Page 68 of Whisper

She kneels beside me, hands already reaching for the tactical vest’s straps.

“This has to come off,” she says. “I need to see what we’re dealing with.”

Her fingers work the buckles quickly. Academic doesn’t mean helpless, apparently. The vest lifts away, heavy with absorbed blood, and reveals the true extent of the damage.

My shirt is ruined. Red soaks through fabric from shoulder to waist. When she pulls the fabric away from the wound, fresh blood wells up, runs down my arm in rivulets.

“Jesus,” she breathes. “Cooper, this is bad. This is really bad.”

“I’ve had worse.”

“When? When have you had worse than this?”

Afghanistan. Syria. That clusterfuck in Somalia that doesn’t officially exist. But those stories belong to classified files and men who don’t come home the same way they left.

“Doesn’t matter.”

She strips off her outer shirt—one of the extras from the convenience store—and underneath, she wears a simple tank top that hugs her curves in ways that make my blood pressure spike despite the blood loss.

Focus. Tactical situation. Stay alert.

But watching her tear fabric into strips, watching her move with calm competence while her hands shake, watching her take charge when I can’t—it does something to me that has nothing to do with tactics and everything to do with the woman kneeling beside me.

The woman who cracked Phoenix’s financial code.

The woman I fucking fell for somewhere between that basement tunnel and the moment she admitted her deepest fantasy.

“This is going to hurt,” she says, folding the fabric into a pressure bandage.

“Do it.”

She presses the makeshift bandage against the entry wound, applies steady pressure. Pain explodes through myshoulder, white-hot and immediate. I clamp my teeth together to keep from making a sound, but a low growl escapes anyway.

“I’m sorry,” she whispers. “I’m so sorry, but I have to stop the bleeding.”

“Keep going.”

Her hands move to the exit wound, larger than the entry, muscle torn and ragged. This bandage takes more fabric, more pressure. When she ties it tight, the pain nearly blacks me out.

But the bleeding slows. Not stopped, but manageable.

“The ribs?” she asks.

“Just a graze.”

She examines the wound anyway, clinical and thorough. Her touch is gentle but sure, fingers probing for damaged bone, checking for signs of internal bleeding. When she’s satisfied it’s superficial, she moves to the head wound.

“This one’s already clotting,” she says, dabbing blood away with clean fabric. “Scalp wounds always look worse than they are.”

She continues her careful assessment, checking my pupils for signs of concussion, feeling for skull fractures. “You don’t have a head injury, just a cut. But these other wounds …”

She sits back on her heels, looking at me with a gaze that might be a professional assessment or personal concern. Hard to tell which.

“You need a hospital.”

“No.”

“Cooper, you’ve lost a lot of blood. You need IV fluids, antibiotics, proper suturing?—”