Page 46 of Mistaken
Oh,shit.
There must be at least twenty of them, wearing tuxedos and waiter uniforms, and they’re heading toward us. The rapid staccato of bullets knocks three of our men off their feet. Yuri shoves Tania behind one of the steel prep tables and Lauren and I follow. There’s a grunt and a thud, and I see Ivan bleeding in terrifying spurts.
“Help me grab him!” I shout at Tania, but she’s frozen, staring at the blood. It’s Lauren that comes to my aid and we struggle to drag the beefy Russian behind the table. “Craaap,” I’m mumbling, trying to make my stupid brain work. “It’s the femoral artery, Lauren hold it here-” I grabbed a dishcloth and pressed it against the bullet wound. She held it down firmly; her lips were white but she’s calm. The cloth was almost instantly saturated with blood while I struggled to pull off my stockings. There was a wooden spoon lying on the floor close to us and I grabbed it, getting the stocking around his leg, twisting it into a tourniquet with the spoon. Ivan looked up at me, his big, square face was pale, his skin greyish, like his short-cropped hair.
“Go behind the… counter,” he wheezed, trying to look stern.
“We’re good here, just concentrate on breathing slow,” I urged him, “breathing fast pushes up your blood pressure and you’ll bleed more. Slow breaths.”
“The bleeding’s slowing down,” Lauren shouts into my ear. Not that it matters, my ears are already ringing from the gunfire and we if actually live through this thing, I’m going to be deaf anyway. It could be my imagination, but it sounded like all the shooting stopped and there was the unmistakable thud of three, or four more bodies hitting the floor.
God, I hope they’re not our guys.I paused,when did they become “our” guys?”
Silence. Did this mean it was over?
An explosion ripped through the ballroom, blowing the doors open and there’s screaming everywhere, followed by a thunderous crash that sounded like three hundred windows are being smashed at the same time.
Tania is crouching, hands over her ears, rocking back and forth. “Sweetie? Hey, Tan, it’s-” was I really going to say it was going to be okay?
The fire alarm is blaring and it’s not helping the ringing in my ears. But I don’t smell smoke, so I keep one arm around Tania and the other on the tourniquet on Ivan. We wait. I don’t know for what, but I’m not moving.
“Lauren!”
She leaps up, sobbing in relief. “Thomas? Oh, I was so afraid you’d-”
He’s hugging her, kissing her hair tenderly. “I will always come back to you; you know I will.”
My eyes fill with tears for their happiness, and then it hits me that he’s alone. “Wait. Where’s Maksim?”
They part and he smiles at me. His face is covered in soot and his expensive tuxedo jacket is ripped. “It’s all right. He’s in the ballroom. I’ll take you back, where’s his brother?”
“He’s…” I look around, rising up on my knees, trying to find him. I finally spot him around the corner by the pantry. Yuri's doing chest compressions on one of his men, his face set and determined. It’s obvious the poor guy is gone, he was hit in the neck, and it’s a terrible-looking, jagged wound.
“Yuri?” I clumsily get to my feet. I want to kick off these stupid high heels but there’s broken glass everywhere. “Hey…” I kneel down next to him, but he ignores me, continuing his precise CPR on a man who’s gone. “Hey, he’s-” I try to put my hand on his, stopping him, but he brushes me off, continuing the chest compressions. “Yuri? Sweetie, why don’t you let the paramedics take over? They’re here now.” He still ignores me, so I sit next to him, finding a napkin and putting it over the poor man’s neck.
Maksim found us after having pried himself loose from a hysterical Alexander King. He apparently saved his life by taking out one of the shooters who had his gun to King’s head. There are police crawling everywhere and none of them seem cool with us leaving without extensive questioning, but he gives a short statement and brushes them off by coldly reminding them that some of the men lost were his. Yuri finally stops his mechanical CPR when his brother crouches next to him, murmuring in his ear.
I lean in and whisper to Maksim, “Do you want me to take Tania home?” She’s still sitting with Lauren, who kindly refused to leave her until we could find the rest of our group.
He looks up at me, blue eyes pale and blank. “No, we’ll all go together.” He and Thomas do that manly thing where they grip each other's shoulder while they’re shaking hands to indicate extra emotion.
Lauren and I just hug. Pretty tightly because I’m learning fast that nothing bonds a new friendship faster than imminent death. “Let’s talk soon,” she whispers, “I have some experience, so maybe we can process this together.”
“You have experience with shootouts?” I whisper back.
She sighs, “You have no idea.”
Looking down, I groan. “Oh, my dress. I’m sorry.” It’s ripped in a dozen places and decorated with some nauseating splashes of blood. For some reason, there’s gravy covering most of my left side.
Maksim shakes his head. “It’s only a dress. You’re not hurt.” He looks down and frowns. “I’ll send in a couple of men to search for the Dresden Green. It might still be by the table where we took shelter.”
“Oh-” I plunge my fingers into my corset top and fish around for a moment. “Here it is, I stuck it in there for safekeeping.”
His brow rose, and one corner of his mouth. “In the middle of a firefight? Impressive.”
Maksim and his bodyguards shepherd us through the ballroom, trying to hustle us past the dead bodies. The ear-searing crash we’d heard was the two massive chandeliers falling from the ceiling and crushing ten or so of the gunmen under a ton or so of rubble. “Did you do that?” I ask as he’s hustling me past the piles of shattered crystal.
“Possibly.”
