Page 212 of Deep Cover

"I wish I was dead. I wish he'd just let me go. Leave me some way to die. I wish I was dead. Oh, god. Oh, fuck. I wish I were dead."

At that moment? Me, too. For me. Not just for her.

It didn't end just like that. Kie didn't get to die and despite the pain, neither did I.

Vincent came with security to answer the screams, covered me expertly and rounded on Kie, who shrank back, a look of terror and triumph mixed on her face.

There was no way she was getting away that easily. Because the look on Vincent's face spelled out her death and no. Not while my pulse still banged away between my legs, every too-fast heartbeat driving fresh blood to make the hurt that much more intense.

"Sir!" Me calling him that was enough to jolt him out of his contemplation of her, but I'd only have a minute. "You told her to get me out of the room by any means possible."

His fury was instant, and directed at me. "Are you blaming me for this incident?"

Oh, hell, yes. "I'm saying she didn't have a lot of options." My eyes were squeezed tight shut. I could hear security calling for a medic and assumed it would be the same man who had come the last time. Someone Vincent had bought off. Some poor medical student like Mark had been not all that long ago, in over his head and maybe trying to pay off student loans.

At least he was good, and gentle.

In the hall, security was saying yes and emergency and burned and two of them.

There were? If I had to, I'd fight Vincent before I let him do the same thing to Kie. Stupid, because my fighting him was stupid. Stupid, because my fighting anyone for the sake of Kie was stupid. But I couldn't face it.

Vincent was still staring at me like I was some new species of bug.

"I'm not being altruistic," I snapped, then added, "Sir," because I needed him to not be angry at me when I could barely move.

Maybe it was the sir that did it, because he relented. "She'll be punished," he said as if daring me to argue.

I didn't. I was fine with that. I just wasn't all right with this happening to anyone else.

Except maybe to him. I wondered vaguely if anyone had ever died from the shock caused by the pain of one of the peppers. Mark had told me about people getting what was almost a chemical burn from eating the hot peppers, and that it was becoming like the cinnamon challenge and ice water challenge and other incredibly stupid challenges from recent years. People were eating ghost peppers and other stupidly bred-to-deadly heat level peppers on challenges, saying they liked to do it and then vomiting from the pain.

Sometimes I though that, as a race, all humans were very stupid.

I'd started to drift into my thoughts when Vincent covered me with a blanket.

I shivered into myself.

"Miss?"

The medic. Last thing I wanted to deal with. But he'd ordered everyone out, and he was thorough and fast and reassuring that the blistering and pain would end no matter what it felt like. For all of her attempts, Kie had gotten very little of anything inside me. It was surface and it was fixable.

It would just hurt. And hurt, and hurt.

Burn creams would help, but at the beginning he suggested coconut oil and olive oil, carrier oils that would pull the oil of the pepper out.

"Or sour cream," he said without warning, as if hoping to get some reaction out of me.

He did. I stared at him. "I'm not an appetizer."

"Good," he said, as much to himself as to me. "Sour cream is thick and sticks and there's something in the milk that neutralizes the fire of the pepper's heat. That's one of the reasons it's served with nachos."

I blinked again. "Um," I said. It was as much as I could manage and caused him to pat me as if he needed to reassure himself by touching me.

After that I struggled out of myself long enough to understand what to do for it and what would stem the ache and fiery burn with commercial remedies.

And to ask. "She wasn't – this didn't? No one did this to her, did they?"

Even the medic gave me a startled look, then he said, "No. She burned her fingers. More important than that, we needed to get gloves on her before she accidently touched one of her eyes, or her mouth."

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