Kissed by a Dark Prince(44)

“We have to get out of here. The whole place might come down.” Sable released her arm and held her bloodied hand out to Olivia.

She shook her head. She couldn’t leave. There were injured here who needed her help. Sable included.

She grimaced and used her teeth and her good hand to tear a strip of material from her jacket.

“We have to help as many as we can. Starting with you,” Olivia said and held the white material out to Sable. “Help me with this.”

Sable nodded and crouched before her, and together they managed to bandage her forearm, tying it tightly to slow the bleeding.

“What happened?” Sable helped her to her feet.

Olivia didn’t dare put any weight on her injured leg and she didn’t want to look down to see what sort of state it was in. She had to help the others first. She would worry about her own injuries later.

“Don’t know.” Olivia thanked her friend with a smile when she slung her arm around Olivia’s waist and helped her over a section of the ceiling.

More doctors came through the thick black smoke. Among them was one of the smug doctors from the meeting. He looked like hell. Blood coated the left side of his face and saturated his white coat.

“What happened?” Olivia said to him and he lowered his hand from his mouth.

“The whole laboratory is gone. Wiped out in the blast. God knows what happened up there. We’re taking the injured down to the square.” He covered his mouth again and moved on, pausing to check the vitals of everyone he came across. The other two doctors did the same. Judging by the fact that only smoke and blood dirtied their skin and coats, and they showed no sign of injury, they must have been on the lower floors at the time of the explosion.

“I’m getting you out of here,” Sable said and Olivia wasn’t in a position to argue with her. “You’ll get these wounds checked out and then you can help anyone waiting in the square. This place is a death trap.”

Just as she said that, the floor shook and a second explosion rocked the building, this one feeling more distant than the first. Higher up?

The laboratory levels were towards the centre of the building. If only those levels had blown up, that meant hundreds of Archangel staff were trapped above them.

Mark’s office was up there, and so were all the staff quarters for those who lived in the building.

Sable had tried to convince her to go up to her apartment in order to spill the beans about the situation with Loren, but Olivia had refused. If she hadn’t, they would have been trapped up there too.

Sable helped her to the emergency stairwell and down to the next level. It was a different world. No fire or smoke touched the rooms on the other side of the glass wall. Sable pulled her away and they continued down to the bottom floor of the building, and out into the square.

Glass and debris from the building covered the stone slabs. Sable adjusted her grip on Olivia and they hobbled together away from the building and towards the park. Doctors were working on the injured there, using whatever they had on hand to patch up their wounds, and there were already Archangel ambulances on site, ferrying the worst affected staff members to one of the other facilities in the area. How long had she been unconscious?

Olivia took in the chaos and the carnage, the fifty plus victims of the explosion as doctors fought to save them, and the bodies that lined the square just metres away from them. Who had done this to them?

She looked back up at the building and covered her mouth, biting back a sob as she saw the state of it. The floors above the laboratory levels were in darkness until around three from the top. The second explosion had destroyed those levels and they burned, sending smoke and sparks of fire high into the night sky.

A deliberate attack.

They had taken out the laboratory and then they had taken out the roof so they couldn’t use helicopters to rescue everyone trapped in the upper part of the building.

Olivia’s knees gave out and Sable crumpled with her to the ground.

“Pull it together.” Sable gently shook her. “These people need you. I’m going for a doctor, we’re patching that leg and that hand, and then you get on your feet and you help these people. You hear me?”

Olivia nodded, staring blankly at the burning building, numbed by the sight of it and the thought that someone had done this. It hadn’t been an accident.

A female doctor she didn’t recognise came to her and bandaged her right calf up. She placed the little finger and ring finger of Olivia’s left hand in a plastic cast and bandaged them up too. Olivia took the meds she offered and swallowed them, her eyes still locked on the building, her vision blurred with hot tears.

Awareness of her surroundings slowly dawned on her and a sense that she was being watched crawled over her skin.