“Is everyone okay?” she yelled, and jerked against someone’s hold, trying to free herself. “I need to check on my team.”
The hand firmed. “Mademoiselle, we need you to lie down,” a black-uniformed man said.
Chase’s head jerked around.
“It’s just the liquid nitrogen,” Lina said. “I’ve had burns before. I’ll be okay.”
Lina’s chef’s coat had done its job—any nitrogen that had splashed when she threw the bucket hadn’t soaked into the cloth but rolled off it and evaporated. Her hand was cold-burned a bit, probably more from punching Abed’s nitrogen-soaked shirt than from the splash of nitrogen, which would have vaporized at the heat of her skin.
Abed, now, was wearing a cotton sweatshirt—he was going to have some serious burns over his torso. Not to mention the knife wound from Mikhail, and the splash of oil over his face from her pan.
Good.
Vi wanted to kick him again. She hoped she’d broken several ribs. She hoped they took him to Guantánamo and interrogated him for years. “You fucking asshole!” she shouted at him, just in case he’d been ignoring her the first time. “Adrien, is everyone else okay?”
No one was trying to make him lie down. Probably all these military men assumed he was the head of the kitchen, damn it, just because he was male.
“No other injuries, chef,” Adrien said. “A couple of burns from people grabbing hot pots to throw.”
Burns. Vi relaxed in relief. They knew all about burns.
“Mademoiselle. Please lie down.” The hand pushed on her shoulder.
“It’s my restaurant!” Vi snapped at the hand’s hard-jawed owner. Merde, any idiot could see this was a situation she needed to take charge of. Even if they were physically unhurt, her staff was going to be devastated by this. And half their diners must be complaining about what was taking their food so long. Merde, this was all her reputation needed. She could see the reviews now: Cold food, melting structures, and no matter how artistic Violette Lenoir imagines herself to be, her dramatic splashes of red across a plate only manage to look like a massacre occurred in the kitchens. Perhaps she’s trying to suggest how close all carnivores are to the blood and death of their meals, but this reviewer found his appetite slaughtered in the process.
“Fuck.” A long way across the room, Chase was staring at her from where Jake had sat him on a counter. His face had gone white. “Vi, is that your blood? Jesus, is she hemorrhaging?”
“I feel really sleepy,” Vi said, confused. Even her voice sounded fuzzy.
“Here, Vi.” Lina, the only person in the entire room who seemed to understand Vi at all, scooted a little closer, proffering her shoulder. “I’ll help you up. Lean on me.”
So Vi did. Just for a second. Just to help herself get to her feet.
And then she just faded into black.
Chapter 17
“Let me get this straight.” Vi’s voice. Chase pressed a hand to the hospital wall, taking a deep breath. Dizziness swept over him. A nurse hovered next to him, trying to take his elbow, furious with him for being on his feet at all.
“You had information to suggest someone might try to stage a ricin attack in my restaurant. Ricin. An odorless, tasteless poison with no possible cure. And you didn’t inform me?”
Oh, good, she was in fighting form. Chase let his head and shoulder sink against the wall, just breathing for a moment. The last time he’d seen her awake, they’d been loading her into the ambulance, and she’d been trying to fight her way to consciousness enough to argue the EMTs into slowing down and letting her talk to her sous-chef first.
She’d lost the battle. Chase, being bundled into an ambulance himself and arguing about it, had carried with him a horrible, heart-freezing impression of Vi fading, not able to fight her corner. Torso wounds were almost always bad, but, within that context, his had been more minor than hers. They’d managed to keep the infection from the nick in his intestines down, and he’d lost a lot less blood. But Vi’s had touched the liver as well as leading to hemorrhaging, and it had required several small surgeries to stabilize and repair the various types of damage done in order of priority. She’d been medicated, mostly out of it, for the first three days, and he’d been going quietly frantic at his inability to talk to her and convince himself she was going to be fine.
A wheelchair appeared beside him, the nurse trying once again to get him to take it. He shook his head. It was only a few steps into the room. It wasn’t his wound making him dizzy. It was Vi’s wound, and finally hearing her voice again.
“Ma’am, it was imperative we not reveal we were on to them.” A male voice. Was that Brandon, the CIA case officer? Be good for him to have to deal with Vi in person. CIA guys always forgot what human flesh and blood was like. “And the information wasn’t credible. We were following a lot of threads tracking Al-Mofti, and this one seemed like a red herring.”