wasn’t sure if he was.

He needed to—

He had to—

His kit—

He saw that he was still applying pressure to the overshirt he’d wadded against her wound and thought what the fuck, asshole, do something!

“ Hey ,” someone snapped, across the table, and he glanced up, or most of the way up, to meet Walsh’s thunderous glare. “What happened?”

He was no one’s VP these days, but his normally-laconic voice still had that leadership snap in it, and it helped Shep focus.

“We were headed up to my cabin. I heard maybe three shots, and then she…” He trailed off when he glanced down at her and saw blood trickling from under his makeshift compress, bright rivulets ruining the lace of her dress. “Jesus Christ, I need my kit!”

“Here, here.” Mav pushed through the ever-growing crowd, toting Shep’s oversized, soft-sided zippered med kit.

The sight of its familiar red nylon was the thing that finally allowed Shep to push past the panicked haze of a husband watching his wife bleed out, and call solely upon his medic training.

He took the kit from Mav, thumped it down on the table by Cass’s hip, and barked out, “Okay, back up, everybody back up. I need one extra set of hands. Maybe two. It’ll take an ambulance half-an-hour to get here, so I gotta move .”

The others talked around him, words clipped with stress.

Fox: “Tenny, Reese, go.”

Raven: “Ian, can you…?”

Ian: “Yes, of course, they can take her faster by air.”

A woman’s high, wailing scream pierced the air. The mother. Emily. Someone, Phillip, Shep thought, intercepted her with strong hands and soothing words and urged her out of the room.

While all of this went on, Shep unzipped his kit, snapped on gloves, and pulled out a massive bottle of alcohol. He handed a clean pair of gloves to Raven, and Devin leaned on the table across from him, composed and no-nonsense.

“What can I do, son?”

“Can you put in an IV?”

“Yeah.”

Shep tossed gloves over and he caught them.

“There’s fluid bags in a cooler in the laundry room.

” He glanced at Cass’s face, her eyelids fluttering, head turning on the makeshift pillow.

Her lips moved but no sound emerged. Her face had gone even paler, and when Raven pressed a wad of clean gauze to the wound beneath her clavicle, more blood seeped out.

Too much. “Shit, I don’t have any blood bags. ”

“I’m a universal donor,” Devin said. “We’ll do it straight if we have to.”

“Shit. Yeah, okay, I can do that.”

“This is a lot of blood,” Raven said, voice hushed, peeling back the gauze, frowning, and then snagging another bundle from the kit.

“Yeah.” Shep fitted a needle on a syringe and tipped up his bottle of sedative to draw a dose. He leaned over Cass as he pulled back the plunger. “Cass. Babe. Can you hear me?”

She gave a low grown, and her upper body lifted, as though she meant to sit up.

“No, no.” He set down the bottle and used that hand to pin her clean shoulder to the table. “Stay still.” He tapped the bubbles to the top and pushed the plunger until a droplet welled at the needle’s diagonal tip.

Devin had found the bags, and was deftly finding a vein in the crook of her elbow, taping the needle down.

“Here, trade with me,” Shep said, and they moved around one another in a few quick steps so Shep could inject the sedative into the IV, and then connect the tubing.

“Shep,” Raven said again.

“I know. It’s okay. You can hand me shit. Pour alcohol in that dish and get more gauze ready.”

When the sedative kicked in, and Cass went still, Shep slipped deeper into the past, into the old habits, long-practiced movements. It was muscle memory, peeling back the gauze, cutting away the lace and cloth, cleaning the blood off the wound and examining.

She’d been hit twice. Two entrance wounds in her back, one exit wound in the front. Smaller caliber, maybe nine-mil.

Blood still poured from the back of her shoulder, puddling on the table.

“Help me turn her over.”

Raven and Devin moved seamlessly with him. Raven moved to support her head, climbing up onto the table to kneel on the wood, blood smearing all over the ice-blue skirt of her dress as she pulled Cass’s limp upper body into her lap.

Shep flushed the wounds. He wanted to use the quickclot, but first, he shined a penlight down into them each, spreading the edges with careful fingertips. There was a bullet lodged in her scapula.

“I’m gonna pull it.”

It took an age, forceps slipping off the back of the slug again and again. Someone wiped the sweat off his brow, and he didn’t know who, only that he was thankful. The fingers of his right hand started to tingle, and he prayed he could fish the thing out before his wrist cramped up.

“Shep, son,” Devin said in a careful voice. “You’re bleeding.”

He was? “Where?”

“Right arm. Have been for a while.”

“That explains the numbness.” The forceps gripped, and held, yes. “Two holes?”

“One. It’s still in there.”

The numbness was getting worse, and bringing a healthy dose of pain with it.

“Lodged in the bone, I bet.”

Devin hummed an agreeing noise. “Adrenaline’s kept you from feeling it.”

Slowly, carefully, breath held, Shep drew the bullet out of Cass’s wound, and dropped it in the dish of alcohol.

“Jesus fuck. Thank God.” When he reached for the saline to flush the wound, pain shot up his arm, through his shoulder; streaked up his neck and hit him in the back teeth.

Ow. When he looked, he saw that blood had poured down his bicep, over his elbow, and was slowly filling his glove.

It was just like in Iraq. Bleeding all over himself while he fought and cursed, teeth clenched, to draw a round out of a fellow soldier. He could even hear the thump of helo rotors…

No, wait. He actually could hear them.

Raven let out a deep breath, a rush like she was caving in on herself.

Devin hung the IV bag off the chandelier and walked around to Shep’s side of the table. He nodded toward Cass. “Keep tending to her, and I’ll tend to you.”

