Page 99 of Yours on the Canvas

Luca ignores me while he continues checking him over. His fingers work with a frantic pace, but I can see he is efficient as he checks him. Luca checks his vitals, working around me. Then he sighs, looking at me.

“I really need you to move. Now.”

I look at Jack, and he gives me a small smile and the slightest nod. “I’m not going anywhere,” he says.

I reluctantly move to the end of the bed, laying my hand on my boy’s ankle as Luca spends the next ten minutes in silence as he works on Jack, setting up an IV line, wrapping the ribs tight. Once he has finished, he sits back on his heels and looks at me.

“I believe he’s got a partially ruptured spleen and internal bleeding, a fractured and a broken ribs,” Luca says quietly. There’s sweat beading on his forehead as he flashes a penlight into Jack’s sluggish pupils. “I can stabilize him for transit, but he needs to go to a hospital now.”

“We can’t go to a local hospital,” I snarl, my voice dropping into a lethal, unyielding register as I lean into his space, towering over him. “Our entry into the States was entirely off-the-books. State lines, federal databases—we trigger any of it, we’re all locked up or dead.”

“He could die,” Luca says, standing to glare at me without a flicker of fear. “I’m an ER doctor, not a miracle worker! I can’t fix a failing spleen in the back of a truck!”

“You’ll fly with us,” Reid cuts in smoothly, stepping between us with a cold, absolute authority that allowed no argument. “You keep him alive across the border, till we get back to Campbell River. You owe me, Luca. Big. You know it, and I know it. Once this is done, you’re clear of me. Those are your only terms.”

Luca swallows hard and looks down at Jack, who lets out another shallow, agonized wheeze.

“I can get him stable enough to fly. That doesn’t mean he’s stable, he could still die. I won’t accept responsibility for that.”

“Fine. But we need to move now.” I say, making the decision for all of us.

He kneels down again, his jaw tight, and rips open a fresh bag of saline, nodding sharply. “Fine. Let’s move him before his pressure bottoms out entirely.”

* * *

“Careful,” I mutter, my voice cracking, fracturing around the raw panic bleeding through my teeth as Mack and Callan step into the cage carrying a body sling.

“Watch his ribs. If his weight shifts even an inch too fast, we’ll puncture a lung. Move like he’s made of glass.” Luca said quietly as he stands next to Jack’s cot.

We move with agonising, surgical precision. The tight, confined space around the cot makes every move a calculated risk.

When Mack slid the straps beneath my dove’s blood-soaked frame, Jack winces, a low, wretched sound tears past his cracked lips, his pale face tightening into an expression of unconscious agony even through the heavy, drug-like haze of exhaustion.

I watch as they lift him off that wretched mattress felt less like a rescue and more like pulling a shattered soul away from the very jaws of hell.

As we carry him out of the cage, up the narrow wooden stairs, and out into the biting night air, his hand tight in mine, my eyes track his every breath. I watched the agonising, shallow rise and fall of his bruised, caved-in chest, counting the seconds between each inhalation like a man dying of thirst.

I feel a squeeze around my fingers, and I look down at Jack, tears blurring my vision as I take my broken boy in. He’s watching me as the sling wraps around him, holding his body tight, like a hammock does on a sunny day. I smile at him, and he gives me a small one back, and relief washes over me in dizzying waves.

“Sol,” his voice is a whisper in the silence of the night.

“I’ve got you, baby. I’m taking you home.”

“I love you, Sol.”

A sob rips from my throat, and I have to lock my knees before I fall at his words.

“I love you too, dove,” I say around tears that are now falling freely.

Looking at him, bruised across his skin, black eyes, cuts on his perfect skin, I am instantly swallowed by a dark, toxic surge of pure, unadulterated rage.

Dale and Ray were already dead; CJ had killed Dale in the hallway before he could even pull the trigger, and Callan had put down Sale out in the frozen dirt of the yard, but looking at the sheer, calculated extent of the damage they had inflicted on Jack, I felt a violent, hollow fury that they had died too quickly.

And Ray, my fingers itch at wanting to wrap my hand around his throat again, forcing the life out of him, and watching it fade from his eyes.

They each got a clean bullet.

They each got a mercy they didn’t deserve.