Fifteen compressions. Twenty. Twenty-five.
Damien's arms burned, his shoulders shaking with the sheer, brute force of his efforts. The mud soaked through the knees of his ruined suit pants, the freezing river water dripping from his face, blinding him. He didn't feel the cold. He didn't feel anything except the absolute, world-ending terror gnawing at his sanity.
"Breathe," Damien commanded, his voice tearing at the seams. It was a roar aimed at the heavens, a feral demand. "I said breathe!"
He brought his hands down for one last, desperate, brutal compression against her sternum.
Aria's spine violently arched off the muddy grass.
Her chest hitched—a sharp, unnatural spasm—and then came the most beautiful, sickening sound Damien had ever heard in his twenty-nine years of life.
She choked.
Damien instantly shoved his hands under her shoulders, rolling her onto her side just as her mouth opened. She expelled a violent, splashing lungful of river water onto the grass.