More saline, a healthy dose of quickclot powder, and fresh gauze. Shep worked one-handed while Devin mopped him up and wound bandages around his bicep. When Shep went to tear the tape with his teeth, Raven took it from him silently and fastened down the edges of Cass’s bandage.

The chop of rotors grew louder, more staccato.

From the doorway, Ian said, “They said on the phone they can only take two extra passengers.”

Devin did use his teeth on the tape. After, he said, “Shepherd and Raven.” Like it was a no-brainer.

Which…yeah. It was.

~*~

It was dark out. And cold. And the air smelled of exhaust. An ambulance trundled by, lights spinning but no sirens, and Shep lifted his head from where he’d been staring at his boots in the gutter, blinked, and thought, I’m at a hospital .

Duh, Cass would have said, laughing. But Cass was in surgery, and they hadn’t let him go back with her. He thought, but wasn’t sure, that he’d shoved someone. Or hit them. His knuckles hurt. But his whole hand and arm hurt, too.

Because he’d gotten shot. That was a blur.

Much of the past hour was a blur.

He remembered Devin twisting his bad arm and drawing him back, Walsh putting a hand on his chest, when the paramedics came in and took charge of getting Cass onto her back and then onto a stretcher.

It was Raven who’d rattled off what Cass had been given, and in what amounts.

Raven who’d stepped up, dress splashed with blood, to push Devin and Walsh away.

She’d told the paramedics: “She just got married today. This is her husband, and he was an Army medic. He’s done a beautiful job.”

Then Raven’s slim, elegant, blood-sticky hand had been in his, and she’d towed him after the stretcher out into a night made windy and loud by helicopter blades.

He’d climbed into the red and white machine unquestioning.

When Raven guided him to the bench in back, he sat; when she pressed a hand to his thigh, he didn’t try to get up and accost the paramedic who strapped Cass’s stretcher into place and then started working on her.

It had been a middle-aged guy with a bald spot and a quick, efficient way of moving his hands, and Shep had let him do his work while the pilots got the bird up off the grass and into the air with a whine and a lurch.

At some point in the journey, he realized that Ian must have called upon a private medivac team.

But then they were touching down on the roof of Albany Medical Center Hospital, and he didn’t worry about what sort of strings the man had pulled.

There was a slip-sidey, unspecified period that followed, the one in which he thought he’d shoved or hit somebody wearing scrubs, and been yelled at for it.

He recalled Raven’s cool, smooth voice rising to capture everyone’s attention.

He didn’t remember walking out here, or sitting on the curb.

As he turned his head, his vision smeared and blurred like he was really drunk, but he wasn’t dizzy. Adrenaline crash.

He saw warm yellow lights, and brick walls, and a ways down the street, a skywalk stretched between two wings of the hospital.

This was the nearest Level 1 trauma center, right? Right. He knew that. Just like he knew his arm hurt like a bitch. And that Cass might…might not…

He heard the soft clip of expensive shoes on the sidewalk behind him, and it dragged him back from the precipice of despair.

It could have been someone coming out for a cigarette, a breath of fresh air; a worried wife, or mother, definitely a woman, going by the click of the high heels, but it could have been any woman, one who needed to escape the Cloroxed confines of a building meant to save, but which contained so very much death.

He knew it was Raven, though, before he twisted around and caught sight of her.

She still wore her ice blue dress, the lower half of it stiff, crumpled, and dark with crusting blood. Very Carrie . Someone inside had lent her a white lab coat, and she held it closed tight across her middle with one hand, the other lifting her ruined skirt out of the way as she walked.

Under the yellow streetlights, her face was lined and exhausted; her hair had escaped most of its up-do, and she’d done nothing to right it save tuck a few stray pieces behind her ears.

She looked more like Cass than Shep had ever seen her look, and maybe that should have been an insult to his wife, given her current haggard state, but he didn’t think of it like that.

The resemblance was comforting, in the moment.

She walked with her head bent, careful of her footing, until she reached the curb, then she scooped a hand behind her back to smooth her skirt as she sat down next to him. Close, her knees tucked together and angled toward him so they pressed into the side of his thigh.

“She still in the OR?” He knew she was, because Raven would have been waving and calling him from the door if she was out of surgery.

She nodded. “An intern came to provide an update. Her vitals are stable. They’ve cleaned the wounds, and checked for further internal damage.

The surgeon’s stitching her up, now, but he thinks she’ll be fine.

” She dashed at her eyes, a fast, precise movement.

“There is of course a risk of infection, and she’ll need physical therapy.

We won’t know if there’s any nerve damage until she wakes, but… ”

She took a heaving breath, and then patted his knee. “You did well, Shep. You did a good job. At the house, with Cass,” she pressed on, halting, struggling to hold back her tears. “You did so well.”

It had been a very long time since he’d gone home to visit his parents.

And he’d never had anything like a tender or familial relationship with one of the old ladies.

No pseudo sisters or mothers. And so it took him several long moments to realize that’s what Raven was offering him, now: a sister’s love and grace.

It took him a long moment to understand his automatic impulse: to realize that he wanted to bend at the waist, and lay his head in her bloodied lap, and feel her fingers through his hair.

That wasn’t really what he wanted; he wanted the lap to be Cass’s.

He wanted her fingers, and her gentle chiding, and her… fuck, he just wanted her…

He pressed a hand over his eyes and concentrated on his breathing.

She laid her hand on his arm, right in the crook of his elbow. “Frank.” Low and earnest. “Let’s go inside and let the doctors look at you.”

Too shaky to argue, he stood at her urging, and let her tow him back into the building.