***
Connor!
She turned and barged through the door, barreling down the unfamiliar stairs and emerging into a warren of hallways.
“Wait!” Flint’s voice came from behind her. “It might be a trap!”
Maddy ignored him, frantically searching for the door that would take her out to the floor. Behind her she heard a door swing open. Whirling, she saw two big men haul Connor inside. She darted toward them, but they ignored her. She followed their eyes, and arrived at the door they wanted two steps ahead of them. She threw it open and held it wide so that they could easily get Connor inside.
Turning, Maddy noticed it was a sterile, medical room of sorts. Not a surgeon’s operating room at a hospital, but much more than she would have expected a normal club to have.
Then again, judging by the size of the two men who had brought Connor inside, this was far more than a “normal” club.
“Connor,” she said desperately as they gingerly lifted him onto the bed in the center of the room.
“Get his leg,” one of them commanded.
At their directions, she helped them lay him back on to the bed. He groaned, but his eyes stayed closed.
“He’s in a bad way,” one of them commented. “We need to rebreak his leg and set it properly. Otherwise he’ll have a limp.”
“Okay,” she said, looking back and forth. “That should hurt, but I mean, he’ll recover, won’t he?”
The pair of shifters looked at each other quickly before they focused back on her. Maddy felt her stomach tighten. There was more. Something they weren’t telling her.
“What else?” she whispered.
The one who had spoken the first time hesitated.
“Show me,” she commanded, fixing him with a stare, refusing to back down from the challenge she had just thrown out there. By giving an order and forcing her will upon the man, Maddy knew she had just tried to insert herself in the hierarchy. If the shifter decided she was an unknown, he would probably kick her from the room.
“Who are you?” he asked after a moment.
“I’m with him,” Maddy replied, her body language making it very clear which him she was referring to.
After another moment, the shifter finally nodded, respecting her authority, and lifted up Connor’s blood-soaked shirt.
“This shouldn’t be,” he said bluntly. “This should have stopped bleeding a long time ago.”
Maddy peered at the wound, a mass of black dried blood, green-tinged skin, and angry red flesh exposed to the open air. The man was right. The wound was bad, but if the blood had dried to a blackened color on him, it should have closed by now. Instead, it continued to bleed.
“Leg.” The faint word escaped from Connor’s lips as he stirred.
“What’s that?” she asked, moving immediately to his side, careful of his injury.
“My leg,” he said, eyes blinking open. “Fix the leg now.”
The two shifters started to move, then stopped as they looked at her. Maddy frowned. Why were they looking at her? They knew it needed to be done, and Connor had just confirmed it. She hated to see him put in any more pain, but she knew he would react worse if he ended up with a limp for the rest of his life that prevented him from doing his job.
Then it hit her. She had taken charge of the situation. They were looking to her for permission!
“Do it,” she said in her best command voice, indicating the clearly broken leg. She could see a lump of what she presumed to be bone sticking out, almost puncturing the skin on his calf. How the hell had he been able to walk on it? Her stomach rebelled at even contemplating the idea of doing something like that. Her eyes flashed with pride as she wrapped one hand around his face, looking into his eyes as the two shifters set about their business.
Maddy had always been amazed at how well most shifters could set bones. She had broken her arm rather badly when she was younger, and her father had reset it for her before taking her to the hospital. The doctors had been amazed at the job he had done. Her father had blown it off when she asked him about it, saying that shifters both learned young and had an innate sense of just knowing how to do it.
That sense was in full force now as the men worked on his leg.
Connor jerked in her arms and his eyes bulged. Maddy heard something pop loudly, and Connor cried out, clamping his lips closed, but the sound still escaped. The shifters relaxed their hold on him, and almost immediately Connor’s blue eyes rolled up into his head and he passed out.
“The leg will set properly now,” one of the guards said.
“What are your names?” she asked, looking at both of them.
“I’m Andre, he’s Milos,” the one who had spoken to her at first replied.
“Thank you both,” she said, before returning her attention to the wound on his side. “Now, what do we do about this?”
“Clean it, and hope for the best.”
She turned as Flint finally entered the room. Where the hell had he been? It had been a good five or ten minutes since Andre and Milos dragged Connor into the room. Flint had been right next to her in the office. What had taken him so long to get down there? Maddy had forgotten all about him in the commotion that had followed.
“That’s it?” she asked, angry. “Just hope and pray, nothing more?”
Flint shrugged. “I am sorry Maddy, but I have never seen something like that before. He is a shifter; his body should have healed that quickly. It looks deep, and it might have taken a day to completely heal, but the flow of blood should have stopped in five or maybe ten minutes. That blood around it is black and crusty. It has been dry for a long time now. This happened at least an hour ago.”
Maddy glanced at a big digital clock on the wall above the door. It had been two hours since she and Connor had split up. Flint was right. Something was wrong.
“Is he going to survive?” she asked, looking at the three men in the room.
All of them looked uncomfortable.
None of them replied.