Chapter 071
She reached the bottom of the dune in seconds. Ten feet away from the
boy, she twisted hard on her snowboard, digging in for a sharp stop, causing
sand to scatter in a wide fan around the boy’s friends, who were struggling
up towards him. Lyra kicked off her snowboard in a single fluid movement
and leapt barefoot across the hot sand.
“Are you all right?” she said to the boy in English. His black eyes were
anguished, and he answered in sobbing words she didn’t understand.
Then she saw his leg.
Beneath the boy’s white pants, now covered with blood, she saw the
freakish-looking angle of his shin.
She blinked, feeling as though she was going to faint. Careful not to look
back at his leg, she reached her arm around the boy’s shoulders. “It’ll be all
right,” she whispered, forcing her voice to offer comfort and reassurance.
“It’ll be all right.”
“It’s a compound fracture,” Viktor said behind her. She turned and got one vision of his strangely calm face, before he twisted around and spoke
sharply in Berber to the other two boys. They scattered, shouting as they ran
for the encampment.
Viktor knelt in the sand beside her. He looked down at the injury. As
Lyra cuddled the crying boy, Viktor spoke to him with incredible
gentleness in his voice. The boy answered him with a sob.
Carefully, Viktor ripped the fabric up to the knee to get a closer look at
the break. Tearing off a corner of his own shirt, he pushed it into Lyra’s hand. “Press this just below the knee to slow down the blood.”
His voice was calm. Clearly he was good in a crisis. She was not. She
swallowed, feeling wobbly. “I can’t—”
“You can.”
He had such faith in her. She couldn’t let him down. Still feeling a bit
green, she took a deep breath and pressed the cloth to a point above the
wound as firmly as she could.
Rising to his feet, Viktor crossed back across the sand and returned a
moment later with his snowboard. Turning it over to the flat side, he dug
sand out from beneath the boy and gently nudged the board beneath the
injured leg. He ripped more long bits of fabric from his shirt, giving Lyra a
flash of his hard, taut abs before he bent to use the board as a splint.
The boy’s parents arrived at a run, his mother crying, his father looking
blank with fear as he reached out to hold his son’s hand. Behind them
another man, dark-skinned, with an indigo-colored turban, gave quick
brusque orders that all of them obeyed, including Viktor. Five minutes
later, they were lifting the boy onto a makeshift stretcher.
Lyra’s knees shook beneath her as she started to follow. Viktor stopped
her.
“Go back to the tent,” he said. “There’s nothing more you can do.” His
lips twitched. “Can’t have you fainting on us.”
She swallowed, remembering how she’d nearly fainted at the sight of the
boy’s injury. “But I want to help—”
“You have,” he said softly. He glanced behind him. “Ahmed’s uncle is a
doctor. He will take good care of him until the helicopter arrives.” He
pushed her gently in the other direction. “He’ll be all right. Go back to the
tent. And pack.”
Lyra watched anxiously as the boy was carried to the other side of the
encampment. He disappeared into a tent, with Viktor and the others beside
him, and she finally turned away. Dazed, she looked down at her clenched
hands and saw they were covered in blood.
Slowly, she walked back to the tent she shared with Viktor. She went to
the basin of water and used rose-scented soap to wash the blood off her
hands. Drying her hands on a towel, she sank to the bed.
Go back to the tent. And pack.
She gasped as the meaning of those words sank in. She covered her
mouth with her hand. She’d won. By pure mischance, she’d won their race.
There would be no seduction. Instead, from this night forward, she’d be
sleeping alone in a separate tent.
Once, Lyra would have been relieved.
But now...
Numbly, she rose from their bed. Grabbing her backpack, she started to
gather her clothes. Then she stopped, looking around the tent. Viktor
always dumped everything on the floor, in that careless masculine way,
knowing it was someone else’s job to follow after him and tidy up. Looking
across the luxurious carpets piled thickly across the sand, Lyra’s eyes could
see the entirety of her husband’s day: the empty water bucket of solid silver.
The hand-crafted sandalwood soap. His crumpled pajama pants. And in a
corner, his black leather briefcase, so stuffed with papers that it could no
longer be closed, none of which he’d glanced at even once since the day
they’d arrived here.
In the distance, she heard a sound like rolling thunder.
Tears rose to her eyes, and she wiped them away fiercely. She didn’t want
to leave him. This was the place where they whispered secrets to each other
in the middle of the night. The bed where, if she woke up in the middle of
the night, she’d hear the soft sound of his breathing and go back to sleep,
comforted that he was beside her.
No more.