Incense and Sensibility (The Rajes #3) - Sonali Dev Page 0,2

. . nothing.

Why have I never googled what happens after you get shot? That should not have been Yash’s first thought after the deafening blasts rang through the stadium. But it was.

Scattering footfalls thumped across the ground beneath the stage. An endless ringing, like a suspended beep, was trapped deep inside his ear. Outside, everything was too bright, washed in white light. He felt like he was in a movie. How did filmmakers know how this felt? How many of them had experienced being shot?

His hands twitched for his phone in that internal tug that had become part of the human condition, the need for an immediate answer uncontrollable. The memory of crisp encyclopedia pages slid against his fingertips. As a child, he had found answers in his father’s library. The beloved knowledge-filled tomes had swallowed his questions, fueled them, and now they crammed landfills because of a machine that fit in his hand.

The weight across Yash’s legs twitched, pulling him from the tightly packed thoughts in his brain. This time when he tried to move, his body responded and he pushed himself up on his elbows. Abdul was lying across Yash’s legs, face down.

Abdul? The word left his lips but didn’t reach his ears past the suspended beep. Abdul! Was his bodyguard not responding because he didn’t hear him, or because he couldn’t hear him?

Should I move? God, sometimes questions were the bane of his existence. To stop and think before acting, it was supposed to be his gift. Controlling your emotions was the only way to control anything else. It might be the first thing Yash remembered his father ever saying to him. A lesson so early and strong that it had become twisted into the helixes of Yash’s DNA.

Animals operate on instinct. Humans temper their actions with intellect. A leader reins his emotions better than everyone else. A leader thinks.

His father’s voice crackled in his head. Yash had always known that when death came it would take the form of his father’s lecturing.

A man was lying on top of him, and reining his emotions was doing Yash zero good. “Abdul!” This time the sound had to have left his throat, because Yash heard it at a distance.

Abdul didn’t move.

Why am I not feeling anything?

He could feel Abdul’s weight across him. He could smell the dust and blood. But inside, where there should be terror and panic, nothing—just thoughts crashing against thoughts.

As gently as he could, Yash leaned forward and pressed a hand into Abdul’s shoulder. His body was utterly still. Blood pooled under them, springing from a gash on the side of Abdul’s neck, just above his vest. Damn it.

Bending forward, Yash reached for the wound but his hand hovered over it. Pressure seemed the most logical way to stop the blood, but what if touching it made something worse.

“Abdul,” Yash shouted into his friend’s body. The wetness under him made a squelching sound. Abdul was losing too much blood.

Pulling off his jacket, Yash bunched it up and pressed it into the wound as lightly as he could. Almost instantly red soaked through the pale gray linen.

Déjà vu soaked through Yash’s brain. It had been a full twenty-three years since his accident. He’d been all of fifteen when a driver had jumped a stop sign and hit Yash. He felt his belly bounce as he was thrown off his bicycle into the air. The sight of blood always made the collision come alive inside him, so he avoided it. Now every cell in his being felt like it was soaked in the memory.

Beneath his hands Abdul convulsed once. A sign of life. Yash increased the pressure just a little bit. Abdul had brought him a box of burfi this morning to celebrate his daughter’s birth. Naaz, they had called her. It meant pride. A beautiful, beautiful name. A name Yash had tucked away in the vault where he kept things that belonged just to him. Just in case a day came when he might have children. Oh God, Abdul’s wife hadn’t even gone home from the hospital.

“Come on, wake up.” Yash wanted to shake him, do something, but he was too afraid to take his hands off the gash in Abdul’s neck.

“Sir, are you all right?” A man ran up the stage and suddenly Yash was aware of the chaos around him. Screams and scrambling footsteps.

The man tried to pull Yash’s hands off Abdul, but Yash couldn’t let the spring of blood start up again. “You have

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