Page 117 of Kiss Me Like I Didn't Kill You

I stay rooted as a handful of firefighters haul her from the wreck. I watch, helpless, while they ease her onto a stretcher and the paramedics swarm.

She lies there, impossibly small, rain and blood matting her hair.

I take another step forward. I have to touch her.

“Sir, you can’t—” a fireman begins, stepping into my path.

“Let me through,” I growl.

“Sir, please, we’re working—”

“Let me through!” I surge, but another closes on my arm.

“Back,” he says. “We’re trying to stabilise her.”

“Stabilise?” My voice buckles. “She’s alive. She has to be.”

“Barely. Head trauma, possible internal bleeding,” one paramedic snaps, the words blur into a distant roar in my ears.

My head rings, heat floods my chest. I stand by uselessly as they fight for her life. The rain falls harder, hissing into the blood in her hair.

I force my way to her side and drop to my knees. Someone moves to stop me again. “Touch me and you’ll lose a hand,” I snarl.

They don’t. They let me kneel beside her.

My fingers find her hair, sticky and cold. “Ophelia,” I whisper, in a raw voice. “You are not dying. Do you hear me?”

Her eyes are closed, entirely still, not a single flicker.

A paramedic slaps a lead to the monitor. His face drains. “We’re losing her—”

“No.” The word rips out of me. “You are not fucking losing her.”

“Get the airlift ready. Now!” another voice snaps.

“Do it!” I roar. “Call it this instant!”

“It’s en route, two minutes,” someone answers.

They go to work, pads to her chest, compressions, adrenaline pushed into the IV line.

The rain drums on the stretcher, their voices are clipped. “Low blood sugar,” a medic mutters as he slides a syringe in. Her body convulses once, a tiny, useless spasm, and then the monitor keens, a long, terrible tone, and falls to a flat line.

“No.” I grip the edge of the stretcher until my knuckles ache. “Ophelia. Don’t you dare.”

They keep at it, compressions, breaths, shocks, while the lead medic’s voice, reports. “She’s not responding to CPR. No pulse.”

“Keep going,” I bark, my voice breaking. “All of you, don’t stop. Bring her back.”

One medic meets my stare, exhausted and apologetic. “Sir, we’ve been compressing—”

“Push harder,” I snap. “Push and don’t tell me she’s gone.”

When the pause stretches too long, something in me cracks.

My heart is lodged in my throat, before thought can stop me, I drive a single, desperate thump into the centre of her chest.

The noise that follows is obscene, a hollow, sick crack. For a second the world holds its breath.