She heard Dante go down before she saw it.
The compressed exhale. Not a shout—Dante did not shout, even now—but the specific sound she recognized from years of field work as something serious happening to a body. She turned. He was on the ground at the south door, one hand braced against the floor, the other at his side where the blood was already coming through wrong—too much, too fast, the specific dark spread of something that had found a gap.
She crossed to him in four steps. Her hands were on the wound before she had formed a complete thought.
He was conscious. Eyes open, tracking. He looked at her with the expression of a man running a damage inventory and not liking the results.
"How bad," he said.
She had her hand inside the wound. She knew what she was feeling. "Bad enough. Don't move."
"That's not a good answer."
"No," she said. "It's not."
