That’s when Gray saw the syringe sticking out of the side of his neck.
Dani pulled the blue needle cap from between her teeth and blew out a breath. “Nighty night, Doc.”
“Fucking hell.” Maya’s elbow poked him in the ribs, and Gray realized he was still curled around her. Her entire body was shaking, her breathing coming too fast, but she elbowed him again. As soon as he gave her a few inches, she scrambled out of her chair and surveyed the wrecked dining room.
“Fucking hell,” she repeated. No sign of her trembling showed in her voice or the slightly outraged look she pinned on Dani. “Since when do you come to dinner packing goddamn tranquilizers?”
Dani frowned, looking affronted. “Since we started needing them, obviously.”
Maya threw up her hands. “Oh, obviously.”
Nina looked up from Knox’s shoulder. She knew better than to remove the knife, but she’d packed a clean dish towel around it. “He went down like a rock. How much did you give him?”
“Just enough to make it count.” Dani rolled her eyes. “Don’t worry, it was a carefully calculated dose based on his body weight.”
Conall knelt beside a now-snoring Mace. He winced as he gingerly removed the syringe, then checked his carotid artery. “You’ve been carrying around a Mace-calibrated sedative? I honestly don’t know if that’s hot or terrifying.” The joke sounded forced, and worry lines bracketed Conall’s eyes. “Pulse is steady. He’s just out. That’s a less pressing concern than the knife in Knox’s shoulder.”
“It’s fine,” Knox said, still watching Mace, his brow furrowed with concern. “Rafe can deal with it.”
“Uh, no.” Rafe still had Rainbow balanced on his hip, one protective arm curled around her. “When we’re in a Florida jungle and there’s no help for three days, I pull knives out of you. When we’re in Atlanta, you shut your fool mouth and let Nina take you to an actual doctor.”
Knox clenched his jaw and glared at Rafe. Rafe stared back impassively. After a moment, he opened his mouth.
The bastard was actually about to ask Gray if he could handle this. With a piece of cutlery hanging out of his shoulder.
Gray just managed not to slap his palm to his forehead. “We’ve got this. Now please go see the doctor.”
Knox let Nina lead him away. Maya moved by rote, righting chairs and pushing them back under the table, as Rafe crouched to whisper something to Rainbow.
Working together, Gray and Conall lifted Mace from the floor and, hooking an arm around each of their shoulders, carried him next door. He stirred a little, lifting his head to mumble something unintelligible.
“Yeah, I don’t think so, pal,” Gray said soothingly. “It’s gonna take you a while to sleep this one off.”
They maneuvered him into his small, stark room that still felt like a cell to Gray, stripped off his boots, and got him settled into his bunk.
Gray hesitated, torn. “He shouldn’t be alone right now.”
But Conall had already pulled up a chair outside the tiny room. “I’ll sit with him.”
Back in the kitchen, things were back to something almost surreally normal. Rafe and Dani sat at the table with Rainbow. They’d resumed their dinner, undoubtedly for the girl’s benefit—someone had to make her feel safe, and fuck, she still had to eat.
Maya was nowhere to be found.
Gray kept walking, his feet taking him slowly but unerringly through to the warehouse space at the back of the building, where the ladies scanned books and processed food for freeze-drying.
Maya was lying on the concrete floor, stretched out with one arm flung above her head and the other resting on her forehead.
“Maya?” he said gently, even though he knew she’d be listening to music and couldn’t hear him. There wasn’t enough give in concrete for her to feel his approaching footsteps, either, and her eyes were closed.
He reached out, froze with his hand just shy of her leg, then wrapped his fingers loosely around her ankle. She yelped and kicked out with her other foot. He ducked to the side, narrowly avoiding a thick heel to the nose.
He released her, holding up both hands instead in placating surrender.
“Shit!” Maya scrambled to her knees and tapped at her watch. She stared at him, wide-eyed for several fraught heartbeats, then let out a laugh that verged on hysterical. “Oh fuck, I’m sorry. You startled me.”
“No kidding.” He nudged her foot. “You okay?”
She twisted until she was sitting with her back against a pile of boxes filled with books. “Will you believe me if I say I’m fine?”
“Probably not.” He shrugged. “I’m not.”
Another tense pause. Then she patted the concrete beside her. “Wanna sit?”
He very much did, so he lowered himself to the floor at her side. “You’re not freaking out?”
She rubbed at her bare wrist absently, her gaze slightly unfocused. “I feel like a rubber band someone stretched as far as it can go. I keep thinking I can just … keep ahead of this. Outrun the memories. But you can’t, can you? You can’t outrun something that’s inside you.”
“No. We all try, I think, but in the end…” They carried all of their scars, all their traumas with them, like battered, scuffed luggage patched with duct tape.
Maya shuddered next to him and closed her eyes. “Twenty-three days,” she whispered. “That’s how long Tobias Richter had me. And I remember every second of it so clearly, sometimes I think it’s still happening.”
She was still rubbing her wrist, harder with each passing moment, until she was nearly abrading the delicate skin. Maybe she wasn’t hyperventilating like before or lashing out like Mace, but she was still caught up in a nightmare of memory, a prison in her own head.
He could help her. He needed to help her.
“Have you ever seen the ocean?” He pulled her hand away from her wrist before she could hurt herself and kept talking. “It’s a hell of a thing. Different everywhere you go. Down in Florida, the beaches are all soft sand, and the water is blue and green. But when you travel up the coast, everything turns to rock. And the water gets dark.”
Her fingers flexed in his. She took a shuddering breath in and closed her eyes, tilting her head back against the boxes. “How far north have you been?”
“I drove all the way up to the Canadian Territories once.” He kept his voice even and low. “I would have kept going, but they turned me back at the border.”
“What was it like?”
“Cold.”
She nudged him with her elbow. “Tell me more. About other places.”
So he did. He told her about flying through the Heartlands, looking down on the perfect, irrigated circles of the big agriculture co-ops as well as the tiny family farms. About the Mississippi River, how it was a whole mile wide in some places, which didn’t sound like a lot but sure as hell looked like an uncrossable chasm when you were staring out at the swift, turbulent currents. He told her about the mountains and valleys of east Tennessee, where some of the more insular communities had given up completely on modern technology. Being there was like stepping back in time, all simple wood cabins and oil lamps and livestock, and if the world ended again, Gray wasn’t sure they’d even notice.