Chapter 25
She functioned without thinking, as if someone had put her on autopilot.
She turned Connor over and searched with shaking fingers for his pulse. It was weak, but it was there, and she took a deep breath. She needed to act quickly and rationally. Luke had collapsed next to him, but she didn’t dare pull Connor away from him, because she feared that any movement of his body would cause him to lose too much blood. She took the knife and then she had a look at the wound. She silently prayed that it was just a flesh wound. Connor opened his eyes when she pulled her shirt over her head and began to bandage his arm. There was a lot of blood, but Mira didn’t think that any artery had been injured.
“Call Peter,” Connor said. He tried to sit up, but she pushed him gently back onto the floor.
“I will,” she replied. She didn’t trust her own voice to say more than these words. Don’t cry, she forced herself. Connor turned his head to the side and saw Luke’s collapsed body.
“Did you…” he started, but Mira interrupted him as she pulled the shirt around his arm into a tight knot.
“Be quiet.”
It was unbelievable, but he smiled at her. “It is not as bad as it looks,” he said with a surprisingly strong voice. Despite his protestation, however, he was still very pale and sweaty. “I can walk, if you help me.”
Okay then. He was right. The faster they could make it to a doctor, the better. Mira had shot without thinking and did not know if Luke had been critically wounded, but she couldn’t risk it.
They managed to get to the hallway that was still shrouded in darkness. Mira helped Connor to sit down on the floor. “Give me the gun,” he croaked. “If he…”
“Shh,” Mira said sharply and handed him the weapon. Then she ran. The darkness didn’t bother her that much anymore. She found a door and opened it. It was Sarah’s office. Mira wasted no time trying the landline and instead walked through the room. Apart from the fact that she didn’t actually know Peter’s number by heart, all the connections in the company were probably dead without power. Finally, she found Russell’s old office. There was her handbag. She didn’t rummage through it, but instead emptied the entire contents onto the floor until she found her mobile phone. She swiped across the screen. She had saved Peter’s number. It seemed to take forever, before he finally picked up. When she heard the voice of a woman, she remembered what he had told her. This was some kind of operator, who would relay her message to him. Dammit. She almost wanted to hang up, when the woman spoke to her. “I can see from your number that you are Miss Dumont. Mr. van den Burgh has informed me.” For a split-second, Mira couldn’t understand the connection between the strange sounding name and Peter. “Please stay calm, Miss Dumont. My name is Jessica Hopkins and I am Mr. van den Burgh’s secretary. Where are you and how can I help you?”
Mira finally came back to reality. She hurriedly told the lady as quickly as possible what had happened and then started to run back to the hallway. She could just as well talk on the phone while sitting next to Connor. She reached him, still answering the calmly asked questions of this woman. Mira thought she could hear the clacking sound of fingers typing on a keyboard in the background.
“Mr. van den Burgh has all the information,” she then said. “I can see that he is only around 12 minutes away from you. You said that you have eliminated the perpetrator. Is there a possibility that other suspects could be in the building?”
Mira forced herself not to scream at the lady. A part of her understood that the woman had to collect as much information as possible, at the same time trying to calm her down, but she was close to losing her patience.
She sank next to Connor on her knees and felt his hand. It was cold and clammy. Without thinking, Mira just laid her phone to one side and leaned over to Connor.
His pulse was very weak at this point. “If you die on me right now, I will never forgive you,” she whispered.
There was no answer.
Mira threw her arms around the man, who had given his own life to save hers, and she did the only thing she could do at this point: wait.
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