I shake, holding her, kissing her, begging her, pumping her chest and blood through her body to spell Gabe. I can’t let her go. The girl in the chair is wailing, calling out to Marcella. This can’t be happening. I can’t lose her. She can’t lose her.
My chest hollows, and shudders rack through me. She has no pulse and no breath. She’s limp in my arms. Dead. Agony is its own heartbeat, pulsing through me and filling my veins and organs with bottomless grief.
“Helicopter is landing. Rowan, go let them in.”
I shake my head. I can’t leave her, but Gabe is doing compressions again, and the girl is tied up, and I have to save Marcella. I kiss her forehead and crawl up to my feet before I sprint across the house.
“She’s in here,” I call out to them as I open the door, waving desperately for them to hurry the fuck up.
“Your Highness!” The two paramedics gasp and go to bow, but fuck that.
“Move! She’s dying.”
“Sir!” They hop to attention, and I fill them in as best I can. There’s a man with a gunshot wound to his head and a dead woman on the floor beside Marcella. It’s as fucked as a situation can get.
The girl tells them that it’s a concentrated form of cyanide and that the antidote she was given was an oral hydroxocobalamin.
The paramedics set to work. “No pulse. Get the paddles on her. I’m going to intubate.”
“IV is in. First round of epi on board.”
I don’t know what they’re saying, and I don’t interrupt. I stand back as they put a tube down her throat and attach a large bag to it that they squeeze to give her air. The other paramedic is placing pads on her bare chest.
“Charged. Clear.”
They stand back and shock her. And fuck. Her body spasms, and her back tenses. They just shocked her heart. I turn around, pounding my already aching fist into the wall.
“Anything?”
“Pulseless V-tach.”
“Restarting compressions. Let’s move her.”
I turn back around as they get her onto the gurney. I glance over at the girl whose face is bruised and bleeding. “We’ll get help for you too.”
She simply looks at me, her expression calm yet distraught, with tears quietly flowing down her face like a river. “Will they put me in prison?”
“Prison?” I question, my thoughts too chaotic to make sense of anything.
“That’s what Signoria and Antonia always told me would happen if I were discovered. That I’d be put in prison. A worse prison,” she amends.
I can’t begin to imagine the torture this girl and Marcella have faced. I’ve seen it on Marcella’s back, but that doesn’t speak to what they’ve endured.
“You’re not going to prison,” I promise her. “I’m the prince of the country, and I won’t let that happen. No one will ever hurt you again.”
Isn’t that what I told Marcella? That I wouldn’t let anyone hurt her again? That I’d take care of her? Now look. I couldn’t save her. I couldn’t protect her. My heart can’t take this.
She licks her lips, and more tears fall. “You have to save her.”
“She needs an IV antidote,” the paramedic informs us. “Theoral form isn’t enough. We were able to shock her and give her some medicine. It’s keeping her heart going, barely, but it’s not perfusing her tissue.”
“Then give her the IV form,” I demand.
“We don’t have that in our med kit. This level of cyanide poisoning isn’t common.”
“I’m going to give her another round of epi and shock her,” the other paramedic states. “Charged. Clear.”
Her body jolts and spasms on the gurney, and they return to squeezing the bag to give her oxygen.