Total pages in book: 51
Estimated words: 45957 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 230(@200wpm)___ 184(@250wpm)___ 153(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 45957 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 230(@200wpm)___ 184(@250wpm)___ 153(@300wpm)
Mark grabbed a small flashlight and shined it into my face. I winced, holding my hand up to shield my eyes, but he shoved it aside, cursing as he did so. “You’re hypothermic, Adrian,” he said, turning the flashlight off. “Holy fuck.” He glanced toward the rope ladder, then clenched his jaw. “Can you climb?”
“I think I’ve got enough strength in my arms to manage,” I told him. I had to have enough strength. Otherwise, I was dying here, and quite frankly, that wasn’t a goddamn option for me.
He nodded. “Then come here. Let me heft you up, and then, I’ll go up after you in case you need the support.”
I winced. “Is that safe?” I asked, eyeing the ladder. There was only so much weight that was supposed to be on a rope ladder at one time.
He grunted. “Going to have to be. Ivan will have my fucking head and my balls if you die.”
I scoffed at that because I seriously doubted if he actually gave a fuck whether I lived or died, but I kept my mouth shut because I was too fucking cold to argue any longer, and standing still was making me shiver more, and my breathing was slowing. I needed to get a fucking move on before I actually did die.
Once I was at the bottom of the ladder, Mark bent at his knees, then wrapped his arms around my thighs right above my kneecaps and lifted me. I grabbed the ladder, and my fingers burned. I hissed through the pain and gripped tight before reaching up and grabbing the next rung, pulling myself up with sheer upper body strength.
My feet and legs were goddamn useless—numb and frozen. I couldn’t fucking feel anything in them except pain. Grunting, I pulled myself up one ladder rung at a time, my shoulders and arms burning from the strength needed to keep pulling myself up and up and up.
Ivan grabbed my wrists once I was near the top and pulled me in the rest of the way. I collapsed on the floor of the helicopter, my vision wavering. I could barely breathe, and my head was spinning. I was so fucking tired. Just… exhausted.
“He’s gone into hypothermia,” Mark said as he began to pull the ladder in while my eyelids fluttered closed. Ivan smacked my face hard, and when I managed to drag my eyes open again, I could swear he looked a bit panicked, but hell, I was probably hallucinating at that point. Wasn’t hallucination a symptom of hypothermia? Fuck if I knew.
“What the fuck do we do?” Ivan growled. “Adrian, come on. Stay with me,” he rasped, smacking my face again. But my eyes were closing, and I was too sleepy to peel them back open. Everything hurt, and I was so fucking cold.
“We get him home and get the doctor to see him immediately,” Mark told him. The helicopter began to move once the door was shut, and then, something was draped over me. I couldn’t tell what. “For now, we do our best to keep him alive.”
“Mark, I can’t fucking lose him,” Ivan growled, his hands smoothing whatever was draped over me down and tucking it beneath me. “He cannot fucking die.”
I didn’t hear anything else after that. The world faded to nothing.
I was pretty sure I was dying.
7
Ivan
Unable to sit still for very long, I paced back and forth at the foot of Adrian’s bed as the doctor checked his vitals. He’d barely been lucid when Mark and I moved him from the helicopter and into the house. The most Adrian had done since he’d gotten in that helicopter was barely come in and out of consciousness. His breathing remained shallow and labored the entire time, making me come fucking unhinged.
Because there was nothing I could fucking do to help him. I’d insisted on him having to come to Russia to “help” me figure out this problem for James, and I’d damn near gotten him killed.
One of Dr. Lebedev’s nurses stepped into the room. She ducked her head immediately upon seeing me, casting her eyes to the floor as she rushed over to the IV pole that’d been wheeled in a little while ago, hanging up a bag of saline. I had no doubt I looked on the verge of a fucking mental breakdown—and not one that involved tears.
This kind of breakdown would involve a lot of dead bodies.
“He’d dehydrated,” Dr. Lebedev spoke up as another nurse, this one a male, wheeled in some kind of machine I didn’t recognize. “That’s a fluid warmer,” he explained before I could open my mouth. “With Mr. Miller’s condition, we do not want to give him cold saline.” He hung his stethoscope around his neck and turned to give me his undivided attention. “We need to get him out of these clothes, then cover him with as many blankets as you can spare until his body temperature rises again.”