Private Princess

Chapter 60

Morgan and Knight ducked under the police tape and followed the police sergeant quickly to the back of the ambulance. Knight threw a look Morgan’s way, worried at the intensity he saw coming from his friend and boss. There was no knowing what kind of state Sharon Lewis was in emotionally, or physically. Knight had never met the woman, but his guess was that the last thing she would need would be Morgan going in bullheaded and demanding answers.

He needn’t have worried.

“Lewis, I’m so glad you’re alive,” Morgan said gently. Knight could have sworn there were tears in the man’s eyes.

And why not? Lewis was strapped to a gurney, her arms splinted to immobilize around the fractures she had suffered at the hands of Flex.

“What the hell have they done to you?” Morgan whispered.

The answer to that question was obvious — Lewis had been savagely beaten from head to toe. Her skin was already turning a mottled purple, her neck held firmly in place by a plastic brace. Her right eye was fully closed; her left was focused loosely on the two men who stood silhouetted against the ambulance’s door.

“Morgan,” she whispered. “Morgan.”

“I’m here,” he told her, placing his hand on hers. “I’m so glad to see you, Lewis.”

“Like this?” She tried to smile.

“Not like this,” he said softly, and Lewis’s open eye shed a tear. They both knew what Morgan meant. He was glad to see her alive.

“I couldn’t stop them,” she said, the single tear followed by several others. “I’m sorry, Morgan. I couldn’t stop them.”

“Don’t think about it, Lewis. Don’t even think about it.”

But of course it was all she could think about. The image of Cook on her knees with the barrel pointed at her head. The soft psst sound of the silenced pistol firing. The sight of Cook’s body slumping to the floor.

“You need to rest, Lewis.”

“I don’t want to close my eyes,” she whimpered. “It’s all I see.”

From long experience of violent memories, Morgan knew of one way to escape the emotional pain.

“Watch her, Peter.”

Morgan slipped out the rear of the ambulance and returned a moment later with the paramedic. Without a word, the first responder took a syringe and fed morphine into the cannula in Lewis’s wrist.

“He’s given you something for it. You’ll sleep, Lewis, and you won’t feel the pain. You won’t see the pain.”

Lewis tried to blink tears away, but gravity held them on her eye. Morgan took a tissue from one of the ambulance’s shelves and delicately dabbed them.

“You’re one of the bravest people I’ve ever seen. I’m going to come with you to the hospital.”

“No,” she said, fighting against the drug that now began to overtake her. “No hospital, Morgan.”

He had to hunch over to catch the rest of her words, which were lost to Knight. Finally, Lewis’s lips stopped moving, the slow rise and fall of her chest showing the signs of a woman in a deep, drug-fueled delirium.

“What did she say?” Knight asked Morgan.

When the American turned to face him, his eyes reminded Knight of an impending storm. There was calm now, but soon all would be destruction and violence.

“That we finish this.”