Chapter 19 · Sutures in the Rust

"Hold still, or I'll sew your mouth shut instead."

Lucian's laugh came out wet. That was not a good sound.

"Try it, wife."

I didn't try it. I pushed the curved needle through the torn skin over his ribs, and his whole body went tight under my hands. Muscle like a slab. Hot. Slick with blood and diesel and God knows what else.

The SUV sat nose-deep in the bunker's steel shutter behind us. Hood smoking. One headlight still lit, throwing a yellow cone across the vault floor. Past the gap in the shutter, the fuel tank burned on the pier. Orange light crawled up the walls and made everything look like the inside of a furnace.

We'd been alive for eleven minutes. I'd counted.

"Rust," I said, and picked a flake out of the wound with tweezers. It was the size of a fingernail. "You've got rust in you. You'll get lockjaw."

"I've had my shots."

"Of course you have."

I'd found the trauma kit in the SUV's cargo well. Gauze, clamps, a scalpel in a sterile pack. No lidocaine.